Usually, when joe public hears the word ‘incest’ they immediately move to either condemn us as ‘perverts’ or insist that we are ‘sick’ people in need of ‘help’ (and by help they mean psychiatric intervention). Either way, it doesn’t help us, it helps the status quo to persist, and it means that loving couples the world over must live secret and fearful lives.
So, why do people believe we’re ‘sick’? What do they mean by that anyway? Usually, they point towards common knowledge and say things like ‘it’s not normal’ or ‘there has to be some kind of mental illness at work?’ But are the people saying this psychiatrists? Most of the time they’re not, they’re usually random people on the internet repeating the same mantra that has been circulating around society about us, or occasionally it might be a journalist covering a story where incest featured (and often those stories are the ones featuring sexual abuse or pedophilia, but not always, even consenting adults get tarred with the ‘sick and disgusting’ brush).
However, how can we be sick simply for falling in love with someone? It wasn’t so long ago that same-sex relationships were thought of in the same light. 100 years ago, gay people were thought of as ‘sick’ and as being profoundly abnormal, again, simply because of who they fell in love with. They, just like us, were subjected to legal harassment, blackmail and the like. Just because of who they loved.
None of us in our community asked to be consang, with all the complications that brings to our lives. But for better and worse, we are. Right now, consangs face unique struggles, our love is often one that dare not speak it’s name aloud. Yet in reality, we do not differ from other people in all the ways that really matter in life. We fall in love, we spend our lives together, we have families, sometimes we are lucky enough to grow old together, in the shadows, unseen, unsung and uncelebrated.
No, we’re not sick people, we’re normal human beings with normal lives made all the more complicated and anxiety ridden by the burden of secrecy and fear placed upon us. We don’t need ‘help’ either, because there is nothing at all wrong with being a consang. I’m very comfortable with my sexual identity thanks very much, I wouldn’t change it for the world, because it’s a part of me and it’s made me who I am.
Did ‘help’ actually change any other orientation to standard? It didn’t. It hasn’t stopped people from being gay, it hasn’t stopped people from being poly, it hasn’t stopped people from practicing BDSM, and it hasn’t made asexuals into people with a full and active sex life. In short, there is no reason or need to ‘help’ people who are happy with their sexual identity, regardless of which orientation they happen to belong to. And yes, consanguinamory is an orientation, just as normal and just as healthy as any of the above. It does not make us evil, and it does not make us sick.
What we, and all people who belong to non-standard sexual orientations require, is your understanding and your acceptance of us. I realize many regulars reading this might have serious doubts about consangs, but read more from my blog. As a consang, I can give you some insight into how we think and who we are as a minority. We’re NOT what you fear we are. Don’t condemn us before you hear us out… don’t be that person.
Whether you realize it or not, you probably know one of us. We are one in every fifty. We’re everywhere, hiding in the shadows. I’ve seen the pain and suffering that this repression causes people, both in my own life and in the lives of others I care about. It doesn’t have to be like this… the more we are understood and the more people who hold acceptance and understanding in their hearts for us… the sooner things are going to change, as eventually things must. Get to know us, we’re far more normal than you’d ever imagine.
Consanguinamory 
It depends on people. People who are involved in consanguinamory relationships most probably will not change. People who think people who are invovled in consanguinamory relationships need “help” most probably will not change. But this people who think “help” will change are better than those who just hate (sometime this haters become violent).
Communication is the best way to move forward. As long as different schools of thought are talking there is a chance.
Our relatives believed we needed help. Some of them even brought phone numbers of prominent psychiatrists. Our relatives believed we were ill. So they wanted to help. They tried to explain us that we are abnormal and we needed help. As we kept refusing their help they started to condemn us as pervert and other things.
Fortunately, they kept the communication line open. We had conversations. A lot of them. But small conversations. That helped.
We are married. It was NOT a small no guest wedding as we expected. It was an extravagant wedding. It was arranged by our relatives. They did all the work and we just sat their.
We are not blocked or vanished by our relatives. We are invited to all family gatherings and we, too, invite them. It was just as before. They even help us hide that we are consanguinamory married family as it is punishable by law. The worst is the mob justice. We are fortunate that our family is tolerant.
Communication is the key. If they are willing to listen anything is possible. Unfortunately, prejudice, sterotyping, biased opinions are thriving in this world. I also see these are growing more and more around the world as harsh intolerent political views are spreading.
