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Incest

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Incest is sexual activity or marriage between very close family members. It is a taboo, as well as a criminal offense, in most societies. The same restrictions usually apply to sexual unions as they do to marriage.

The precise meaning of incest varies widely, because different cultures have differing notions of "sexual activity" and "close family member." Some jurisdictions consider only those related by birth, others also those related by adoption or marriage; some prohibit sexual relations between people who grew up in the same household, while others prohibit sexual relations between people who grew up in related households.

Sometimes the word "incestuous" is also used metaphorically to describe other inappropriately close relationships, for example between an authority figure and a subordinate, or between people in the same profession or creative field.

Incest and Inbreeding

"Incest" and "inbreeding" are not synonymous.

  • Incest refers to inappropriate sexual activity between individuals who are considered to be too closely related socially or genetically. It is a social and cultural term, in other words, within any culture, any given sexual activity can in principle be categorized as either incestuous or non-incestuous.
  • Inbreeding refers to procreation (breeding) between individuals with varying degrees of genetic closeness only. It is a scientific term rather than a social or cultural term.

In many societies, the definition of incest relations and the degree of inbreeding may correlate positively (for example, any sexual relations between people of a given degree of genetic closeness is considered incestuous). In many other societies, the definition of incest and the degree of inbreeding may not correlate (for example, sexual relations between certain people of a given degree of genetic closeness are considered incestuous, whereas sexual relations between other people of the same degree of genetic closeness are not considered incestuous.)

The consequence of inbreeding is to increase the frequency of homozygotes within a population. Depending on the size of the population and the number of generations in which inbreeding occurs, the increase of homozygotes may have either good or bad effects.

Incest versus exogamy

Anthropologists have found that marriage everywhere is governed (often informally) by rules of exogamy (one must marry outside of one's group) and endogamy (one must marry within one's own group). What is considered a group, for purposes of either exogamy or endogamy, varies considerably. Thus, in most stratified societies one must marry outside of one's nuclear family (exogamy) but should marry a member of one's own class, race or religion (endogamy). In this example, the exogamous group is small and the endogamous group is large. But in some societies, the exogamous group and endogamous group may be of equal size. This is the case in societies divided into clans or lineages.

In most such societies, membership in a clan or lineage is inherited through only one parent. Sex with a member of one's own clan or lineage — whether a parent or a genetically very distant relative — would be considered incestuous, whereas sex with a member of another clan or lineage — including the other parent — would not be considered incest (although it may be considered wrong for other reasons).

For example, Trobriand Islanders prohibit both sexual relations between a man and his mother, and between a woman and her father, but they describe these prohibitions in very different ways: relations between a man and his mother fall within the category of forbidden relations among members of the same clan; relations between a woman and her father do not. This is because the Trobrianders are matrilineal; children belong to the clan of their mother and not of their father. Thus, sexual relations between a man and his mother's sister (and mother's sister's daughter) are also considered incestuous, but relations between a man and his father's sister are not. Indeed, a man and his father's sister will often have a flirtatious relationship, and a man and the daughter of his father's sister may prefer to have sexual relations or marry. Anthropologists have hypothesized that in these societies, the incest taboo reinforces the rule of exogamy, and thus ensures that social ties between clans or lineages with be maintained through intermarriage.

Chinese society provides an example of a society with a very broad notion of the exogamous group, as relations between two individuals with the same surname may be banned.

Some cultures cover relatives by marriage in incest prohibitions. For example, the question of the legality and morality of a widower who wished to marry his deceased wife's sister was the subject of long and fierce debate in 19th century Britain, involving, among others, Matthew Boulton.

The Tanakh (Old Testament) contains prohibitions (primarily in Leviticus) against sexual relations between various pairs of family members. Father and daughter, mother and son, etc., are forbidden on pain of death to engage in sexual relations. According to the interpretation given to it by some anthropologists, it prohibits sexual relations between aunts and nephews but not between uncles and nieces.

