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urborous t1_j0cjx8p wrote

Reply to comment by Solonotix in What’s With HBO’s Grossest Obsession, Incest? by Sisiwakanamaru

Interesting, but I remember opening a Victorian porn novel and it was all incest, really vile stuff. I believe what you're saying (they just throw "step" on cuz nobody cares about the story,) but it's longterm.

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Solonotix t1_j0cp5m3 wrote

Sure, incest has quite the storied history. It's fairly well-documented, especially in places of nobility and cultures of "pure blood". That said, incest has been taboo since humans have had laws, really.

There's a well-known behavior among humans called the mere-exposure effect, whereby you become attracted to people you spend a lot of time with. Generally the first thing that triggers a new romantic relationship is time spent together, and conversely a common trigger for breakup/divorce is lack of quality time together. Now, extrapolate that to family, and you have a problem in which you have a high chance of becoming romantically involved with your progeny, caregiver, or sibling. Luckily, humans have a pheromone/mechanism (not sure exactly, read about it once and I dread the search to find it again) that short-circuits that behavior and generally causes you to view immediate family as non-mating partners. Obviously this isn't perfect either, because there are plenty of stories about familial rape, but it's part of why the practice isn't universal. On the contrary, the occurrence is low enough that we might consider the ones who partake to be aberrations.

As always with humans, it's complicated. There's a mix of primitive, biological urges, as well as societal pressures to keep healthy gene pools flourishing, but it doesn't stop people from being tempted or indulging in behaviors others might seem unsavory.

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Gowantae t1_j0e414u wrote

There is something called the Westermark effect. Adults are not sexually attracted to people with whom they grew up. They don't have to be relatives, so we know it's not purely based on pheromones. Some evidence of this is Taiwanese minor marriages, where pairs that were married as children had higher rates of divorce and infidelity and were less likely to have kids. Also Kibbutz age-mates, where Jewish immigrants lived in communal nurseries, and rarely would children that grew up in close proximity marry each other.

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