Dangerous Liaisons: What We Know and Think About Incest
When Patrick Stübing was three years old, he was sent to an orphanage — four years later he was adopted by another family. In 2000, when he was twenty-three, Patrick decided to track down blood parents - and found out that he had a sister, Susan, who at the time was sixteen. After the death of the mother, Patrick and Susan got close, but not just like a brother and sister: over the next five years they had four children, two of them with a disability. In Germany, incest between blood brothers and sisters is a criminal offense, and Patrick spent several years in prison - Susan was diagnosed with a mental disorder, so she was released from responsibility. Now three children of the couple are in foster families, the fourth lives with their mother. Patrick repeatedly tried to challenge the decision of the judges and even appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the ban destroyed his family and violated his right to privacy - but to no avail.
The story of Patrick and Susan is probably the loudest incest case in recent years - but not the only one discussed. A huge role in this was played by the “Game of Thrones”, the creators of which explore the topic from different angles. There are a couple in the series - twins Jaime and Cersei, who had three children and who are clearly condemned by both the audience and the society of Westeros. In the last season, a more ambiguous situation arose: one of the main characters, John and Daenerys, had sex. The heroes do not yet know that Daenerys is accounted for by John Aunt, and they don’t realize the consequences of their actions - because of what the viewers don’t understand how to react to the situation.
Immediately, several media began to discuss whether it was normal or abnormal to want the heroes to stay together - and if you like the screen pair, does this mean that you approve of incest? Does it matter that they are not as close relatives as, for example, brother and sister? Does it matter that in the Targaryen family brothers and sisters have long married each other and this was considered the norm? Or the Targaryen family is a good example of what incest is dangerous - because perhaps the Mad King was born because of it?
Then and now
Incest is one of the most taboo topics in society: the mere thought of a sexual or romantic relationship between loved ones makes us shiver. However, this was not always the case. George Martin, author of the book The Song of Ice and Flame, which formed the basis of the series Game of Thrones, tells us that he was guided by the experience of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled in ancient Egypt, and the European royal lines, which believed that kindred marriages do kind of more "clean". In the past, incest was often practiced among aristocracy: it is believed, for example, that the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen had genetic diseases due to the closely related marriages common in the families of the Egyptian pharaohs. The Spanish king Charles II, the last of the Habsburg dynasty, was very often sick - the researchers also connect this with numerous incestuous connections in the clan. Until the last century, marriages between cousins were commonplace: even Charles Darwin married his cousin - although studying a closely related crossbreeding, he was afraid that his children might have health problems due to the relatives of their parents.
Nowadays, incest in many countries is prohibited by law - for example, in the UK, Germany and other parts of Europe. In Portugal, Spain and Serbia, it is decriminalized. However, even where the law does not prohibit incest, it is only about relationships based on mutual consent, between adults - it is understood that individual laws protect children from pedophilia and adults from violence.
One of the Swedish parties tried to legalize sexual relations between brothers and sisters. True, they advocated the legalization of necrophilia.
The laws of different countries interpret incest differently and, accordingly, impose different restrictions. For example, in France, a law that defines the concept of incest and prohibits it was introduced only in 2010 - before that there were only separate laws on violence, rape and pedophilia. According to the new law, rape or other forms of domestic violence, including minors, committed by a person who has “legal or de facto authority over the victim” is considered incest - this implies parents, brothers, sisters and other family members. At the same time, relations between adult relatives by mutual agreement formally remain within the law. The situation is different in Russia: The family code prohibits marriage between close relatives - parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, full and half-full (that is, having common father or mother) brothers and sisters, but sexual relations between close relatives are not criminalized.
In some countries, trying to come up with additional mechanisms to combat incest - for example, in Iceland, whose population is only about 320 thousand people, have created a special application that allows you to check whether you are not distant relatives. It takes information from an electronic database of all the inhabitants of the country and their origin. In other countries, with the ban, on the contrary, they are trying to fight: in 2010, the Swiss parliament considered the decriminalization of sexual relations by mutual agreement between two adult relatives. The parliamentarians resisted that from 1984 to 2010, the law was applied only three times and was redundant (the offenders were charged with other crimes - for example, child abuse), but it was never accepted. One of the Swedish parties tried to legalize sexual relations between brothers and sisters older than fifteen years by mutual agreement. True, they also advocated the legalization of necrophilia (provided that the person before death signed a written consent for the partner to use his body for sex after death), and their initiative was not crowned with success.
Moral issue
Despite the almost complete unanimity of the law, views on incest are not so straightforward. In the literature one can find a very different understanding of connections between relatives - in the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, incest symbolizes the violation of the natural order of things, in Francis Scott Fitzgerald's “A Tender Night” he breaks the life of the heroine, and in Blue Lagoon by Henry de Vera The author points out that the heroes live in isolation and do not understand what happens to them and their feelings. In the play "August: Osage County" heroes learn that they are brother and sister, only by the end of the play, and in the novel "It's good to be quiet" the hero becomes a victim of domestic violence.
