Incest

In my opinion you should be able to love who you love if they are within a reasonable age range from you, even if they are your identical twin. And since you are gay, the entire reason incest is considered bad is because it causes a greater rate of mutation of babies. Which you do not have to worry about. So just be confident and love, I suppose.

 

As long as they're both happy, who gives a shit how they're related.

 

No f**** ng way. Humans are wired not to be inlove with the same dna.

 

Well, I seriously doubt I'm wired like that, but I can appreciate that not everyone is the same. If a consensual couple are harming nobody, then who are we to dictate what they can and cannot do? It might provoke a knee-jerk reaction of disgust, but that doesn't mean incest couples should be persecuted.

 

Can you imagine that theres millions of people in the world and youre gonna be inlove with a person youre blood related? Thats sick and i cant digest that. Im sory but that is just too much!

 

Interestingly enough, if you trade out "blood related" with "of the same gender", you'll hear an argument we've all heard and dismissed.

To the OP, love is love. I personally don't judge based on who one is attracted to. You love who you love and you can't help whether that's a family member or not.

 

As far as i know it is taboo to love (sexually) your family. And i dont want to be accepting about that matter. Not gonna say " its okay love is love", Im enough with the gay lesbian love. Thats all i can handle.

 

Well there are many things that are considered taboos which shouldn't be. Just saying "its a taboo" doesn't automatically make it bad. Homosexuality was, and sometimes still is, a taboo. And why shouldn't love just be love? They aren't hurting anyone. No one is asking you to fall for a family member. But I think you shouldn't go about judging something just because its different, particularly when you aren't willing to look at that thing objectively.

Its worth mentioning that there is such a thing as genetic sexual attraction, a sexual attraction between family members which occasionally occurs between people who are closely genetically related and have been separate from each other. But IMO, I don't really care if its natural or not. Nature is highly overrated sometimes.

 

Well incest used to be perfectly fine up till even the 1800s. Hell some pretty famous people in history like Edgar Allen Poe, the Habsburgs, Cleopatra, and almost any monarch worth naming during the Industrial Revolution had, or was the product of some kind of incestuous relationship. Of course now we know the consequences of having a kid with your sister, but the way I see it is if it's consensual and they can accept the consequences if they have a kid with eachother then it's fine with me.

 

I'm incredibly open-minded, so if someone loves another, no matter whether they're related, what their gender is, their sex, their race, anything, it's fine. Love is love. Nothing can stop that.

 

FYI, I read a stat. that said brother/sister incest was most common form. Not sure how reliable that was. Personally second cousin is my limit. I don't judge other people.

 

I think it's a bit weird. But my parents are cousins. They've been married for 23 years or so, they love each other, and they get along great.

 

My grandpa always used to say "if you can't keep it in your pants, keep it in the family."
... eww

Really? I'd like to see that source. I honestly could never look at my brother and father in that light... even if I tried.

However it would be interesting to know if this is a social construct or a natural thing. Perhaps a mix of both?

 

I think that if both (or all) members of the incest relationship are truly in love, willing and not forced in any way then it's fine by me, who cares if they're related

 

I think that the main problems with incest are the incredibly high rates of abuse and of unhealthy power dynamics. Yes, sometimes it's fully consensual and is just like any other relationship, but that doesn't happen often (I reckon that it's more likely with cousin or sibling incest than intergenerational incest). I do not see incest as inherently bad, but incestual relationships must bet treated with more caution than non-incestual ones because of those issues. In the same way, I do not see polyamory as inherently bad, but a one-man-many-women structure must be treated with more caution than monogamous relationships.

Tricky subject for me, though. I do not like incest one bit, because of stuff, but what I do or do not like should not dictate what other people do or do not do when that does not affect me. Same reason the fact that some people don't like homosexuality doesn't mean they can ban gay marriage.

Sauce. "More recently, studies have suggested that sibling incest, particularly older brothers having sexual relations with younger siblings, is the most common form of incest, with some studies finding sibling incest occurring more frequently than other forms of incest." (That sentence seems a bit repetitive, but oh well.

For lots of people, looking at someone of the same sex in a sexual light is something they could never do even if they tried. They may consider it icky, or even immoral.

If I recall correctly...

We have a natural aversion to seeing people in a sexual light if we've known them since age 6 or younger. This means that we usually have an aversion to seeing siblings in a sexual light, having been in close quarters with them for so long. The aversion is an evolutionary advantage because it encourages genetic diversity (including going outside your family and going outside your village). However, if siblings grow up without knowing each other then they won't have an aversion to seeing each other sexually, except from the socially constructed taboo surrounding incest.

Does that help?

 

If ones think about it purely logically (which means consciously disregarding the westmarck effect), none of the current arguments against incest really holds water except for maybe the one which states that offspring of incestuous partners are at a higher risk of hereditary diseases.

But If this is the case, then the same argument can be made against partners that have genetic diseases or high-risk pregnancies as well.

So I came to the conclusion that there's nothing really wrong with incestuous relationships, as long as both parties consent to it. The same applies to a consenting polyamorous relationship as well.

I realised that I actually have a thread that this was discussed.
Here it is:
http://emptyclosets.com/forum/chit-chat/68402-homosexuality-incest-among-other-things.html

 

I think it becomes wrong if:

a) you grew up as siblings to each other, or

b) you have a significant age difference.

The genetic relationship, to me, is irrelevant morally (though it is important medically). I don't see anything wrong with biological siblings who were adopted into separate homes as infants forming a romance with each other. In contrast, I would be concerned about adoptive siblings having a romance with each other, even though they're not genetically related.

The thing about siblings is that you form a certain unique kind of bond with them, completely different from a parent-child or romantic bond. And it seems like mixing together distinct types of strong emotional bonds is often a recipe for unhappiness. (Friendship is an exception - it goes fine with everything. In fact, it tends to improve any other kind of bond.) I'm not sure exactly why this tends to happen, but I do know that sibling romances tend to be associated with a lot of psychological problems. I have yet to find an example of a healthy couple who were raised as siblings from early childhood.

If you weren't raised as siblings, and you're age-appropriate for each other, I don't see the big deal about having a romantic relationship with someone related to you. As long as you either ensure no children are produced or are prepared to handle the resulting medical issues, what's the big deal? (Incidentally, I also don't consider it wrong to knowingly produce a child at risk for medical issues. But you should be prepared to the best of your ability and committed to meeting that child's needs, both physical and emotional. If you're going to wail about how your life was ruined by a disabled child, you shouldn't be a parent, and especially not if you know going into it that a disabled child is likely.)