Decriminalizing incest

If you don’t read the article, the headline contains the essential argument. Consensual incest should be decriminalized.

The one thing I can say in favor of this is that is that, yes, they are correct; based on the currently accepted arguments, there isn’t any particularly good reason why consentual incest shouldn’t be legal. Or polyamorous marriages. There’s no real basis left for objecting to either. Both of these holdovers are really just down to them not being a commonplace enough situation for enough people to demand the extension of rights to cover them.

Child-adult relationships might be one case where things won’t change so easily. There’s still a large prejudice against that, and a coherent internal argument still exists against it (based around consent, which is about the only condition for sexual regulation we have left). And there is a pretty big difference between laws forbidding racial mixing, which really have nothing to do with sex or marriage at all but are a case bad values in one area of life being transferred to a connected domain, and laws forbidding incest.

I believe I wrote some while back wondering what the next frontier to break through would be, since all the ideological arguments that confine any kind of regulation of sexuality have lost their underpinnings. Considering that consent is essentially the only measure left around which to organize sexual taboos, there isn’t any reason to place special protections around anything or any special penalties around anything except what conforms to or violates that condition. Consent, good; no consent, bad. End of story. Love is love.

The main problem is that you need a good example, a good case, to shift opinion around, and you need enough people who care to want things changed. Transgenderism is a pretty limited demographic, but media attention and one good story were all it really took to extend the ideological boundaries that had already been established for homosexuality. The idea that sex as an act is in any way limited or defined by biological function had already fallen (and in fact had fallen quite a while before the shift in opinion on homosexuality). These were just the next logical steps as the barriers gradually come down.

Progression moves outward in ripples from the center, once the point of gravity ceases to exist. Divorce was first, then premarital sex, then single parenthood, then cohabitation, then homosexuality in general, then gay marriage specifically, then transgenderism. And there is actually a very coherent underlying logic to that entire progression. You might even say that it was necessary, or necessary by definition. I don’t have time to explore it now, but far from being random, it’s an extremely logical progression, possibly even an inevitable one. It’s not a slippery slope so much as it is a gradual gravitational realignment around a major shift in the underlying mass of value theory, driven by drastic changes in either ideology or practical conditions among the populace.

By this point in time we’re already out at the further statistical boundaries of deviance from the former center, with the ripples reaching categories that are quite small. With the disintegration of the gravitic structure, the orbits start to blend together, the amount of matter at the center shrinks and erode and disperse into the outer territories, because there’s nothing really keeping them in any more, and the centrifugal force of culture and human desire and exploration will drive more and more people away from the former center.

Further and further out and less and less dense orbits are coming loose now, gaining momentum. In many ways transgenderism is the last really serious horizon to be crossed and dissolved. There just aren’t any really serious arguments to confine much of anything once that area has been unleashed.

That’s why it’s so hard to predict what might be next. Each step in the preceding progression was in some ways a logically necessary extension of the conclusions of the previous step to the next most comparable situation. It’s a long and drawn out series of “if this, then why not this?” As much as some people said it was silly to call it a slippery slope (which happened at every stage and was denied at every stage), the results bear out those perfectly reasonable conjectures. The failure to recognize how obviously most slopes are slippery is simply a failure to appreciate how people actually think. Assumptions drive belief, belief conditions action. If you fundamentally alter people’s underlying assumptions, their beliefs and actions will change of their own accord. Nothing in particular is stopping them except time.

But it’s hard to perceive a logic beyond this last threshold. It’s more a matter of opportunity, which is closer to chance. I think non-binarism in general, as well as bisexuality, will continue to gain cultural currency. Not merely being one or the other sex, by identity or behavior, but both or neither. A general dissolution of all borders except consent.

Quantity, age, and genetic proximity are a few obvious sexual barriers that might dissolve next (multiple partner relationships, adult/youth relationships, and incestuous relationships). I think the first and last are much easier to sell to the culture. It’s easier to picture. And it’s much harder to imagine a sympathetic case for undoing age prejudices. Some people (gay men particularly) have tested the waters on age differentials and haven’t had great success with those barriers and taboos in the wider culture. It’s also easier to make an argument about a with regard to consent, which means this barrier is unlikely to fall quickly, if at all.

But you never know. People may demand their freedoms. The idea of letting younger people making voting decisions or key decisions in other important areas in life for themselves, reducing parental control, is gaining traction. If a child can determine that they should change sexes and undergo serious medical treatment without parental approval, then other serious choices about sex and consent aren’t so far off.

I don’t think multiple partnerships will have the same ethical clout as other types of non-traditional sexual relationships. In some ways they already contain elements that are non-controversial (hetero and homosexual partnerships); the main issue is quantity. We already made our peace with serial monogamy, with promiscuity, with divorce, and all of these included a change in the accepted quantity of partners. Why not more than one at once, then? Possibly the main barrier is just that these relationships are still so rare and so complicated and, in some ways, also so conventional that you just can’t make a big deal or a big splash with them. There’s not a compelling story there. It’s a minor adjustment, not a major one.

Incestuous relationships also shouldn’t be hard to get approved ideologically. The idea of biological function and procreation have already fallen out as defining values for sexual regulation, and those are really the only really good arguments against incest. And incest hasn’t really been that uncommon in the past, even when sex was about having children and forming families. “Love is love” and “consent is all” clearly include no reasonable forbidding on incest.

Maybe you could try to make a case out of consent and taking advantage of a position of proximity, but there are ways around that objection. And it’s hard to pull that argument off with consenting, legal adults in particular. Who are you to deny them and the reality of their feelings?

