Professor charged with incest

qayak said:
Same place everyone else's is. There are a lot of choices others make that I wouldn't. Not because they are wrong, but because I'm not into that. I can't claim that those making those choices are doing so against their free will just because the only way I would make the choice is if it were against my free will.

You are projecting your feelings on the subject onto everyone else and that doesn't work in human relationships. In general, children do not want to have sex with their parents and vice versa, but that doesn't give an accurate gauge of individuals. Some children do want to have sex with their parents ans vice versa.
Click to expand...

I think I agree with this. It seems like the most logical answer.
 
3bodyproblem said:
See I thought I read something on smell or scent having something to do with it, but I forget. But that's if they are raised together if memory serves? If they aren't then there's evidence of a very strong attraction.

clear as mud my memory
Click to expand...

I was reading about it a few weeks ago in The Ape and the Sushi Master by Frans de Waal. Your post got me curious so I checked it out, pg 341-343.

It is known as the Westmarck effect afte the person who first proposed it.

http://www.everything2.com/title/Westermarck+effect

[Arthur] Wolf discovered that the children in question often strongly resisted the idea of marrying when they were of age, that they were three times likely to become divorced, produced 40% fewer children, and the wives were three times more likely to commit adultery. He identified the key factor as the closeness of the relationship during the first thirty months of the lives of both partners. The more time they had spent together during those crucial first thirty months, the more likely they were to reject the idea of marriage and more likely any subsequent marriage would fail.
Click to expand...

Further evidence arose with the work of Joseph Shepher in 1960s in Israeli Kibbutzim. There children where raised collectively in creches, and Shepher found that not only did children raised in such an enviroment not marry within their kibbutz peer group, but that there were no instances of any sexual contact whatsover between peer group members.
Click to expand...
 
Do you think the Westermarck Effect, at six years, could be related to marriages that suffer from the 'seven year itch'?
 
Incest between two consenting adults? Got to be a misdemeanor, right?
 
qayak said:
I was reading about it a few weeks ago in The Ape and the Sushi Master by Frans de Waal. Your post got me curious so I checked it out, pg 341-343.

It is known as the Westmarck effect afte the person who first proposed it.

http://www.everything2.com/title/Westermarck+effect
Click to expand...

I think that's siblings though right, and not cousins. I think kissing cousins is considered incest, but very, very common. Especially among royalty.
 
qayak said:
:confused: We are talking about sexual relations aren't we?
Click to expand...

At an age where, unless the conditions I noted are present, no coercion should be present and no functional harm to the general public or the individuals is likely (outside of crazed religious nutcases). Oh, yes, since he was arrested for incest I must assume we were talking about sexual relations - and I honestly do not care at the adult level what they do as long as they have no harm from it (again, physical or psychological).

Brush up your Heinlein!!:)
 
3bodyproblem said:
I think that's siblings though right, and not cousins. I think kissing cousins is considered incest, but very, very common. Especially among royalty.
Click to expand...

The one study is children in China who are not related at all. The girls are adopted as future husbands for the sons. They are raised together and the marriages just don't work out.

The other is on children from different families in Isreal being raised together. When they are older, they do not marry within their own group and there was no known case of sexual contact within the same group, during or after they left the group.

You should read the link. Only one page but very informative.

Cousins tend not to be raised together although they may have a lot of interaction.

Incest is defined by the society one lives in. Few, if any, see first cousins as incest. Here's the general law for Canada:

Under Canadian law, incest is defined as having a sexual relationship with a sibling (including half-sibling), child/parent or grandchild/grandparent while knowing the existence of the blood relationship. It is punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment
Click to expand...
 
For information purposes, here's the incest law in New york state:

255.25 Incest.

A person is guilty of incest when he or she marries or engages in sexual intercourse or deviate sexual intercourse with a person whom he or she knows to be related to him or her, either legitimately or out of wedlock, as an ancestor, descendant, brother or sister of either the whole or the half blood, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece. Incest is a class E felony.
 
Or maybe you're thinking of Heinlens "I Shall Fear No Evil" (rich dying old man has his brain transplanted into his hot young female secretarys body)?

Is it incest if you literally ___ yourself?
 
Regardless of the "ick factor" here, I'd say it's the power imbalance that makes this case wrong. Sure, she's grown now, but she could have been groomed, and the father-daughter dynamic is still present. I think sadhatter's post summarizes this well.

I wouldn't be so opposed to incest between adult siblings close in age. Then again, maybe I read A Game of Thrones too much... >_>
 
Puppycow said:
Foundation was Asimov.

Stranger in a Strange Land was Heinlein's most famous, but I think the one most relevant to this discussion is To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Click to expand...

What it Stranger in A Strange Land with the super long lived incest loving guy, or was it The Cat Who Walks Through Walls? It's been a while, but I seem to remember them all being from the same family as well.

I suppose they were groomed to be incestuous, but it seemed to work. At least on paper:)
 
While grooming is of course a realistic problem, in society, we still expect the girl to be able to make her own decisions as an adult. It is, for example, not illegal for a girl to give money to her dad, even if he may have "groomed her" into this, in fact, he very probably has, one way or another. I see no reason for why there should be special pleading for sexual actions in this case.
 
Puppycow said:
William Saletan of Slate now has an article on this:

Incest Is Cancer
The David Epstein incest case: If homosexuality is OK, why is incest wrong?

He gives some pretty good reasons besides just "it's icky."
Although he doesn't think prosecution is necessary.
Click to expand...

The main reason he gives here is that incest breaks the conservative view of what a family should be, which "violates the natural order" and "messes up the kids". But any first year anthropology course will teach you that there are and have been many, many functional systems of kinship relations and family units that are significantly different from the "mom, dad, kids" structure this article claims is natural and necessary. Is there evidence that children raised in an environment where incestuous relationships occur are "messed up" and "disoriented" like this article is claiming?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom