this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2020
0 points (NaN% liked)
Main
15770 readers
17 users here now
THE MAIN RULE: ALL TEXT POSTS MUST CONTAIN "MAIN" OR BE ENTIRELY IMAGES (INLINE OR EMOJI)
(Temporary moratorium on main rule to encourage more posting on main. We reserve the right to arbitrarily enforce it whenever we wish and the right to strike this line and enforce mainposting with zero notification to the users because its funny)
A hexbear.net commainity. Main sure to subscribe to other communities as well. Your feed will become the Lion's Main!
Good comrades mainly sort posts by hot and comments by new!
State-by-state guide on maintaining firearm ownership
Domain guide on mutual aid and foodbank resources
Tips for looking at financials of non-profits (How to donate amainly)
Community-sourced megapost on the main media sources to radicalize libs and chuds with
Main Source for Feminism for Babies
Maintaining OpSec / Data Spring Cleaning guide
Remain up to date on what time is it in Moscow
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
(Hot?) take: consensual sex is consensual sex (minors can't consent ofc). It might be gross to most people, but so is gay sex.
No, fuck that. It isn't just about being gross, it's about the potential for abuse. Parents have power over kids and can groom them to be ok with it once they come of age. Given that the vast majority of people are naturally inclined to find it gross and wrong, the chances that two people in the same family "just happen" to be ok with it are extremely low, and it's much, much more likely that something fucked up is happening and that one of them is the victim of abuse.
Obviously, couples aren't going to be on equal footing power-wise and that's ok - but when you have extreme differences in power, like that of a guard and a prisoner or a parent and child, then it isn't safe to assume that just because someone says they consent means that they really do.
If you're adults and you meet a long-lost sibling you never met and decide to hook up, it's still weird af but I don't have a problem with it on principle. But that's the exception, in most cases it's a matter of abuse.
People are naturally inclined to find it gross and wrong to have sex with anyone they grew up with from a young age, including very close childhood friends but not family members who were largely absent during their childhood (this is very well documented across a range of societies and has analogues in many other species - it's called the Westermarck effect).
So this argument doesn't necessarily apply in all cases. There are broader culture-specific taboos around incest, but they can be pretty weird and arbitrary, e.g. there are societies where it's taboo to have a relationship with a very distant cousin or a sibling-in-law.
I don't really have any strong views about any of this, I just think it's important to be very careful to make sure that your reasoning is sound on this kind of thing, given our long history of banning harmless sexual relationships based on prejudice, then coming up with dubious rationalisations. A lot of the opposition to LGBT rights has been based on claims that LGBT identities are generally rooted in abuse or coercion.
I also wonder how much of an impact anti-incest laws really have on anyone, given that they generally don't seem to be enforced outside situations where there are other crimes going on too.
But it's difficult to come up with specific rules on exactly how much of a power difference is acceptable, and there are plenty of troubling relationships that are universally legal, e.g. all the Donald and Melania-style relationships between rich old businessmen and much younger and poorer women.