Incest is a Social Justice Issue (Updated Version)
[Author’s Note: This is the second version of this article. I have made major changes since the first version, in particular I make and interact with more arguments, but I also made more minor changes throughout to the wording. I think that this is the better version of the article, it reflects what I now believe and know better, but I have kept the original article up as well. For one thing, looking at analytics of the traffic to the first article, it seems there are a number of links to it floating around, so I don’t want to pull the rug out from under anyone by changing the article they have linked to all of a sudden. For another thing, this version is about twice as long as the already pretty long first version. Although I am not as happy with the first version, it is much shorter, so it is understandable if it is still the one many people would prefer to read. The first version of this article can be found here: https://medium.com/rudolf-mandelbaum/incest-is-a-social-justice-issue-9a40f69e9ae5]
It’s time that we as a culture had a serious talk we’ve been avoiding. We need to talk about incest. Incest is at a unique place among issues in our culture, it is both an issue where there seem to be no strong supporting arguments for the general consensus, and one that is so taboo even to talk about, that it couldn’t even be properly called controversial at this point. Whether you are moved by this essay or not, please consider taking this issue more seriously than most people today do. This means examining your position on it thoroughly, and being willing to discuss it as though it is not a settled matter with no effect on people’s lives.
For my part, I intend to demonstrate that sex, romance, and/or marriage between family members, is not only ethically fine when between consenting adults, but that the stigma on it should be viewed as bigoted. I also hope to prove to you why your position on it isn’t trivial. Why this isn’t no big deal, or an abstract intellectual ideal deserving no present real-world advocacy. Why it is in fact a serious social justice concern worth holding a stance on.
Although it has only been a little over two years since I wrote the first version of this article, since then, I have decided that many parts of it need revision. This has been influenced by further readings on my part, interactions with others who care about this issue, and rereading parts of this article that I have noticed the weaknesses of after stepping back for a while. My actual views have not changed very sharply however.
I am less certain about my views on reproduction, as reflected by the much longer and more complicated section on it in this version. I am, however, more certain about most of the other conclusions I have come to. My interactions with others online who have been in or are allies to the types of relationships I discuss have confirmed some of my impressions about what the experience of being in such a relationship is like right now. I also feel more ethically vindicated, as many of the specifics of my views are reflected by others I have run into who have thought about this issue. A liberal, consent-based view of sexual ethics is what leads many people to similar ideas. It is not merely extreme libertarians and libertines who are drawn to this view, as I think the stereotype goes.
However, I want to briefly emphasize here that I am not writing these views on the behalf of anyone but myself. I do not expect everyone I have talked to about this will agree with everything I say here, and my views shouldn’t be taken as a statement of anyone else. I have, however, sought feedback from the online community of people in these relationships and their allies. In some areas where I was on the fence, I have been convinced to make a change.
Perhaps the most noticeable example is that I have decided to mostly use the word “consanguinamory”, which means consensual adult incest specifically (the only type I wish to defend), rather than “incest”. I was somewhat torn on this. I recognize that the word seeks to distance consensual forms of romance between relatives from the strong stigmas that have become attached to the word “incest” because of the bad relationships also lumped in with it. At the same time however, I have worries that this shift might further the stigma on the word incest, which for those who don’t know the word “consanguinamory” is currently all they have, as well as worries that the word may be alienating for those who disagree with me on this issue, which is the group I am primarily targeting with this essay. Still, as I was torn on this matter, and the most common feedback I received was that people would prefer I used the word “consanguinamory”, I will respect these wishes. I have elected to keep the title and some of the beginning however, so that the article is more searchable, and people who don’t know this word can come into this article with some idea of what it is about.
I want to open this series of arguments with some hypotheticals that will, hopefully, make this issue real for people. Ethics, presumably, should provide justifications for how we ought to act in real cases, so let’s try to inhabit one. Maybe you, the reader, will find it too inconceivable or morally foreign to imagine yourself in a relationship with a relative, but what if you encountered one? Let’s say that you found out that a close friend or relative of yours was in a loving relationship with a relative of theirs. What would you say to them to defend the claim that their relationship is wrong and needs to be stopped?
