A Rose By Any Other Name

There has been a recent surge in media interest in Genetic Sexual Attraction, something that hasn't been given enough attention given an increasing percentage of the population is experiencing GSA. The percentage is increasing because the conditions that make GSA possible are increasing. Those conditions happen when close genetic relatives are not raised together or by one another, but are introduced or reunited after they're both post-pubescent, and there has been an increase in recent decades of adoptions, egg/sperm/embryo donations, and other things separating close genetic relatives, social networking making it easier for people to get in touch, and an increase in mobility in general, which makes both separations and reunions more likely.

NYMag.com ignited the recent storm by running an interview with a Friend of Lily. Jezebel.com is keeping it going with Natasha Rose Chenier, who writes in an essay and says in an interview that sexual experiences with her genetic father (who didn't raise her) were abusive because he's her genetic father and because she felt out of control, not because he physically harmed her or went ahead without her consent (he didn't do either, in fact she wanted to do more than he did.)

Chenier's experiences are her own. If she feels they were, on balance, negative, then nobody should or can tell her differently. Her body and her sexuality are hers. However, on the flip side, nobody should be able to tell consenting adults who feel their experiences were/are positive that they are wrong, or are being abused, or that they need to stop.

I'm sorry Chenier has these feelings of trauma. I wish her experiences with her genetic father had been entirely positive however they played out. I don't know what it is like to be in her skin. I don't know her mind for certain and can only go on what I've seen in these writings. I will note that she's writing essays, writing a book, and doing interviews, and that people she's working with in media and people in general are going to be much more sympathetic to, and approving of, a woman who says she was abused, than a woman who challenges their comfort by daring them to confront the fact that there's nothing wrong with consenting adults choosing to make love, even if they are genetic father and daughter. I am not saying she is being less than authentic about her feelings, so please don't imply that I am. You can read below what she herself has said. Also, I'm all too aware that journalists have to work with those willing to work with them, and most people who are happily together are reluctant to work with journalists for fear of losing everything in a backlash of bigotry.

Which brings me to noting that it's easy to point to a situation where a young woman who has had some turmoil in her life reunites with her long-lost genetic father and say she's being manipulated and abused, and to dismiss GSA entirely. But what about when a divorced upper middle-class PTA mom in her thirties or forties, who has always had good a relationship with her adoptive father or stepfather, meets her genetic father and initiates sexual contact with him based on her intense attraction to him? What if a similar woman, who had a good childhood but had a teen pregnancy that resulted in her adopting her son out, who has never been inappropriate with the children she's been raising, has that firstborn come back into her life as an adult, and they have a romantic, sexual relationship?

It is easy to find people who've had bad relationship experiences. I can find literally millions of people who'll tell you what a living hell their supposedly monogamous, heterosexual, non-BDSM relationship with someone who was in the same age range and of the same race, but not a close relative, was. That doesn't make such marriages categorically wrong, and it doesn't make interracial, adult intergenerational, BDSM, gay, open, polyamorous, or consanguinamorous relationships categorically wrong because some people have had bad experiences in those. There are people in relationships that involved GSA who are in lasting, loving, healthy relationships in which nobody is being abused. There shouldn't be a stigma, or a law, applied against them.

I support the rights of consenting adults to have their relationships and marriages without being criminalized or shamed. I don't think every individual relationship is a good one. Some people are toxic. With GSA, sometimes someone being toxic is one reason the separation happened in the first place. Whether someone acts on GSA should be a mutual decision of those involved, not something decided by outsiders.

Rather than rushing to make criminals out of consenting adults or ostracize them, let's recognize that the best way for relationships to have the help they need is by bringing them out of the shadows. Consensual sex between adults should not be a criminal matter.

On to the latest media on the subject...




First is a piece Chenier wrote called "On Falling In and Out of Love With My Dad."

My biological father wanted to have sex with me from the first moment he laid eyes on me. This I learned two years after meeting him, as I dry heaved over his toilet in a moment of all-consuming anxiety and self-loathing. This was just after the second time we had oral sex.

Why self-loathing? She never explains why, other than recognizing that there is some taboo that has been in effect. But is there a good reason for that taboo?

I met him for the first time when I was 19, the same age my mother was when she met him. They had had unprotected sex a handful of times, before she got pregnant and he made a quick exit. I sought him out because I was lonely and angry at her. She'd stayed in an abusive relationship with a new partner for almost a decade, and when it ended, my self-esteem was wrecked and my confidence shattered. I wanted to find a parent who would love me unconditionally, who would protect me. The irony of what happened does not escape me.

If having sex with another adult is "failing to protect them," then someone is doing something wrong.

