Columbia Professor Charged With Incest

[borealis]

This interbreeding concern is interesting. What if it was a father having a sexual relationship with gay son?

[Azathoth]

god hates fags so they are already going to burn in hell

[mistermack]

Is that so? Repeating unfounded assertions won't get you anywhere. You'll do better if you can convince us that "All this stuff about consent and a victimless crime is bollocks" is not connected to the professor's relationship with his daughter that we are discussing here.

Post by post you're getting more and more silly.
First you accuse me of saying something I didn't say.
Then you accuse me of thinking somthing I didn't think.
Have you considered a career in the Police?

Just to remind you, you said "You appear to have made up your mind that the daughter was groomed. " and " Do you have evidence they have missed, or are you asking us to accept it simply because you happen to think she was?"
It seems you can read minds. Shame you get it wrong every time, or you might be useful.
.

[Hermit]

Stop your caterwauling and evasion and explain to us instead how "All this stuff about consent and a victimless crime is bollocks" is not connected to the professor's relationship with his daughter that we are discussing here.

[Ronja]

About the Eeewww! factor: The evolutionary advantages of being more attracted to strangers than to members of one's own family are pretty obvious. The research discourse that I know of (from a layman viewpoint) has centered not round the incest taboo itself but round what mechanism(s) build a personally experienced feeling of the incest taboo, and how much the mechanism(s) are the same for sibling incest taboo and parent-child incest taboo. I only know a bit about the sibling angle.

There is evidence gathered during the last 130 odd years that children who have grown up together in a sibling-like relationship since a very young age (1-3 years) and have always lived and played together, without separations, are rather unlikely to find each other sexually attractive/interesting, regardless of whether they are DNA-related.

AFAIK the hypothesis was first stated as "there is an innate aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from early youth" in 1891 by Edward Westermarck (a Swedish-speaking Finn - that's how I've happened to hear about him to begin with), and came to be referred to as "the Westermarck hypothesis" (WH). The original WH was based on Westermarck analyzing data about Korean and South Chinese arranged marriages between adoptive daughters and biological sons of the same family (this was a strong regional custom, though not the only type of marriage, so comparison data was easy enough to find). The WH has been much discussed ever since.

In the early 20th century the Westermarck hypothesis was widely accepted, from the 1920ies onwards and for a few decades it was criticized/disbelieved based on the views of Sigmund Freud (which were neither falsifiable nor based on empiric, systematic data, yet became immensely influential). Also anthropological and sociological data that seemed to contradict the WH were presented by some researchers. However, by 1993 when Arthur P. Wolf wrote a historical review of the WH, "Westermarck redivivus" (Annual Review of Anthropology, http://www.jstor.org/pss/2155844 ) the pendulum had swung again and more thorough analyses of the seemingly contradictory studies had strengthened the WH.

The crucial factors behind the "Westermarck effect", AFAICU seem to be:
1) living in the same quarters / around the same yard / in the same household
2) starting to live so closely at a very young age (under 3 or 4 years) and keeping on living thus until at least puberty
3) close daily routine-like contact / strong familiarity
All three are apparently needed for a true personalized/internalized incest taboo to develop.

There are a few also plausible (well explaining) alternative theories for the psycho-social mechanism behind the incest taboo. One of them can be worded approximately "whomever your (social, steadfast) mother treats as her child you will come to see and treat as your sibling" combined with "whomever your (social, steadfast) mother treats as her partner you will come to see and treat as your father".

Warning: searching Google Web and/or Google scholar for Westermarck hypothesis OR effect can lead to the loss of several hours of one's life - though in an interesting manner.

The links I found most balanced, enlightening, and/or outlandish were:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs ... 07.2.3.307
http://www.springerlink.com/content/98268q5534461m07/
http://family.jrank.org/pages/855/Inces ... riage.html
http://www.psgb.org/BookReviews/SexualA ... n1995.html

Fascinating stuff!


Edit: mistake in publication year

[mistermack]

Ronja, It would be interesting to know how Bonobos handle this.
They seem to be always fucking, as we shake hands, or say good morning.
Do they avoid siblings and parent/child fucking?
I don't know the answer to that.
.

[Trolldor]

Of course you don't. You never take the time to study anything.

[mistermack]

Of course you don't. You never take the time to study anything.

I don't have the time. No sooner do I stop laughing at one of your dumb posts, than you come out with another.
.

[Ronja]

Ronja, It would be interesting to know how Bonobos handle this.
They seem to be always fucking, as we shake hands, or say good morning.
Do they avoid siblings and parent/child fucking?
I don't know the answer to that.
.