If it is non-consensual in some way, this would give you something to say, but what if it is consanguinamory? Maybe it is too uncomfortable to picture saying anything to them in person, you could say this is unfair of me to confront you with, but what else might you do? In many parts of the world consanguinamory is legal despite strong stigma (including US states like New Jersey and Rhode Island, as well as several whole countries like Japan, France, Spain, Brazil, China, and Russia), but there are many places where it isn’t. In some areas like Alabama, the minimum sentence is life in prison. Could you report them to the police? What would you say, in your head, that would justify this decision? If not through the law, in what way would you consider it acceptable to coerce them?
It is easy to support a law on the books or a social rule in the abstract. When the consequences come up in the real world, something more urgent is required than a strong intuitive aversion or vague cultural knowledge that relationships between relatives are simply unethical. This thought, of what I might do in this type of situation, haunted me for years, which is why I bring it up now as an opening challenge. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I was the villain for doing anything other than supporting this relationship. Helping to hide or defend it if necessary.
There is another powerful way to put yourself inside this relationship. If you are currently in a loving relationship, what would you do if one day an ancestry test came in that revealed that your lover was a close relative? Would you actually stop loving this person? What reason could you tell yourself that would feel good enough to make you believe you couldn’t be together anymore?
Both of these are situations real people find themselves in. Most of us could be in at least one such situation at some point, even if most of us won’t be. Insofar as we have an opinion about relationships between relatives, it should be relative to the existence of these situations, and the real choices requiring real justifications that come with them. Without these real situations existing, the ethics are meaningless. Maybe by the end of this article you will still feel justified in these hypotheticals, have answers that are satisfying and cogent. Even if you remain unconvinced however, I cannot imagine how you could remain comfortable.
First I need to challenge a very appealing cultural value that most people in some way accept, because it determines the way I believe most people actually think about consanguinamory, instead of thinking of it as a legitimate topic for discussion. This value is that certain sexual/romantic practices are just sick, dirty, or creepy. That people with these urges are always predators, and their interests hold a negative value such that anything good that happens to them is bad, and any harm is good. To be clear, any stigma or taboo we perpetuate in the area of sex/romance is going to ruin someone’s life, someone who doesn’t deserve to have their life ruined.
Perhaps you won’t be swayed by the picture of the sympathetic pedophile. Even my use of the phrase “sympathetic pedophile” may turn you against my whole argument. Make no mistake, this example is not meant as a defense of pedophilia, but please hear me out, as I feel understanding where the right justification for criminalizing pedophilia lies and where it does not will be useful for understanding where the difference in consanguinamory truly is. Otherwise, I think many will fear “opening the floodgates” by taking my advocacy seriously. Consider the case of a person who is very, and exclusively, attracted to children beyond their control, but does not engage in sexual or romantic activity with children, because doing so would be wrong. There are undoubtedly many cases of this, though people consider pedophilia, not just as an act, but as an attraction, to be morally depraved. This is an easy way to shirk responsibility for suffering, make someone’s suffering good, so that there is no need to feel guilty for incidentally hurting someone with valid feelings by doing the right thing. But whether it is right or not for them to suffer in this particular case, since in this hypothetical they have done nothing wrong I doubt you could justify saying that they deserve to suffer. Unlike pedophilic acts, pedophilic urges aren’t a crime. They are a tragedy.