There were a lot of red flags over the course of those two years, moments I'm only now able to recognize as such.

I kept an eye out for those red flags.

So when my dad started talking to me openly about his past sexual encounters, it felt fairly normal.

Adults in personal relationships often talk with each other about sexual encounters, don't they?

On my second trip to Jamaica, I started sleeping in my dad's bed.

They weren't having sex at this point, but there's nothing wrong with sleeping together.

When I started feeling sexually attracted to him—as well as shocked and horrified to realize it—I spoke of it to no one, least of all him. I hoped I would go home and the feeling would go away. But it didn't. Instead, it grew. 

This is important. It is important for people experiencing GSA to be able to talk with someone about it without being treated like a criminal or somehow defective. However, even people who have had access to such support, have still gone on to have sex with their GSA partner(s).

It was August 2009, and one day, my dad did something that deeply upset me. The heat outside was deadly, and we stayed cooped up in his bedroom, where there was air conditioning. We were watching TV to pass the time when he put on a porn channel. Sex workers were being interviewed and he told me which of them he would most like to f---.

I fled from the room in anger and confusion. I shut myself up in the other bedroom, which was oppressively hot, until he coaxed me to come out, apologizing repeatedly. I wanted to love him. I felt I needed him in my otherwise broken life. But things were starting to feel wrong between us. He was crossing boundaries; I was doing my best to suppress my sexual attraction to him. But despite my sense of impending doom, it was there. And then, we became sexually involved. 

Nobody should do anything they don't want to do. It seems from the whole of what we read in these pieces that she was feeling very conflicted.

We had oral sex a few times, almost always preceded by my descending into a whirlwind of self-hate and disgust and dry heaving over the toilet in the bathroom attached to his room.

Again, if this was entirely due to an external pressure, then isn't that pressure the problem?

It took my therapist at the time explaining GSA to me, and that it is never the child's fault (a person, regardless of age, is always the child in their relationship with their parent), for me to stop blaming myself. 

I wonder if that's still considered to be so in cases in which the genetic parent is aging and to the point they are physically and/or financially depending on a middle-aged child they just met for the first time a few months ago? Is it still the parent's "fault" for not shutting down physical affection before it becomes sexual, when that is what both of them want? Putting aside any argument as to whether this particular case was consensual or not, "fault" is a strange word to use about consenting adults having sex.

To many people, parent-child incest is as repellent as pedophilia, to which it is linked in obvious and complicated ways.

Uh, no. Adults having sex with each other is in no way linked to, for example, a sports coach molesting a prepubescent child, any more than lovers sharing candy on Valentine's Day is linked to Mr. Burns stealing candy from baby Maggie, to use a much less serious example.

So here's a new story to throw into the mix: genetic sexual attraction is normal, and very real.

She has that right.

If it is a parent-child relationship, the parent, whether male or female, is always responsible for establishing and maintaining boundaries. Failing that, they are sexual abusers.

Only if some form of coercion was involved. Chenier is appealing to a child's desire for a parent, even if this parent was only a parent genetically. Because of that desire for a parent, she's saying even consensual sex between them is abuse. I'd like to know if she'd say the same thing about someone wanting to have a wealthy or famous partner? There are people with very strong desires to have such a partner. If they find one, are they being abused?

To follow this up, Jia Tolentino had an interview with Chenier at the same website.

Did you ever feel the want of a male authority figure?

No. I definitely wasn't like Woe is me, there isn't a man in my life. My mom's long-term partner was a patriarchal butch lesbian, so I already had a "father figure" in my immediate family. But they split up when I was 19, and it was in the aftermath of that that I decided to seek out my dad. My mom's partner had been emotionally abusive, and I was desperate for anything else. So when I found my dad, it didn't matter that he was a man, it just mattered that he was a parent.

We see multiple times she was not pining away for a father she'd played up in childhood fantasies as a heroic rescuer.

Had you ever wanted to get in contact before?

No, I didn't really care too much until my mom and her partner split. It was only then when I realized how angry and hurt I was by the relationship, and decided I wanted to seek out my biological father.

And...

Was that when your mom told you his name?

No, my mom never hid his identity from me. She always said she'd support my finding him if I ever wanted to. 

 So we didn't have a situation where she wanted to be with him, but was prevented.

And you don't believe he would have been attracted to you as a child.

Absolutely not.

 So again, we're not talking pedophilia.

Did you have that sort of subversive excitement when you were hanging out with your dad?

I only really felt deviant after we broke the physical barrier. And then, we had mutually-given oral sex four or five times over the course of a few days.

How did you feel during that time?

