this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2020
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No, fuck that. It isn't just about being gross, it's about the potential for abuse. Parents have power over kids and can groom them to be ok with it once they come of age. Given that the vast majority of people are naturally inclined to find it gross and wrong, the chances that two people in the same family "just happen" to be ok with it are extremely low, and it's much, much more likely that something fucked up is happening and that one of them is the victim of abuse.
Obviously, couples aren't going to be on equal footing power-wise and that's ok - but when you have extreme differences in power, like that of a guard and a prisoner or a parent and child, then it isn't safe to assume that just because someone says they consent means that they really do.
If you're adults and you meet a long-lost sibling you never met and decide to hook up, it's still weird af but I don't have a problem with it on principle. But that's the exception, in most cases it's a matter of abuse.
People are naturally inclined to find it gross and wrong to have sex with anyone they grew up with from a young age, including very close childhood friends but not family members who were largely absent during their childhood (this is very well documented across a range of societies and has analogues in many other species - it's called the Westermarck effect).
So this argument doesn't necessarily apply in all cases. There are broader culture-specific taboos around incest, but they can be pretty weird and arbitrary, e.g. there are societies where it's taboo to have a relationship with a very distant cousin or a sibling-in-law.
I don't really have any strong views about any of this, I just think it's important to be very careful to make sure that your reasoning is sound on this kind of thing, given our long history of banning harmless sexual relationships based on prejudice, then coming up with dubious rationalisations. A lot of the opposition to LGBT rights has been based on claims that LGBT identities are generally rooted in abuse or coercion.
I also wonder how much of an impact anti-incest laws really have on anyone, given that they generally don't seem to be enforced outside situations where there are other crimes going on too.
But it's difficult to come up with specific rules on exactly how much of a power difference is acceptable, and there are plenty of troubling relationships that are universally legal, e.g. all the Donald and Melania-style relationships between rich old businessmen and much younger and poorer women.
Abuse is abuse. It's not consensual, and would still be treated as such. We have the same policy for workplaces, schools, and prisons like you said.
If most cases are abuse then those cases will still be illegal, but because they are abuse, not because they are incest.
A sort of compromise could be keeping inter-generational incest illegal, but not same generation. But still, setting the illegality criteria at actual abuse makes more sense to me.
No. First off there's still the problem of grooming. Proving abuse is much harder if the child was essentially brainwashed from birth to be ok with it. We can't reasonably expect the state to have sufficient knowledge of people's private lives - literally all of their home life for 18 years - to be able to judge which relationships are kosher on a case by case basis. It would inevitably go into a bunch of "he said, she said," and that's assuming that the victim is actually willing to testify against their abuser in the first place, which again, if they're groomed, they probably won't.
The rights of kids to not be groomed and abused and scarred for life outweighs your right to bang your family members. It's an extremely small sacrifice, made for an important reason.
You could argue that since it's illegal, victims who are already adults will be afraid to come forward since it was technically illegal for them too once they became adults.
But like I said, the compromise is making only same generation incest legal, or making a certain age difference illegal so stuff like siblings and cousins where it's a lot less likely to be grooming are fine.
I'm still not ok with siblings. Again, just from the perspective of probability, it's astronomically unlikely that two siblings would both randomly decide that they're ok with it independently from each other. We can be almost certain that one got the other into it, and we can't be sure when that happened, whether the topic was breached as adults or whether the seed was planted during development.
The number of cases where two family members want to have sex with each other and nothing fucked up has happened in the process is so small that it may well be zero. We shouldn't make a rule from the exception.
It doesn't have to be random and independent. If neither sibling has power over the other (any more than any other couple), one proposes it, and the other accepts despite never having thought about it before and perhaps after thinking about it after, there's still no problem, that's literally how consent works.