Let’s migrate the thought experiment somewhere most people are less likely to hold resistance, so that you see what I’m getting at, one-sided feelings of attraction. Take the example of someone, yourself if it helps, who is hopelessly in love with someone who doesn’t return your feelings. You feel your suffering is genuine. Perhaps you are so deeply and exclusively in love with this person that not being in a relationship with them would even ruin your life in a sense. Or maybe it’s not just one person, but every person you fall in love with who rejects you. You would probably feel that you don’t deserve to have your life ruined, but that on the other hand, because acting on your attraction by stalking or raping your love would be worse, it is still important that you not act on your feelings (since writing this in the first version of this article I have encountered the case of “incels” which makes this particular example all the more potent. Incels after all are not bad because they have unreturned desires and feelings of attraction, nor even is any suffering unreturned love causes deserved merely because acting on it would be wrong. Incels are bad because unlike most people in this type of situation, they use this to justify an ideology that claims they are entitled to relationships).
These are examples of cases where a cultural norm about sex and romance is justified, but where someone’s life will still be undeservedly ruined. A social taboo cannot justify itself by calling a feeling perverted, or deny that it involves some genuine harms, it must justify itself by preventing something sufficiently bad to justify its use, for example if, as in the case of pedophilia and rape, its fulfillment will most likely ruin someone else’s life. This wrongness is usually measured through the idea of “intelligent consent”, if both members are competent to intelligently self-represent in choosing relationships, there is a presumption that this relationship should be trusted, and not trusting it is paternalism. You need a different measure to justify the taboo against relationships between relatives however, as this does not inherently relate to “intelligent consent” at all.
This argument that “sickness” is an empty, arbitrary measure for the morality of an act, is of course in a big way the central motive behind the popular “love is love” slogan used by many LGBTQIA+ activists. To challenge people who oppose equal treatment for same-sex relationships just because they consider them perverted. The slogan implies that if that person’s love is special and important, they are unjustified in assuming any other type of love is less pure. This does not guide policy on its own of course, look back at the one-sided love case. That love is no less pure than returned love by most standards, since its essential difference is not on the inside of the one with the feeling, but because of some state of the world outside of this feeling, namely the other person’s feelings. Despite that feeling’s purity, it still must remain unacted on.
The idea of this assumed purity does, however, require that you give love the benefit of the doubt. That otherizing certain attraction isn’t valid as an ethical argument, and barring valid ethical arguments, the significant damage you can do with this otherization is amoral. You have no right, then, to assume that your romantic love is any different from that someone might feel towards, for example a sibling or parent or son/daughter (I bring up these cases immediately to dispel the idea that this article is only meant to defend consanguinamory among the extended family, you may feel that the extended family is a different story even if you can’t bring yourself to agree with my points for the immediate family, but for my part I am defending consanguinamory as close as you can come in a family). You must feel the weight of people’s deep and legitimate feelings in your hands when you try to justify any taboo of this sort.
So, if the “argument” that relationships between relatives is a dirty, sick form of attraction doesn’t hold up, then what about other ethical considerations? Are there good enough ethical arguments to despise and criminalize relationships between family members? There are of course forms of relationships between family members that are unethical. Underage incest, incestuous rape, both are things that people tangle up in their minds with all incest, which is the key reason so many people now prefer the word consanguinamory for relationships specifically between consenting adults. This association is not an argument either. These cases do not condemn relationships between family members in particular, since rape and underage sex are unethical even if the incestuous component is removed, and consanguinamory can and does occur between consenting adults. This cultural entanglement, by the way, is something consanguinamory shares with the general view of homosexuality not long ago, and many homophobes today, the automatic association of homosexuality with pedophilia and rape, so you should doubt that there is anything compelling or inevitable about this mental entanglement in the case of relationships between relatives. Still, these two instances are appealing as arguments because of the idea that a taboo tends to be justified if it combats something that ruins people’s lives, even as the taboo also inevitably, and tragically, ruins other lives.