Almost all wild adolescent females leave their own group (are exogamous), and almost all males older than 2 years avoid sexual contact with their own mother.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/factsheets/ ... nobo/behav
http://books.google.com/books?id=oW64qj ... &q&f=false

[devogue]

I love the smell of incest.

What does incest smell like?

Lovely. The priest wafted it over my granny's coffin last year.

[Warren Dew]

I think you have a duty to refrain from incest with your children, even if they want it. You don't necessarily have a duty to prevent your daughter from relationships with older men. Maybe to give your best advice, and guidance, but people arranging marriages usually think they are doing that.

I agree that any duty to refrain from incest with one's children is different from any duty regarding grooming or advising children regarding their relationships.

My hypothetical was really more aimed at the people who thought incest should be allowed, but seemed to think that combining it with grooming made it worse, perhaps putting it in the category of things that shouldn't be allowed. That seems to be fuzzy thinking to me.

Personally, I'm somewhat on the fence about whether incest is bad. My emotional reaction is that it is, but I don't regard emotions as a good guide for morality, ethics, or law. I don't see a difference between an incest law based on such reactions and laws against homosexuality, for example.

I think my conclusion, given my libertarian leanings, is that it shouldn't be illegal; I suspect the cultural taboo is sufficient to prevent any negative impact on society, if there is any.

[Trolldor]

Of course you don't. You never take the time to study anything.

I don't have the time. No sooner do I stop laughing at one of your dumb posts, than you come out with another.
.

"I don't have the time"

Apparently you can post long-winded assertions without any supporting evidence and a grasp of some of the most basic elements, but you can't google?

[hadespussercats]

She should follow Katherine Harris's example and write a creepy bestseller about the affair-- that should offset legal fees, anyway.

In Australia this wouldn't work. We have laws here prohibiting you from profiting from your crime. That includes money made from publications, interviews and so on. The government will simply confiscate the proceeds.

I think this is in most states in the US as well.

I wonder what state Harris was writing from. I'm not so certain that criminals can't profit from books, interviews, etc., written about their crimes. What if the book were written before the crime was prosecuted successfully, or after the time has been served? This warrants some research...

[maiforpeace]

She should follow Katherine Harris's example and write a creepy bestseller about the affair-- that should offset legal fees, anyway.

In Australia this wouldn't work. We have laws here prohibiting you from profiting from your crime. That includes money made from publications, interviews and so on. The government will simply confiscate the proceeds.

I think this is in most states in the US as well.

I wonder what state Harris was writing from. I'm not so certain that criminals can't profit from books, interviews, etc., written about their crimes. What if the book were written before the crime was prosecuted successfully, or after the time has been served? This warrants some research...

Son of Sam Law

[hadespussercats]

This interbreeding concern is interesting. What if it was a father having a sexual relationship with gay son?

Well, there are plenty of sodomy laws still on the books in many states in the US, so the law would probably get them one way or another. Whether or not that's as it should be is a separate question. I'm against sodomy laws, but I don't think it's a good idea for a father to sleep with his son, however eager both parties may be.

I think it's important to consider the power dynamic, the emotional imbalance of power, that would exist in an incestuous relationship between a father and his adult offspring-- of either gender. Adult children, whether "groomed" or not, are likely from a lifetime of loving, attention-seeking, etc., to still want to please their parent, to fear losing their love, admiration, respect, attention, care... These feelings have their roots in childhood, but they don't disappear once a child has passed the age of consent. And to add a sexual relationship to that deep, complicated mix is likely to do neither party any good.

Should the law step in and try to prevent this? There are plenty of people in sexual relationships that are bad for them, yet break no laws or social taboos. And while that's regrettable, I'm just as glad not to have the police charging into the bedrooms of consenting adults, however poor their decision-making skills might be.

In the case of a heterosexual incestuous couple, there is a reasonable argument to be made about public health concerns-- in the same way there are laws to protect a fetus from the actions of its drug-addicted mother. It's hard to come up with any solid public health reason why homosexual or non-fertile incestuous relationships shouldn't exist.

However, Dan Savage once responded to a question about incest with less concern to the sexual taboos and more concern to the integrity of the family unit. Consider if the relationship goes wrong-- and how often would a relationship that laden with complicated emotional connections and family dynamics succeed? Right there the incestuous couple has exploded their family-- broken possibly past repair.

I suppose there are people who wouldn't care about such things, but I thought it was an interesting take. And it moves the question of the relationship beyond a knee-jerk disgust response and into an arena beyond the sexual taboo.