Industrial societies

Many American states recognize two separate degrees of incest, the more serious degree covering the closest blood relationships such as father-daughter, mother-son and brother-sister, with the less-serious charge being pressed against more distantly-related individuals who engage in sexual intercourse, usually down to and including first cousins. Despite the strong stigma attached to incest, even the more serious charge is generally prosecuted as the least severely-punishable class of felony (in New York state; for example, the maximum penalty is four years in prison), and the less serious charge is usually only a misdemeanor (curiously, many incest laws do not expressly proscribe sexual conduct other than vaginal intercourse— such as oral sex— or, for that matter, any sexual activity between relatives of the same gender, so long as neither party is a minor). This legal position is in stark contrast with that in Australia, where incest is punishable by a maximum of 25 years imprisonment for the more serious form of penetrating a child (even if that child is over 18), and 5 years for the less serious charge of sexual penetration of a (half-)brother or (half-)sister.

Incest is most frequently engaged in by parents of both sexes and their children. Incest is also an important part of sexual exploration by children, especially in families with children of the same age. A study by Floyd Martinson found that 10-15% of college students had had a childhood sexual experience with a brother or sister (see child sexuality).

The degree to which even the topic of incest is forbidden varies between societies. In the United States incest is rarely described in books or movies and then usually as a very traumatic and perverse experience (e.g. the 1994 film Spanking The Monkey in which mother-son incest takes place, leading to the latter's suicide attempt). Meanwhile in Japanese manga and anime the topic of incest is covered relatively often and in a more neutral and tolerant way; notable series dealing with incest between major characters (to wit, siblings; most often an older brother/younger sister pairing) include Koi Kaze, Angel Sanctuary, Marmalade Boy (between step-siblings), and Cream Lemon (which was one of the first and most notable hentai anime).

It is widely, but by no means universally, agreed that incest by parents is abuse and should be illegal. Some societies considered incest an inescapable fact of life. In many societies some forms of sexual contact between close family members is socially (and sometimes even publicly) encouraged.

Consensual adult incest

Finally, there is also the much rarer phenomenon of consensual incestuous relations between adults, such as between an adult brother and sister. This is illegal in most places, but these laws are sometimes questioned on the grounds that such relations do not harm other people (provided the couple have no children) and so should not be criminalized. Artificial insemination and open adoption have compounded these problems. Unreported incestuous relations may never be punished by law, however, the consequences of the behavior may by themselves be regarded as forms of punishment on the individual or individuals. In most cases, there is a distinct difference between incest and endogamy, relations within a group. An endogamous relationship may not necessarily mean incest is being practiced. In today's society, endogamy is practiced openly. Some may call it racism or snobbery, others may call it love.

Proposals have been made from time to time to repeal these laws—for example, the proposal by the Australian Model Criminal Code Officer's Committee discussion paper "Sexual Offences against the Person" released in November 1996. (This particular proposal was later withdrawn by the committee, in spite of their own feelings on the issue, due to a large public outcry. Defenders of the proposal argue that the outcry was mostly based on the misunderstanding that the committee was intending to legalize sexual relations between parents and their minor children, which it did not.)

In the wake of the Lawrence v. Texas decision by the US Supreme Court, striking down laws criminalising homosexual sodomy as unconstitutional, some have argued that by the same logic laws against consensual adult incest should be unconstitutional. Some civil libertarians argue that all private sexual activity between consenting adults should be legal, and its criminalisation is a violation of human rights -- thus, they argue that the criminilisation of consensual adult incest is a violation of human rights. In Muth v. Frank, the 7th Circuit interpreted the case narrowly as only applying to homosexual actitvity, and refused to draw this conclusion from Lawrence, however, a decision that attracted mixed opinions.

History

Ancient Egypt

Some experts claim that incestuous marriages were widespread at least during part of Egyptian history, such as Naphtali Lewis (Life in Egypt under Roman Rule: Oxford, 1983), who claims that numerous papyri attest to many husbands and wives as being brother and sister.

