Young Lovers
She is a petite, delicate, blue-eyed blonde, while he is a strapping young man with auburn hair and soft brown eyes which never stray for long from her face.
They hold hands, they kiss, they stroke each other’s arms, they listen attentively to each other. They are totally besotted.
What makes this scene so disturbing, however, is the fact that Danielle and Nick are half brother and sister.
Danielle and Nick only met as adults. Danielle says of their first meeting “I was nervous about meeting Nick because although he was my brother, he was also a stranger,… We just clicked straight away. It’s impossible to explain. I just felt drawn to him, as if he was the person I’d been waiting for all my life.” Three weeks later they became lovers.
They might be suffering from genetic sexual attraction:
Genetic sexual attraction is a recognised psychological phenomenon, which sometimes affects siblings or blood relatives separated at birth, who then meet later as adults.
The term is believed to have first been coined in America in the 1980s by a woman called Barbara Gonyo, who wrote about the unexpected lust she felt for the adult son she’d given up for adoption 26 years earlier.…
According to research, first published in the British Medical Journal in 1995, by Dr Maurice Greenberg and Professor Roland Littlewood, 50 per cent of people seeking post-adoption counselling “experienced strong sexual feelings in reunions” with their real family.
This can happen between siblings, mother/son and father/daughter and is believed to be the adult response to the absence of “bonding” in childhood.
The natural repulsion brothers and sisters often feel for each other as children is a safeguard against incest and those who miss out on that bonding, according to psychologists, can develop obsessive feelings for their sibling as an adult.
Those feelings may or may not become sexual, but those that do take that course challenge our notion of incest because there is no coercion or abuse between consenting adults.
Do we treat them as perpetrators of a disgusting crime against nature, or victims of hardwired sexual attractions to inappropriate individuals?
Tags: adoption, family, incest, pshychology, research, sexuality, situationism, taboo
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Seth R. said,
February 27, 2008 @ 4:58 pm
If you are going to allow homosexual attraction, you really have no strong basis for opposing this kind of thing either.
February 27, 2008 @ 5:15 pm
Well, with incestuous relationships this close, there’s a good case for the community to forbid having children, but then you open the door to also forbidding couples who are known carriers of genetic disorders. Other than that, a relationship between adults is what we’re talking about.
February 27, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
Dawkins address this subject a bit tangentally in The Selfish Gene. The diff on half-siblings vs full-siblings is quite large from a genetic perspective. So there’s room for a few mistakes here.
But I think your key question is this:
“Do we treat them as perpetrators of a disgusting crime …?”
No.
This and the homosexual question that Seth raised are totally managed on a biological level by nature itself. Our sense of revulsion may be part of that nature but I think we can make temper such feelings with our sense about the rights of consenting adults.
February 27, 2008 @ 8:10 pm
Plenty of other people who are at risk for genetic disorders are allowed to reproduce.
February 28, 2008 @ 1:54 pm
I wonder how we would feel about it if this were a mother and son or a father and daughter couple.
February 28, 2008 @ 3:11 pm
Well, getting past the squick factor which is pretty much purely a function of our cultural norms, the only real concerns are genetic disorders, possible psychological ramifications, and coercive power relationships.
The genetic stuff is a questionable objection. The psych stuff is out of my personal knowledge, but I would imagine it’;s highly tied to the olevel of cultural taboo. And it’s not like we forbid everyone esle’s incredibly dysfunctional relationships.
The power/coercion/abuse dynamic is the only one left, and it would pretty much depend on the individual facts.
Seth R. said,
February 28, 2008 @ 4:29 pm
Well, Mormons believe we’re all related anyway, right?…
February 28, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
Kullervo,
I think like you do on this it seems. The less attention I pay to my squeamishness, the more this appears to be a cultural taboo which may be applied too broadly. That is the details of individual cases are important.
Seth,
It gives new meaning to “sister wife” eh?
February 28, 2008 @ 4:42 pm
Again, I think this comes down to whether we think parents and siblings would start copulating should the social stigmas go away. In general I think not. There are always going to be edge cases but we need not be concerned as nature will regulate against such cases by the compounding of disabling gene complexes — they’ll either die before reaching sexual maturity or be otherwise too freakish to much succeed.