Incestuous pedophilia and rape are certainly likely to ruin lives, usually more than non-incestuous practices of the same kind, mostly because of the fact that they are likely to come from someone you trust and have a special type of formative bond with, but also certainly in part because of the taboo itself. The presence of this additional life ruining factor that comes from the stigma itself, could in fact be viewed as an argument against the stigma. Many people will be all the more hurt by these unethical acts because of how dirty and twisted they are taught sex between relatives is, on top of the trust violation that remains the core factor. If the taboo against relationships between family members is not justified in the general, consensual case, and its existence harms the victims of incestuous pedophilia and rape by adding extra baggage on top of what traumatizing elements are already there, then associating relationships between family members in general with its worst cases should be seen as seriously problematic. If these worst cases are considered bad enough for special treatment, they should be prosecuted more harshly, consensual relationships that share a single superficial feature with them do not deserve to share this punishment.
The next argument people often latch onto if they can dig past their impression of consanguinamory as wrong, perverted love, as well as their entanglement of it with truly unethical forms of sex, is genetics. People say that consanguinamory is wrong because consanguineous reproduction leads to babies with terrible disorders, so we have evolved to shun it. I’ll briefly argue against the end part of this claim. The assumption it seems built on is that natural selection or nature are good justifications for morality. This is a historically dangerous argument, one that has been used to justify everything from homophobia to racism, but furthermore, it doesn’t hold up at all.
Nature is a descriptive concept, however we anthropomorphize it. If anything happens, arguably, it was a natural occurrence, any separation of “nature” from this relies on assumed values we must take personal responsibility for. Other definitions use those specific aspects of physical inevitability we already privilege for some reason, and so whose reasonability can be debated. We own ethics. We don’t get to pass it off to mother nature because it’s more comfortable than examining what it is that we have actually decided about it, or more importantly perhaps, what we are free to decide instead. In fact if we say that naturalness makes no difference, then the idea that our revulsion to consanguinamory is naturally selected for should make us more skeptical of the taboo, because we know of a likely source of bias in our judgements.
Without the nature component, the rest of the argument relies on the assumption that, independently of how we may have evolved to avoid reproducing with family members, the genetic problems consanguinamory can lead to are a good ethical reason to choose to condemn it. First of all, this only even remotely applies to couples who can conceive a child together. It has essentially no bearing, for example, on same-sex consanguinamory. Putting that aside though, even if you consider consanguineous reproduction to be unethical, it doesn’t follow that consanguinamorous romance, sex, and marriage are unethical.
Consider, for example, someone carrying the gene for a terrible genetic disorder, one well beyond the usual risks of consanguinamory, we’ll take the extreme example of Tay-Sachs disease (a genetic disorder that usually causes one to die in early childhood after a long period of painful mental and physical deterioration). Maybe you would argue that someone with this gene shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce with someone else carrying this gene, if you would argue that about consanguinamory it would be a striking double-standard for you not to, but would you stop people with this gene from ever entering into romantic relationships? From having sex and marrying? Maybe you would, I doubt it though. The idea that genetic risk makes a relationship inherently “sick” seems to only ever be applied to consanguinamory. It is a double standard.
Even if you think that the risk of consanguineous reproduction makes it fair to not only restrict consanguineous reproduction, but to also restrict consanguinamorous romance among fertile couples to be safe, there is always the possibility of offering the choice to become an infertile couple instead. Consanguinamorous couples could be given the choice of one or both of them being sterilized if they wish to legally be together. This choice seems like it would be better for the couple, give them at least the option to be together if they are willing to go through with this. Normally we allow people to choose to undergo sterilizing surgery with no required explanation, and it is not even necessarily a choice that would prevent them from ever being able to reproduce again if they change their minds. They could store sperm and/or eggs for this possibility. So why forbid this loophole?
To many this will seem like a dystopian policy, but since it offers a choice for this couple’s love, it is less dystopian than outright illegalizing consanguinamory, is indeed less dystopian than the world we live in, and the world most people continue to advocate today. If this policy change seems wrong to you, the current policy should as well. There is no real way around the eugenic/dystopian implications of these reproduction-based restrictions on relationships, so it seems like they are bad justifications for preventing consanguinamory.
