BODY LANGUAGE
Johann Hari
It was a Friday night a few months ago. Rob* was standing on my doorstep, ashen and trembling. We could not guess what had happened; we could only assume that something terrible must have happened to his fiance, Karen*. Gradually, the story emerged.
Rob and Karen had recently moved out of their flat while it was being redecorated, each returning to their respective family homes for a couple of weeks. That Friday, she had left her keys at his place. He was passing by her parents’ place later that night, so he stopped off and rang the doorbell.
No answer. So he let himself in to leave the keys for her. Only, the house wasn’t empty he heard some movement in the front room. In an instant, he blundered in on Karen having sex. With her dad.
Not her stepfather. Not her adopted father. Her actual, biological dad. She was 22 years old. There was clearly no coercion taking place.
Three weeks passed. Rob was trying to put his life back together. One morning, he got a call from Karen, asking if they could meet. He agreed.
Predictably, when they met, an argument began. “I don’t know why you think it’s so odd!” she screamed. “I know lots of people who do this.” That stopped Rob in his tracks. “Who?”
And it began to spill out: that she had made contact with lots of people over the Internet: boys, girls, fathers, mothers, who are sleeping with their kin. The Internet is value-free: it doesn’t care whether you are selling a second-hand car or buying arms. There are chatrooms and websites that are de facto support groups for people engaged in incest. And what they want is to normalise what we have long considered to be abnormal.
Rob and I spent a few nights gawping at the disguised but fairly developed pro-incest (or, to be more accurate, pro-tolerating incest) areas of the Net in an attempt to understand Karen. The exponents of incest that we talked to in cyberspace were very keen to draw a distinction between “consensual incest” on the one hand and abuse, rape and paedophilia on the other. Consensual incest, we were told by “JimJim2” from Ontario, is “when two adults who just happen to be related get it on. You can’t help who you fall in love with, it just happens. I fell in love with my sister and I’m not ashamed … I only feel sorry for my mom and dad, I wish they could be happy for us. It’s nothing like some old man who tries to fuck his three-year-old, that’s evil and disgusting … Of course we’re consenting, that’s the most important thing.”
Voices in Action, a US support group for victims of incest, vehemently rejects these arguments: “These teens have been brainwashed into believing this behaviour is natural; it is not … Sexual abuse is learned behaviour.” But some political thinkers are prepared to support the distinction between abuse and consenting relationships. Dr Sean Gabb, a leading member of the Libertarian Alliance, a radical British thinktank, argues that “consenting incestuous behaviour is no business of the state. It is up to individuals to make their own decisions.”
Few other public figures are prepared to tread into this ethical minefield. One of the few who was brave enough to talk on the record is Brett Kahr, senior lecturer in psycho- therapy at Regent’s College, London. He stresses that there is no proper research into this phenomenon, and wonders, “Who are we to say that Joe Bloggs and his sister Jane Bloggs aren’t having a perfectly good relationship and we’re all missing out?”
But he is also quick to qualify this. “In over 100 years’ worth of case studies I’ve looked at, I have never seen a single case of incest that has ended happily.” He admits, however, that by their very nature psychiatrists don’t attract happy people.
Kahr, drawing on his experience as a practising psychotherapist, raises some pertinent questions about any incidences of seemingly “consensual” incest. “Even if, as in your friend Karen’s case, she did, as she claims, initiate sexual contact with her father, what was lacking in her relationship with him so that sexual behaviour seemed the only way to bridge it?”
Consensual incest has been portrayed sympathetically in popular fiction for centuries, from John Ford’s masterful 17th-century play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore to Ian Mc-Ewan’s novel The Cement Garden and Steven Poliakoff’s film Close My Eyes. Even in the popular medium of TV, from Jerry Springer (who has featured incestuous sisters on his show) to Brookside (which featured a love affair between siblings Nat and Georgia), incest has been depicted in a not unsympathetic, if somewhat salacious, manner.
So why is your stomach still churning? The most obvious answer is the risk of producing severely deformed children. All existing studies of inbred populations show that incest increases the rate of appearance of negative recessive genes.
We should, however, be wary of damning incest on these grounds alone. To prohibit two people from having sex because their offspring may be “defective” or “inferior” is to adopt the standpoint of a eugenicist. If we prohibit incest on the grounds that it risks producing “defective” children, we must also prohibit reproduction by haemophiliacs and the carriers of a host of other “defects”.
In any case, we must acknowledge that, with the rise of contraception, we have succeeded in separating sex from reproduction. Another participant in incest discovered in a chatroom, “daddysgirl”, insisted: “We would never have a baby, it would be all screwed up.” So has a window opened for “safe” incest? And if so, is our visceral disgust just a remnant from a vanishing age?
* Some names have been changed