No we do not need help or condemnation. They need us to live as we want. If not, they can just ignore us.
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I agree, those that say we need help aren’t as bad as those who would dole out mob justice. I’m glad your family eventually came to terms with your relationship and decided to accept you, though from the sound of it, it was a long road, as it is for many of us. I think that dissolving a prejudice is often much harder for people than forming one, and yes politics is another good example of that. The block is that people who are prejudiced often believe that their views are completely reasonable and therefore correct. Sometimes people need a reason to take a good hard look. Like, your family took a long time reassessing what they believed to be true about consang relationships, their reasons were because they loved you, and they eventually realized that what the mainstream says didn’t tally up with what they knew of you as a person.
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People hate which is different. When it comes to consanguinamory relationships it is much more complicated. Some people believe it is polluting the divine purity.
There was a time when consanguinamory relationships/marriages were not abnormal. I wonder how it got its bad name. What heppened? Why are people against these relationships? May be normalizing consanguinamory starts from there.
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People who say that incestuous people try to steal the discourse of the LGBT community seem to forget that many are also part of the LGBT community themselves… And they feel the same about being LGBT than being consanguinamorous. How surprising
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Normal people atre disgusted by disgusting things.
Incest is disgusting on so many levels. Even nature abhors it; inbreeding results in a deformation of the genome.
Incest doesn’t need “acceptance” , at the most it needs to be understood so effective intensive psychotherapy can be applied.
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If you find it disgusting, that is a good reason for you to not personally engage in it. However, intolerance of people who want something different from you isn’t a good thing. Not all incest pregnancies result in deformed babies, most don’t in fact. The kind of deformities you’re thinking about are most likely to happen after many generations of inbreeding when no new genes are added. In ancient Egypt it took thirteen successive generations of brothers/sister inbreeding for serious problems to show up. Nature allows for the occasional incest couple without doing anything horrible to the gene pool.
Furthermore, there are many consang couples who cannot hve children, these would be people who are sterile for medical reasons or age (or they have chosen to undergo surgery to become sterile), or they might be a same sex couple.
Psychotherapy never changed anyones sexuality, gay conversion therapy didn’t work, and it is unlikely tht similar techniques would work for consangs either. But, even if there was a possibility of such change, many of us would not want it, because we’re happy as we are thank you. We aren’t hurting anyone, and we do not deserve to be hurt by others.
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I’m wondering about the super common “daddy daughter role play.” A lot of women are into this, although I don’t know how many. In general they declare it has nothing at all to do with actual attraction to their dad, but I’m thinking at some level, it probably does, and they’ve just mostly blocked that out consciously.
Again, just throwing out some ideas here but maybe one reason why incest is such a terrible taboo is because at some point it has probably been fantasized by pretty much everyone (even if they don’t recall, or if it was just a dream).
Is there any possibility that someone could reap therapeutic benefit from not avoiding the incest fantasy, especially if they have, say, “daddy issues”?
I’m aware that actual incest is often a bad idea, since it’s socially unacceptable, and I can see how consciously fantasizing about it could lead to something not desirable, but I just wonder if anyone has any stories of therapeutically fantasizing about something like this, because I know that women do that type of therapeutic fantasy with rape even if they don’t “really” want to be raped.
As for myself, I’m a man who as a teenager definitely fantasized about incest. I’m very glad that I personally did not end up in any incestuous relationship, mainly because on my part it was just hormones that had no outlet.
Once I got into my first real relationship I lost the incest fantasy for the most part, until one particular relationship with a very special woman who engaged with me in a very strong daddy/daughter role play and told me her dad was more or less the sexiest man alive, but she could never admit she actually wanted to have sex with him, and I feel like this caused her a lot of internal strife which then she projected onto me (accusing me of having incestuous fantasies still, among other more bizarre accusations).
One of her fears that came up was that since I enjoyed her role-play, this meant that if we had a daughter, I’d be lusting after our daughter. I told her quite honestly that I’ve never had a daughter and so I can’t answer if there would be a lust issue there or if the Westermarck effect would take hold (which I suspect it would), but if I did have a lust issue around my daughter I would seek therapy (or self-therapy) for that and I wouldn’t let it make anything weird for my daughter in real life. Obviously that answer was not satisfactory for her, but it was honest.
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