When instances of brother-sister marriages first began to appear in the papyri, they were greeted with great scepticism in some quarters, where doubt was expressed that any society would really have countenanced such common violation of the incest taboo... Such arguments [to otherwise explain the evidence] are ingenious, but they collapse completely in the face of the cumulative evidence of scores of papyri, official as well as private documents, in which the wife is unequivocally identified as the husband's "sister born of the same father and the same mother". (pp.43f)

Joyce Tyldesley (Ramesses: Egypt's Great Pharaoh: London, 2000), writing about the pre-Roman Egyptian period, expresses the opposite viewpoint. She states that within the royal family there was a tradition of hypergamy, where a king or his son might marry a commoner, but his daughter could not marry beneath herself, without the act be considered degrading herself. As a result, the royal princess often found herself either marrying her royal brother, or living her life without a spouse.

Incestuous unions were frowned upon and considered as nefas (a violation of the natural and social order) in Roman times, and were explicitly forbidden by an imperial edict in AD 295, who divided the concept of incestus into two categories of unequal gravity: the incestus iuris gentium, who was applied to both Romans and non-Romans in the Empire, and the incestus iuris civilis who concerned only the Roman citizens. Therefore, for example, an Egyptian could marry an aunt, but a Roman could not.

Royal dynasties

Adult incest has been notable in royal dynasties, probably in order to help concentrate wealth and political influence within the family (historical evidence suggests that this practice actually weakened the genetic makeup of elite society family lines, resulting in abnormally high occurrences of rare genetic defects and diseases). Although the marriage unions were often not consensual, with young adults or children forced to marry close relatives, this does not imply the sex was non-consensual. Best known for this practice, which included brother-sister marriages, are some of the dynasties of Ancient Egypt (as explained above), ancient Hawaii, and the Precolumbian Mixtec.

Dynasties of the modern era where there was frequent familial intermarriage were the mid-Habsburgs, one branch ruled over Spain and the other over Austria. Spanish princesses, however, did marry French kings, Louis XIII and Louis XIV who were not Habsburgs. The Spanish branch died out in 1700, but the last Spanish Habsburg king, Carlos II had been married to María-Lüisa of Orléans, grand-daughter of King Charles I of England and niece to King Louis XIV of France. However, over the last century, Kings Philip II, Philip III, and (for his second time) Philip IV all married their Austrian cousins. The Austrian branch continued to rule until 1918, and they are still alive and prospering today.

In Christian society, in which most of the great royal dynasties of the early modern era functioned, incest was a terrible taboo. In 1536 Queen Anne Boleyn of England was falsely accused of incest with her brother in order to blacken her name and enable her husband to execute her and marry again.

Mythology

Examples of incest in mythology are rampant. In Greek mythology Zeus and Hera are brother and sister as well as husband and wife. They were the children of Cronus and Rhea (also married siblings) and grandchildren of Uranus and Gaia (a son who took his mother as consort). Cronus and Rhea's siblings, the other Titans, were also all married brothers and sisters.

In Scandinavian mythology, Loki accuses Freyr and Freya of committing incest, in Lokasenna. Moreover, in the Völsunga saga, the hero Sigmund and his sister Signy murdered her children and begat a son, Sinfjötli. When Sinfötli had grown up, he and Sigmund murdered Signy's husband Siggeir.

In Icelandic folklore a common plot involves a brother and sister (illegally) conceiving a child. They subsequently escape justice by moving to a remote valley. There they proceed to have several more children. The man has some magical abilities which he uses to direct travellers to or away from the valley as he chooses. The siblings always have exactly one daughter but any number of sons. Eventually the magician allows a young man (usually searching for sheep) into the valley and asks him to marry the daughter and give himself and his sister a civilized burial upon their deaths. This is subsequently done.

Sibling incest forms an important part of the plot in the story of Kullervo in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, as also in mediaeval versions of the British legend of King Arthur.

Religion

The Bible also contains a number of references to incest: see Biblical references to incest.

Fiction

Incest is a somewhat popular topic in English erotic fiction; there are entire collections and websites devoted solely to this genre, with an entire genre of pornographic pulp fiction known as "incest novels". This is probably because, as with so many other fetishes, it is a topic of controversy. With the advent of the Internet, there is even more of this type of fiction available.

