Incest - Worth defending?

[bravolima]

totally yes, thats what uncles are for. to teach, nurture, mentor and other things to.

[NotTrueToMyself]

I don't buy into the power dynamics all that much. There are some who have sex with minors for the purpose of power and control but I am convinced that those folks are few in number. Now, regarding incest, I think the only incest that should be looked down upon would be that between a male and female. And I say that because if the female gets pregnant then that could pose some problems for the baby. Other than that, I see no reason why we should frown upon it.

If you’re doing it for power and control, then you’re not a MAP. You are a manipulative child molester or rapist. Once that child gets out from under your control and understands what they were manipulated into, then likely there will be long-term psychological damage. Because if you’re doing it for power and control, you’re doing it for your own interest not the child.

[Fragment]

I don't buy into the power dynamics all that much. There are some who have sex with minors for the purpose of power and control but I am convinced that those folks are few in number.

It's not that the incest is about power and control. It's that there is already a strong relationship of power and control that is hard to turn off just for sex.

Sometimes parents, even good, democratic, autonomy respecting parents need to be coercive. It's part of socializing their kids into adult norms.

Trying to manage a voluntarily sexual relationship alongside a parent-child relationship just seems prone to imbalance. Some people might be able to pull it off, but I worry that they'd been in the minority. The data kind of bears that out. It's hard for a minor to feel protected by someone that seems more interested in their own orgasm. Incest results in high rates of feeling betrayed and consequent trauma.

And like I said, as a MAP, there are billions of non-family options out there. Why risk destroying a relationship that has so much value in non-sexual ways?

[stefanos_katsios]

Yes it is.
Just another variation of pedophilia.

cheers
Stefanos

[Pharmakon]

The Stranger Danger narrative, which played a key role in stigmatizing MAPs, was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to divert feminist activism around claims that the patriarchal family was a site of child abuse in the form of father-daughter incest. Some of the most reliable recent scholarship suggests that this type of incest is less common than generally believed, and not now (if it ever was) as much of a problem as these feminists claimed. Claims that the patriarchal family is a source of sexual pathology, however, do not depend on how frequently father-daughter incest occurs, or on whether it is necessarily a bad thing.

1. Stranger Danger.

Florence Rush published The Best Kept Secret in 1980. The book reflected a growing feminist preoccupation with father-daughter incest, amounting to an attack on the patriarchal family as a site of child sexual abuse. The promulgation of the Stranger Danger narrative occurred in direct response to this attack, and succeeded in diverting the attention of mainstream feminists to imagined threats located outside the family.

2. Incest today

Despite the frequent assertion that much or most sex between adults and minors occurs within the family, the most informative data on youth sexual behavior suggests otherwise. This data is the Finnish surveys conducted in 1988, 2008, and 2013. Bruce Rind's analysis of this data found that less than 10 percent of reported sex between adults and minors was with relatives. Only a minuscule fraction of that was with parents.

3. The pathology of the patriarchal family

Wilhelm Reich and others contend that the patriarchal family, whether or not a site of sexual abuse, reproduces sexual pathology. Reich writes:

Authoritarian society’s fight against the sexuality of children and adolescents, and the consequent struggle in one’s own ego, takes place within the framework of the authoritarian family, which has thus far proven to be the best institution to carry out this fight successfully. Sexual desires naturally urge a person to enter into all kinds of relations with the world, to enter into close contact with it in a vast variety of forms. If they are suppressed, they have but one possibility: to vent themselves within the narrow framework of the family. Sexual inhibition is the basis of the familial encapsulation of the individual as well as the basis of individual self-consciousness. One must give strict heed to the fact that metaphysical, individual, and familial sentimental behavior are only various aspects of one and the same basic process of sexual negation, whereas reality-oriented, nonmystical thinking moves along with a loose attitude toward the family and is at the very least indifferent to ascetic sexual ideology. What is important in this connection is that the tie to the authoritarian family is established by means of sexual inhibition, that it is the original biological tie of the child to the mother and also of the mother to the child that forms the barricade to sexual reality and leads to an indissoluble sexual fixation and to an incapacity to enter into other relations.
…

[N]ationalistic sentiments are the direct continuation of the family tie and are likewise rooted in the fixated tie to the mother. This cannot be explained biologically. For this tie to the mother, insofar as it develops into a familial and nationalistic tie, is itself a social product. In puberty it would make room for other attachments, i.e., natural sexual relations, if sexual restrictions would not cause it to be eternalized. It is as this socially motivated eternalization that it becomes the basis of nationalist feelings in the adult; it is only at this stage that it becomes a reactionary social force.

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946) p56-58