I think the main barriers to approving incest are first, apathy, and second, hedging. It’s such a fringe case. It’s not an exciting story or barrier to cross, more of a box to be checked. And it’s tempting to keep those barriers up just as a hedge against potentially questionable and problematic cases. Because we aren’t entirely sure how being related affects consent, we may be tempted to just put off making any serious change to the status quo. The weak potential benefit hangs in a balance with a weak but possible risk.

If we want any insider information, some intelligence, on what sorts of things people are interested in as sexual frontiers, that is easy to get. All you have to do is look at pornography. I don’t mean that literally as a suggestion, I mean that you just need information on what people are interested in with regard to porn and you’ll know what desires haunt the human id.

As Camille Paglia once pointed out, pornograohy is an unregulated free market expression of what people want, or could want, an expression of the underlying forces of human desire, unrestrained by the realities of actual life, society, sex, people, or even basic biology. It’s a window into the wild and wooly paths that the sexual impulse can walk when not confined by any serious gravitic realities to channel, direct, guide, or restrain it.

So if you want an actual picture of where people would fundamentally like to go, if you want a window into the spectrum of what deregulation of sex would mean in an ideal world, where people could just get what they desire and didn’t have to be ashamed or restrained or censured or discriminated against, then just check out porn.

Porn is an imaginative world, a world of our own creative invention. Sex in a world of our own design. What we would do if we only could. It’s wish fulfillment. And a lot of it has crossed over into the mainstream. Porn itself helps power that process. If you spent a few years really enjoying and exploring the porn that’s out there, and technology and social mores were amenable, it’s not hard at all to see why you would be perfectly fine with age, quantity, and genetic proximity being eliminated as regulatory categories. If porn is anything to go by, it’s exactly what people want, in fact. Incest, age, and quantity-transgressive sexual relationships are some of the most common and popular genres you can find.

And the crossing of those barriers is hardly the limit of what people desire. Sex with simulated beings, such as robots or virtual reality partners (human or otherwise) is also an emerging field. People are working on that. Why? Because there is or would be a huge demand. And if you’re wondering where, exactly the limit is that will satisfy people, it’s not at all clear that there is one. There are always going to be some people who want to explore the fringes of acceptable and possible behaviors. That attitude doesn’t change because the frontier gets pushed back, you just seek out new frontiers. So the fact that incest is so popular as a category of pornography may have more to do with the fact that’s its one of our few remaining taboos than any actual general interest in committing incest.

Hentai is a field of sexuality that’s radically divorced from the social and biological realities of our world. Gender, quantity, age, and even species are barriers and lines that are blurred and crossed with ease. And that’s a genre that is right at the top of popularity. A realm where the rules and realities of sex in the human world as it has generally been understood hold no sway. You can have and be and do whatever you want. Be a half-wolf hermaphrodite in a physically impossible three-way with a prolapsed anthropomorphic deer and a tentacle monster.

As one writer researching sex once explained it in a magazine article I read, a large percentage of young people are engaging regularly with a kind of sexual ideal that isn’t even in theory physically possible. Not yet.

No doubt people of the past could have hardly imagined what we can do now with technology. That you could manage to raise a family alone successfully, that you could have sex safely with so many people, that you could have sex so much and not have it result in pregnancy, that you could have risky or unconventional sex so much and not become sick or injured, that you could find partners for all kinds of sexual antics so easily, that you could transform a person of one gender surgically and hormonally to resemble another, that you could see so many naked people and so many varied sex acts without ever needing to even meet or see those people physically, that you could be pleasured electronically by machines controlled by yourself or by others remotely.

All of these could hardly have been imagined by the people of the past. They’re all radical restructurings of the basic limitations and realities of human sexuality. They’re radical changes to the rules, to what can be reasonably expected. The average middle school boy has seen more naked women and more diverse sexual behavior by the age of 14 than the most indulgent lotharios in history ever did in their entire lives. Technology has drastically lowered the cost of all kinds of goods, and sexual goods (being in great demand) are among those most affected. Sexual behavior of all kinds is radically cheaper, in terms of cost, and getting cheaper all the time.

With possibly one exception. Traditional long-term heterosexual unions are actually getting more costly. For many reasons. Not least because they’re being so heavily outcompeted by every other possible form of sex. Pornography alone is a major competitor to marriage. And that doesn’t make marriage cheaper. It makes it harder to produce and maintain.

Marriage used to offer a great return. It was a bargain people were willing to make. But as the costs of other sexual options decreased it became less competitive. Promiscuity, non-marital relationships, and single parenting became more compelling and viable options for men and women, and less costly.

So in order to stay competitive marriage got deregulated, which allowed it to be depreciated. You could get it easier, exchange it easier, dispose of it easier. You didn’t need to commit so many resources to secure it. You could spread yourself around in other areas of sexual investment and still afford it. But as time went on, the question became, why bother? If it’s mostly symbolic at this point and confers no special advantages but still carries some serious costs and complications, and these other new options are so much more convenient and low-cost, why bother? And so the age of marriage has been skyrocketing. It’s more of a feather to put in your cap when you’ve already got everything you want than a means of getting what you want. You don’t need to invest in it to get what you want.

It’s hard to say what the future of sexual values will be in the US. A lot depends on the random chances of history’s unfolding. A single person here or there, a single story, could cause radical shifts in any direction. The development of drug-resistant diseases becoming widespread could also cause a major cultural shift, as our attitudes have become so dependent on our technology to support them.

Anything could happen. In the short run it seems likely that more and more of the remaining sexual taboos will continue to erode, but with a more shrill and less convincing battle cry. Marriage will likely continue to decline as a cultural force and major player in the organization of social and sexual relationships. And it’s always possible that there will be a blowback. People may find that sexual deregulation and a lack of investment in stable monogamous relationships isn’t all its cracked up to be, in the long run. Who knows, it could happen.