The Unspoken Taboo

When the world hears of gruesome instances where young girls have been raped by their fathers, people are aghast. Incest has always presented itself as representing the moral boundaries no one should cross. Those interested in history may be aware that the famous/infamous Egyptian queen Cleopatra, seductress of Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony, had incestuous relations with her young brother Ptolemy, sharing the Egyptian throne at the time of Roman invasion.

A brilliant tactician, a beautiful woman, she and her epoch saw nothing amiss in incest; among royalty in particular it was fairly commonplace for centuries. The issue that resulted from these alliances were famously genetically impaired, due to a loss of genetic vigour. Among royalty it was considered of lesser majesty to marry down, and who, other than their own family might be sufficiently regal to merit the marriage couch?

Nature, however, has equipped us with the 'yuck factor' in ensuring aversion against incest would be adopted, if for no other reason than to avoid children born of incestuous alliances who would be sickly, presented with genetic anomalies, a corruption of normalcy. Studies conducted by behaviourists reached the conclusion that children growing together in intimate familial or group settings develop an unconscious aversion to sexual intimacy.

Yet here is Romania, an eastern European country that is considering re-writing and 'modernizing' some of its laws, among them that which criminalizes incest. Romania feels it should move closer to what prevails in other European Union countries. And doesn't that sound weird beyond imagining. Yet there are three EU countries who don't prosecute incest, sex between family members, as long as they are consensual. Well, ugh, and bloody damn! Where's their sense of the biological fitness of things?

In France, Spain and Portugal parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters are free from prosecution. And Romania is now considering incest legalization as a matter of 'reform'. To most people the very thought of close relations between relations - of the most intimately sexual kind represents an abhorrent bestiality. How can it conceivably be construed as 'consensual' when a father has sexual relations with his daughter?

It's parental coercion of the most disgustingly egregious quality; a parent trading on a child's trust and loyalty. To reject one's parent is tantamount to rejecting the total emotional investment in the parent-child role, a rejection of love and attachment. A 16th-Century wag penned a poem:

Here lies the daughter
here lies the father
here lies the sister
here lies the brother
here lie husband and wife
two bodies sharing a grave.

There's an informatively observant quote in George B. Schaller's book, "Stones of Silence - Journeys in the Himalaya" from his reminiscences published in 1980 of his trek as a biologist through the Indus mountain range:

At intervals we passed through hamlets where stunted men with scraggly beards and wrinkled faces resembling dessicated turnips watched us pass, and women fled at the sight of us, their brown and black rags flapping like the wings of giant crows. Only a few impressions of those villages remain with me: Biano was the village of apricot blossoms where I walked over a carpet of fallen petals, Chongo was the village of cretins where the deleterious inbreeding of isolated communities was even more obvious than usual, Ashkole was the village of fleas.

Geneticist place the risk of genetically-impaired offspring, where incest produces disablement of one kind or another as high as 50% likelihood. In some parts of the United States relatives several times removed, as for example an uncle and niece, may marry, beyond the reproductive age.

And while France dropped incest from its penal code several hundred years ago, the rights of children born of incest are not well delineated. In the Netherlands which no longer prosecutes incest, children born of those unions have an ambiguous legal status.

Most societies recognize instances of incest as non-conforming to modern traditions, cultural norms, and social acceptability. People recoil at the very thought of such unions. Inbreeding has resulted in truly unfortunate incidents of disabilities, as children inherit genetic codes inimical to nature's promise in the premise of dissimilar genes resulting in greater health and vigour.

Even within small communities where people tend to marry within the community, there have been issues related to dread diseases like Tay-Sachs, for example, running rampant in the births of affected babies even though sibling or father-child incest did not occur. A legal prohibition upheld by the law of the land seems a sensible proposition, if only to maintain genetic vigour.

In most societies, even those where incest is not prosecuted, most people's reaction against incest is instinctive repulsive. The immediate thought one of disgust, and the final condemnation lies in the handing down from family member to family member a series of recessive genes, sealing the sad fate of children born of such unions.

Consensual incest? A misery not sought by many. A grotesque play on 'rights' and 'enablements', but generally speaking a blot on the human conscience, the last frontier of the brutish, the ignorant, the blighted untouchables.