So what if we just illegalize consanguineous reproduction? This is a more complicated issue, one which you may not agree with me on, and I have changed my own mind on in significant ways already. I think everyone should retain a good deal of uncertainty on this issue, but if you end up disagreeing with me that consanguineous reproduction is fine, it shouldn’t affect the rest of my arguments on consanguinamory more generally. Although this is one of the longest parts of my article, this is because I think it is a complicated issue and I have become very dissatisfied with how I addressed it in my original article, not because it is the part of this issue that I think matters the most. What follows will be fairly philosophically dense and abstract at times, but I have still left worthwhile considerations out. The premises leading to the political conclusion seem more intuitive and easier to agree on than those leading to the moral one, so I will focus on what you need to agree with in my argument to agree that, at least, reproduction between blood relatives shouldn’t be illegal. If you are convinced of the premises I give, you can feel free to skip the rest of this section, and move on to the family structures arguments.
The specific form of the argument can be summarized as follows. The law should not interfere in reproductive choices where the expected outcome is at least as good as not reproducing, bringing into existence a being with a life worth living is at least as good as not bringing anyone into existence, and the lives of children of consanguineous reproduction are, in expectation, worth living. The more moderate case can be summarized as follows. The issue of consanguineous reproduction is complex and it is not clear whether a law would be good or bad, in areas where there is a great deal of uncertainty as to whether a law will be good or bad, it is better, all else being equal, not to have a law.
So, should we agree that the law should not interfere in reproduction where the expected outcome is at least as good as no reproduction? There are a couple ways to deny this, none of them very palatable. You could say that reproduction is not guaranteed protection unless it is better than not reproducing by a certain amount, but that not reproducing should still be allowed. This seems bizarre, almost rigged to me, but a legalistic argument could be made that the law should only prevent people from doing things, it shouldn’t compel people to do things, so although it has a right to say that reproduction should be held to a high standard as a positive choice, someone cannot be compelled to reproduce in the first place. This principle seems silly to me at this extreme, it seems to justify preventing an act for being only a bit good while not preventing a comparable inaction that is a bit bad. You must lean heavily on the legal distinction between prevention and compulsion while accepting a standard of morality that views an act that is only so good as condemnable because it is an implicit omission of an even better act. I am not saying that a principle of legal prevention versus compulsion like this should be seen as irrelevant. If I had time, I might say more possible defenses of a principle like this, but at the very least, it seems like in this extreme application it would not make sense as the default view.
You could also bite the bullet and deny this principle by saying that, not only should we police reproduction that is no better than not reproducing, but we can force people to reproduce as well. This is a highly repugnant view in my opinion, I think many will agree with me, but unlike the previously stated view, it does surprisingly little to deny the claim that reproduction at least as good as nothing should be allowed. After all, having a child in the legally required way and having no additional child is always no better than having a child better than nothing in addition to this other child. If we imagine a dystopian world in which an infertile couple is forced to have children outside of their relationship, and a consanguinamorous couple is forced to have a child outside of their relationship, and in addition has a child whose birth is no worse than having no child, what can be said to condemn the latter couple?
A final way to deny my premise is to focus on the “expected goodness”. Expected goodness weights how good each possible resulting life would be by its probability of being the one born. Maybe we could say that a certainty of having a child with a good enough life is not the same as an expected certainty of the same, because the latter case risks producing a child in a way that would be worse than not reproducing. Since such a chance exists for any reproduction, this argument, like the previous one, gives you a hard to stomach implication. That reproduction should always be policed, possibly prevented entirely. Unlike the previous argument however, it is an answer that, if accepted, would imply that consanguineous reproduction should be prevented.