Besides this, incest is sometimes mentioned or described in usual, non-erotic fiction. Connotations can be negative, positive (very rarely), or neutral. For example, in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude there are several cases of sex between more or less close relatives, the last of which (between a nephew and his aunt) results in the birth of a disabled child and precedes the destruction of the whole town of Macondo by a hurricane. Other works of literature show consequences not so grave, such as the V.C. Andrews novel Flowers in the Attic and its subsequent sequels, in which brother and sister uphold a loving relationship.

Incest is an element of the Sophocles play Oedipus the King, in which the title character unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. This act came to great prominence in the 20th century with Freud's analysis of the Oedipus complex as lying beneath the psychology of all men. Its female counterpart is called the Electra complex.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle deals very heavily with the incestual relationships in the intricate family tree of the main character Van Veen. There are explicit moments of sexual relations primarily between Van and his sister Ada, as well as between Ada and her younger sister Lucette. Nabokov does not necessarily deal with any complexities or consequences, social or otherwise, which may be inherent to incestuous relationships--outside of the strictly practical concerns of having to hide the taboo relationships from others. Incest in Ada seems mainly to be mainly a sexual manifestation of the characters' intellectual incestuousness, and operates on a similar plane as do other instances of "sexual transgression" in his novels of this period (e.g. pedophilia in Lolita, homosexuality in Pale Fire).

Thomas Mann's The Holy Sinner explores the spiritual consequences of unintentional incest.

It is also a main plot device in the movie Caligula.

Genetics

Today, the general availability of birth control methods has made inbreeding a largely separate issue from incest. Opponents of incest argue, however, that incest should still be restricted since birth control is not always 100% effective.

Some have suggested that the incest taboo is a social mechanism to reduce the chances of congenital birth-defects that can result from inbreeding. Scientists have generally rejected this as an explanation for the incest taboo for two reasons. First, in many societies partners with whom marriage is forbidden and partners with whom marriage is preferred are equally related in genetic terms; the inbreeding argument would not explain the incest taboo in these societies. Second, the inbreeding argument oversimplifies the consequences of inbreeding in a population. Inbreeding leads to an increase in homozygocity, that is, the same allele at the same locus on both members of a chromosome pair. This occurs because close relatives are more likely to share more alleles than nonrelated individuals. If an individual has an allele linked to a congenital birth defect, it is likely that close relatives also have this allele; a homozygote would express the congenital birth defect. If an individual does not have such an allele, a homozygote would be healthy. Thus, the frequency of a defect-carrying gene in a population may go up, or down, when inbreeding occurs.

Thus, in small populations this dynamic would lead to an initial increase in birth defects. But if health care is limited, it is likely that such children would not reproduce; consequently, the frequencies for the allele in question would go down. Ultimately the result would be a population with a large number of homozygotes and a small number of birth defects. In large populations with good health care, however, it is likely that there will be consistently high levels of heterozygosity despite periodic inbreeding. Consequently the alleles linked to congenital birth defects will remain in the population, with a significant chance of a homozygote with the linked allele. In ancient Hawaiian society, negative genetic consequences of incest were circumvented by rigorous physical and mental exams required of children of nobility (ali'i) as proof of their social status, for example races over bare lava rock which would result in injuries fatal to hemophiliacs.

Recent research on the mechanisms of human adaptive immunity suggests that there is a strong evolutionary pressure to maintain as diverse an array of antibody genes as possible. This may provide a biological explanation as to why opposite-sex siblings tend not to be attracted to one another and generally prefer to seek other partners. There is some observational evidence for this: in what is now a key study of the Westermarck effect, the anthropologist Melford E. Spiro, in a cohort study of children raised as communal siblings in the Kiryat Yedidim kibbutz in the 1960s, found practically no intermarriage between his subjects as adults despite pressure from parents and community. The immunoselective theory, however, does not account for the converse phenomenon (dubbed genetic sexual attraction) in which close genetic relatives growing up separately in adoptive arrangements have been observed to become strongly attracted to each other upon reunion.

See also

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