It was literally night and day. At night, the first night, I felt thrilled. I thought, "There's nothing wrong with this, just cultural norms that are meaningless." The sexual intensity was nothing like I'd ever felt before. It was like being loved by a parent you never had, and the partner you always wanted, at once.

And then in the morning, we had oral sex again, and that's when I wanted to puke and felt like a criminal. At night I was really into it, but by morning I wanted to die. That's not hyperbole; I really wanted to die. 

Sounds to me like she was being hurt by external influences that try to police adult sex causing conflict within her, although, strangely, none of the negative feelings on her part are tied in these pieces to the cheating aspect. It would be considered cheating since it seems his girlfriend didn't have an explicit agreement to still be his partner while this went on, or at least that is what Chenier thinks. There is a possibility, however slim, that her genetic father had such an arrangement with his girlfriend.

Do you think he felt the same way?

No. He was much more in control than I was. I had tried to have unprotected intercourse with him, which I had never done before in my life, and he stopped me and said, "We can't, I'm your father."

So he wasn't an out-of-control man looking to assault a young woman. However, many men in these situations report the same feelings of being out of control that she describes having.

When I look back, he was romancing me. He was taking me on extravagant trips to exotic remote places, where we'd stay in these beautiful cabins, and he'd completely spoil me—we would go out and eat the nicest foods, it was like some over the top Disney fantasy.

Is she saying she wouldn't have had oral sex with him, and wouldn't have wanted to have unprotected intercourse with him, without all of that? What was he supposed to do with her? Sit around in a shack eating fast food? We're not talking about an adult plying a child with candy and video games to molest them. We're talking about normal behavior between adults.

Do you look back on the period where he was treating you really well and read it as grooming? When I read your essay for the first time, his seemed very much like the behavior of an abuser.

Obviously it's pretty self-incriminating to say, "I wanted you from the first moment I saw you."

Most men feel sexual attractions upon first sight. There are times when men will find themselves getting attracted to someone they weren't attracted to at first sight, but most of the time, they are attracted at first sight and remain so unless something happens to reduce or remove that attraction.

Were you looking forward to your visits as things that would then be sexually charged?

Yes and no. I did notice that I was dressing more sexily, that I wanted his attention.

As I said, she felt conflicted.

Did sex with him feel different than with other people?

It was crazy. We understood each other's bodies as if we'd been life-long lovers. I've had to teach most of my partners how to do things—and obviously he's a middle-aged man, he's had lots of sex, but there was more than that to it, some deep psychic connection. Not even speaking sexually, but things would go on with me, things I couldn't identify, and he would understand and explain them to me. It felt like he knew me better than I knew myself. 

Your reactions and instincts were the same.

Yes. The sex was intense in a way that no other sex has been. 

Do you think about it?

Yes, sometimes my mind goes there. It was the most physically intense thing I've ever experienced and I can't ignore that. 

She later explains she fantasizes about it now.

My father did ask for my permission before we first had oral sex, and I said yes. But it wasn't me. In fact throughout our whole first physical encounter I kept saying, "I can't believe this is happening, I can't believe this is happening," like a mantra. It truly was an out-of-body experience. Something else had taken ahold of me, and there was no way to fight it.

This has been picked up by dailymail.co.uk and inquisitr.com and salon.com.

For no good reason (personal disgust isn't a good reason), people who think a woman should be free to consent to group sex with three cage fighters she just met should not be free to consent to sex in cases like this. This blog takes a more consistent approach, one of equality.

Was she incapable of consenting? She felt out of control. However, women her age are allowed to get married, to operate heavy machinery, to vote and serve in elected office, and to go to war. They are responsible for their own behavior. She even explains early that her mother was very open with her about sex. So we're not talking about some clueless little child. She was an adult. I have no doubt that her genetic father had a better handle on the situation than she did. That doesn't necessarily make what he did abuse, no matter who is disgusted by any of this. Again, I'm sorry to see she experienced any negative feelings about this. I wish her experiences with her father had been exactly what she wanted, with nothing about which to be conflicted. But from everything written about it, it seems her father is being blamed for not keeping sex out of the relationship, but we're never told why he should have. Probably because there is no reason why it would be inherently wrong for them to have sex.

There are people who are living as spouses right now, in happy, healthy, lasting relationships, some with children, who were brought together by GSA. They should not be denied their rights or subject to any other form of bigotry.

 

If you've experienced GSA and want to share your story, please contact me.

For some positive examples of GSA, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

If you're in a GSA relationship, here's our advice about avoiding trouble. If you need help, see here.

If you know someone in a GSA relationship, please read this. If that person is now a partner of yours, this might help.

Here is how people can help in general.

Here's an FAQ about consanguinamory.