THE A TO Z OF SEXUAL HISTORY: INCEST

"I don't know if many of you have French-kissed your mother. God, it is some thing else. We moved on to oral sex, but it took ages for me to get her to let me enter her," says Jersey on the Consensual Incest Chat Forum. Incest has a terrible reputation, but really, is it

that

bad? Yes, having kids with your nearest and dearest will probably result in a baby seeping brains from its asshole, but for a surprisingly large community, screwing your relatives comes as naturally as not screwing them does for the rest of us. MLN from New Mexico says, "There are many of us who are lovers with our sister or daughter. I am a widower and my daughter has replaced my wife as a sex partner. We have a lovely two-and-a-half-year-old daughter." The forum offers friendly advice on how to seduce your dad (wrestling, apparently), or at what age it is appropriate to give your son head. One mother defends her three-year relationship with her son, saying she didn't consider him for sex until he turned 18. Another girl has had sex with all three of her brothers, but they all love each other and are now in non-incestuous happy marriages, so what's the problem? Incestboard.com has over 59,000 registered users accessing the video, photo, and chat content. Perhaps some of these people only fantasize about incest as breaking the ultimate taboo, but others are definitely fucking their way through the family tree. According to the great anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, the incest taboo forms the foundation of civilization by forcing man to find a mate outside of the home. Other people argue it is has a genetic basis, to lower the incidence of congenital defects caused by inbreeding. However, banging your family is so common throughout history it is present in the mythology of almost every culture. King Arthur had a child, Mordred, with his sister Morgause. Egyptian god lovers Osiris and Iris were brother and sister. Greek gods Zeus and his wife Hera were brother and sister, as were their parents, Cronus and Rhea. The most famous mother-fucker is obviously Oedipus; though that turned out badly for everyone concerned. Incest was encouraged in Egyptian royal families to safeguard the royal bloodline. They were gods, and gods don't do it with mortals. Cleopatra VII married two of her younger brothers. Her mother and father, Cleopatra V and Ptolemy XII, had also been brother and sister. The Incas and the Hawaiians also practiced incest in their royal families. In the Roman-Egyptian census, brother-sister marriage accounts for about 20 percent of all listed. Even though it was eventually outlawed, that didn't stop Emperor Caligula having sex with all three of his sisters, Julia Livilla, Drusilla, and Agrippina the Younger--though he was a famous sexual psychopath, so I wouldn't take his behavior as standard. While the incest taboo exists in most communities throughout history, the definition of what constitutes incest constantly changes. In some Amerindian societies in the Arctic, mothers would routinely stroke the penises of their sons, although this was considered non-sexual, like breast-feeding. For hundreds of years, inbreeding was unavoidable in Iceland due to its then tiny and isolated population. In the 10th century, Pope John XII is said to have taken his niece and his mother as mistresses. Despite anthropologists insistence that the incest taboo is fundamental to human nature, clearly people have been at it forever. Freud famously argued that everyone's first sexual desires are directed toward their family, while Melanie Klein considers sexual relations between siblings to be virtually the norm. The real taboo is in mentioning that perhaps it is not a taboo at all. Historian Lloyd DeMause argues that incest is universal. He cites examples throughout the world and refers to the old Indian proverb ("For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers, nor cousins, nor fathers") as an example of how common incest has been. His examples are endless and worldwide: tribes who have sex dormitories where older adolescents initiate younger siblings into sex; households where parents incorporate the children into their sexual activity in one happy family orgy; fathers marrying daughters when the mother dies, and sons marrying mothers when the father dies. While I can't verify every one of DeMause's claims and references, clearly it gets darker than sitting on granddad's knee. The recent case of the German couple, Patrick and Susan, who were separated as children and later met and fell in love, has made headlines. They've been together for nine years and have four children, three of whom are in care. He has served time in prison fighting for his right to love his sister. While my gut reaction is this is monumentally fucked up, why is it illegal? The obvious answer is that it increases the chances of passing down bad genes. But by that logic, everyone with a genetic condition should be outlawed from having sex--which is rude. In fact, the impetus behind the 1908 Punishment of Incest Act was just that--the proponents of the act were the same people who advocated the "sterilisation" of the "feeble-minded". Siblings generally don't fancy each other due to something call the Westernak effect: Being reared together forms non-erotic bonds. But if you're itching for incest, apparently you're not alone. That doesn't mean the rest of us can't be completely grossed out by it though.

CAMERON KING

Still taken from

The Cement Garden

, 1993, (which, among other things, is about doing your sister).