On to the next premise, that if a child’s life is worth living, it is at least as good to bring it into existence as to not reproduce. This may sound simple, in the original version of this article I think I treated this idea far too simply, but it runs the issue into the ethics of choices that involve changing who comes into existence. This topic, usually called “population ethics”, may be one of the most difficult in contemporary philosophy, and none of the answers proposed so far are very palatable. The three classic views I have the most familiarity with are “total” (total up how good the lives are in a possible scenario), “average” (how good are the lives on average), and “person-affecting” (something like what I defended in the first version of this article, basically that a world is better than another world only insofar as there is someone who exists in both possible scenarios it is better for). The philosopher Derek Parfit summed up some of the worst implications of each view in his book Reasons and Persons, and they are pretty ugly.
Total indicates the “repugnant conclusion”. That a world in which all lives are barely worth living can be better than an extremely rich, pleasant world, if there are enough of these barely worth living lives. In defense of this, the total view could say that the lives not being lived in the rich world are worse than if they were barely worth living (which after all still means worth living), and there are many such people who would now have a chance to, in this sense, be better off.
Person-affecting has the problem of being essentially impractical. Parfit points out with the “non-identity problem” that different people would exist in the future if different parents were to get together, in fact even a different sperm or egg would produce different people. At the extreme, even the same sperm and egg doesn’t give a good enough common attribute, after all, if a zygote splits into identical twins in one future and stays in one piece in another, which twin exists to benefit or be harmed by this other possible future? Given the non-identity problem, even minor differences in policies concerning the future quickly ripple out and change the identities of everyone living after a certain point. The person-affecting view would have to say that nearly any policy about the future is equally good, because those affected by it will inevitably also be different people. Still, person-affecting, like total, can give some reason, by citing the fact that if you asked the future if some policy in the past should be changed, they probably would say no even if it seems disastrous, because they wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the chosen policy.
What about average though? Parfit spends less time here, but the key thought experiment he presents is “how only France survives”. Imagine a world in which everyone lives great lives for millennia, and then imagine another scenario that starts with the same world, except that an epidemic sterilizes everyone except those in the best-off country, France. France survives, but no other country, and the French are a bit more unhappy because of this. Average would prefer this latter world, even though clearly no one is better off in it, and some are worse off. Unlike total and person-affecting, it is hard to see the defense here. Average not only leads to horrible conclusions, unlike the other views, the only reason it seems that it can give is “the average is higher”. I don’t know of any major figures in the history of population ethics, nor any contemporary philosophers, who have endorsed the average view. Insofar as any of these classic solutions has been discredited, it is the average view.
Of these three classic views of population ethics, both total and person-affecting agree than bringing into existence a life worth living is, all else being equal, no worse than not reproducing. The only one that opposes this is the least popular of the three. Having uncertainty in the area of population ethics is very reasonable, but if an answer is needed, this one seems like the best assumption currently available.
Next we come to the two most empirically sensitive parts of my argument. First of all, given that all else may not be equal, is there a sufficient cost to others in the birth of a child of blood relatives to prohibit it, and, second of all, is the expected quality of life for a child of blood relatives worth living? For the most part, I will withhold full judgement on these questions, as the research I have done has yielded uncertain results, and I think most of the research we can work off of right now is similarly uncertain (I was also limited by paywalls, and so I made a one-time investment and relied on a paper examining information from several prior studies rather than reading through the specific studies). Both depend to a certain extent on the rate of birth defects, I will go off of the estimates I have found for the closest relatives.
Going off of Table IV of “Genetic Counseling and Screening of Consanguineous Couples and Their Offspring: Recommendations of the National Society of Genetic Counselors” by Bennett et al. a collection of previous relevant studies on “first degree incest” finds a little more than half of offspring have some birth disorder, with 46% being judged as “normal”, and the remaining 54% having some sort of disorder. The paper discounts this number to about 39.4% for severe problems by excluding “minor intellectual impairments”, which is only an increase of 31.4 percentage points (hereafter pp) over the disorder rate in the control case, and then qualifies the finding further by saying that the studies don’t control for sampling bias based on things like failed abortion attempts and young mothers. A conservative estimate then might say that this compilation of studies places the increase in severe birth disorder risk due to “first degree incest” at around 30 pp over non-consanguineous reproduction.