Examples can be found in art and in pop culture - remember how many comedies are built on the fact that a brother falls in love with a pretty half-sister, but cannot do anything with his feelings. In the Japanese manga and anime, an even bolder plot is often found - the story of a sister and a brother who fall in love with each other despite the ban. True, the way we treat incest in culture is one important nuance: we all clearly understand that heroes, however realistic they may be, are not living people - and what happens to them has little in common with ours. by life. Incest in literature and art is at least mythologized, and the plots and images associated with it are often metaphorical. So psychologically, we seem to distance ourselves from the heroes, calmly perceive any of their actions, even those that we would never have thought of repeating.
Psychologist Jonathan Heidt, who specializes in moral research, found a gap in how we treat incest in ordinary life. As part of the study, he suggested participants to reflect on a hypothetical situation: sister and brother Julie and Mark, who together went on a vacation trip. Once they spent the night in a hut by the sea and decided to have sex. They were protected: Julie took contraceptives, but just in case they used a condom. Both liked the experience, but they decided not to repeat it and keep everything secret - as a result, this night brought them closer together.
Incest in literature and art is at least mythologized, and the plots and images associated with it are often metaphorical. So psychologically, we sort of distance ourselves from the heroes.
Heidt asked the study participants what they thought about Mark and Julie and their actions. Most believed that the couple’s actions were wrong and condemned them. For example, some respondents thought that Julie might become pregnant, and her children might have genetic diseases - forgetting that the couple was protected in two ways at once. Others believed that this could negatively affect the family’s life - but they lost sight of the fact that brother and sister had left everything secret. Still others decided that it would destroy their relationship - although the example clearly stated that Mark and Julie had only become closer. Despite the fact that the arguments of the participants were divided on counterarguments, they continued to consider the act immoral. Heidt called it “moral shock” - he believes that we make moral judgments intuitively and do not always look for confirmation of our point of view.
Of course, in most cases the reasons why we condemn incest are obvious. Very often he means child abuse and pedophilia. And even in cases when two adult relatives come into relations, there are often tough arguments against: for example, in the case when the father is 36 years old, the daughter is 18 years old, and the law of the country does not prohibit incest, it’s still impossible to talk about full consent their relationship, even after years of preservation hierarchy. Patrick Stübing’s case also raises questions - due to Susan’s mental illness.
Nevertheless, there really are contradictions in our views on incest - they relate to the relationship between adult brothers and sisters of about the same age, who are in the family on an equal footing. For centuries, one of the most powerful arguments against incest was that close relatives could give birth to children with serious genetic diseases and disabilities. But there are also nuances: sex does not mean compulsory childbearing for a long time, relationships do not have to be heterosexual, and a child with a disability can be born in any family - but in our mind there is no forbidding children to start having children with hereditary diseases. Much depends on the degree of kinship: according to research, the decision of four cousins to have children will be more successful from a biological point of view. What if the couple is not going to have children - or consciously decides to give life to a child with a disability? Moreover, this is an eiblistic position: if you believe it, then only healthy people can be full-fledged members of society.
We are accustomed to consider the relations of stepbrothers and sisters more acceptable due to the lack of blood ties - although, according to Westermark's theory, there are no fundamental differences between these situations.
Another argument against incest - it destroys the structure of the family. One of the theories explaining why incest is tabooed is called the Westermark effect. More than a century ago, psychologist Edward Westermark suggested that we automatically perceive other children that our parents took care of as relatives and, having matured, do not experience sexual attraction to them. This applies to both blood and non-siblings, and explains why the relationship between stepbrothers and sisters is also taboo. But here too lies a paradox: we are accustomed to consider the relations of half-brothers and sisters more acceptable due to the absence of the notorious blood connection - although, according to Westermarck’s theory, there are no fundamental differences between these situations, and the family structure is influenced by both.
In the case of Patrick Stübing, this argument does not work at all: she and Susan have never been one family. What happened between them could be explained by the term "genetic sexual attraction": it was introduced by the American Barbara Gogno in the late eighties of the last century. This theory states that between relatives who did not live together and met as an adult, sexual desire may arise: according to Gogno, she fell in love with her own son, whom she gave up for adoption when she met him again after twenty-six years. True, the phenomenon of "genetic sexual attraction" has never been investigated seriously, and due to the lack of a serious evidence base, there is every reason to consider it a pseudoscientific.
It turns out that the only thing that makes incest unacceptable is cultural attitudes and moral norms. These are vague and complex categories that change over time and which are difficult to imagine as the only basis of legislation - after all, marriages between people with different skin colors in the United States once seemed something unthinkable too.
Of course, this does not mean that centuries-old cultural installations should be immediately destroyed. But society is growing up, and with it our culture is growing and changing: what has seemed obvious before, now needs to be viewed critically, trying to understand why this or that norm has still been preserved. In modern society, for example, already no standard should be explained in terms of childbearing, simply because we do not believe that romantic relationships make sense only for the sake of procreation. Society needs not axioms, but new, intelligible and powerful explanations - about violence, violation of boundaries, trauma, the impossibility for a child to feel “separate” from the family as a person and everything that is appropriate to discuss in the 21st century.
Photo:Wikimedia Commons (1, 2, 3)