I want to explain incest dynamics from a personal perspective, since I grew up what might be termed “custom blind” by instinct. And I’m hoping that a place called “I love philosophy.com” is a little more tolerant and calm minded when discussing what are usually inflammatory issues among lesser minds (lesser beings).
I had no natural avoidance to incest when I was growing up and my mother only re-enforced it by being Christian (the whole adam & eve bit), as I grew up I rejected it. But it did have a small influence, and even once being taught evolution, I still really couldn’t grasp well the fact that:
All humans require parents, hence, who were the first few parents? The only kind of HUMAN procreation science knows of, of sperm-egg, where the female is fertilized and the child grows inside her womb.
So I was pretty unphased by all the hoopla and superstition around ‘incest’, (which really is a loaded term).
If it was not for society, many incestuous relations would take place naturally out of curiosity and by inborn instinct to procreate with any person of the opposite sex by natural instinctual hunger and psychological rewards, especially related to (auto-erotic behaviour).
Evidence:
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When I was a kid, exactly 5 years old, me and my cousin used to go strip naked and hide somewhere away from the adults and masturbate together (this just came ‘automatically’ (i.e. it felt good so we did it). There was no thought here, only instinct. If I had not been conditioned by Christianity, I would have ended up sleeping with my cousin after I hit puberty, I had TONNES of signals from her looking back, but I was so mired in confusion.
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As I grew up my sister and I had strange more-then-sibling encounters with one another, she always wanted to sleep with me, even past puberty (up until she was 13 years old, I was 2 years older roughly) yet nothing ever really came of it. I think the real issue her was that we were raised by a religious mother so we turned out sexually aversive, I’m pretty sure she wanted to have sex (why would you call your brother in to bath with you in a skimpy bathing suit in a bathtub 13 years old?). But she chickened out, anyway, it was kinda weird, we just sat their casually having a bath and that was it.
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One time my grandmother saw me naked outside on her deck after I had finished swimming when I was changing, at the time I had a hard-on and thought no one was home. I caught her just staring at me through the window, and after that she started calling where I lived to invite me down to “swim” at her place a lot more saying she “missed me”
This was out of the ordinary for my grandmother, she’s not the type to just do that kind of thing, and since her husband had died I’m sure she enjoyed getting an eyeful of her young grandson but was covering it up with words.
Anyway, it seems to me that if not for the taboo there would be a lot of sex going on. I think most social customs were there to guard against consequences of being in more “close knit” tribal societies, in modern society people have their own homes/private spaces and are increasingly more isolated, so I think the environment for incest slowly becoming more normalized may become more common as religious and old cultural mores are destroyed…
It seems to me (at least in my experience) sexual attraction of any type is PERVASIVE, it’s just that people mask it. “Incest” is just a construct in my mind really, it’s a word that has no real value.
It’s like saying “I’m attracted to the opposite sex”, and I’d be like… duh!