“Jane Doe” from the consanguinamory community conducted her own research on this more recently (2018 versus 2002), and with a slightly bigger sample size (226 versus 213), summarized in the post “The Consanguinamory Reproduction Study…The results are in!”. This study included non-first degree relatives, but only three.
The results here suggest that the likelihood of birth defects is far more exaggerated, estimating about a 12.4% overall risk of birth disorder, a 6.2% risk of severe disorder, and a 1.8 pp increase in risk of severe disorder due to the blood relation. It is immediately noticeable that the two studies don’t seem to have the same baseline risks for non-consanguineous reproduction. Given the different samples and small sample sizes of each analysis, it seems like there is a good deal of variation. Still, while some of the sampling bias of Bennett et al. doesn’t exist in Doe’s study, additional bias may be argued since the study was sampled from couples who want to be allowed to be together and may have been more eager to participate if they had good news than bad news. In fact, the post admits towards the beginning that some answers had to be eliminated for being logically impossible. Still, as I have said, it eliminates some of the sampling biases of Bennett et al., so it seems to present a further reason to expect the actual figure for increased risk may be lower than 30 pp, possibly quite a bit.
Given these figures, it seems like a very high degree of uncertainty is warranted, especially given the problems studying this question, and the results may depend a great deal on variable factors like family history. As Bennett et al. indicates, a review of one’s specific circumstances will impact risk a great deal, for instance the risk will likely be significantly higher than this for a couple in which at least one member was already born to blood relatives, and there is an additional risk factor such as a mother over 40. Still, it is worth keeping these figures in mind as a start. I will try to say a few more things philosophically on the subject of how we should think about the remaining issues, but a good deal of the issue may rest on difficult empirical questions which currently have no strong answers, and could vary a great deal between cases.
If close blood relatives decide to conceive a child, is the cost to society high enough to be worth restricting? I will put aside questions about overpopulation itself for this, as these questions presumably apply to reproduction far more generally. It may be said that children with an increased risk of disability may be a burden to the welfare system, because once such a child comes into existence, it would be a great injustice not to provide them with the needed health and disability services, so prevention of these costs should be on the level of reproduction itself. On most person-affecting views, this would be an effective argument on its own. On the total view, the addition of a life worth living to the world is a good in itself that could be weighed against this.
Still, it is worth considering the rights of the parents in this as well. After all, there is controversy over minor consumer decisions like limiting soda sizes, and those who believe they have a right to however big a soda someone will sell them are rarely thought of as perverted or horribly criminal. Comparing risks here is hard, the medical burden of someone who regularly drinks large amounts of sugary soda may be fairly high, and the risk of severe disability from inbreeding seems to normally be under 50% even among first degree relatives, but it still seems that the risk from inbreeding to costs in the healthcare system may be a good deal higher (This is on a per-person basis, since rights are usually thought of on the per-person basis. On a per-decision basis there is of course no competition, but if we look at the overall impact of each policy on the whole of society, it is likely the balance shifts in the other direction because of how many more times and how many more people will choose to drink large sugary sodas than to have a child with a blood relative).
Where the comparison differs most strongly is the nature of the rights involved. While people who want to buy however much soda a company will sell them may feel somewhat indignant at what they see as violation of a consumer liberty, the right to choose to start a family with someone you love who returns your feelings seems far deeper, a much bigger part of our ability to build our best lives together with loved ones. The right to have a child with someone isn’t quite the same as the right to love someone or to be with someone, but it is hard to see it as a petty right to trample for reasons many would object to you trampling someone’s right to relate how they want to with a fast food joint.
It might be objected that the healthcare system can absorb a few cases of “inbreeding depression” without too much issue, but if something like this is legalized, there’s no limit to what could happen. This is not enough of an objection given an appreciation of the legal rights I am highlighting. If you deny rights to only a couple people to protect from some great social ill, perhaps you can defend your decision, but if your concern is a society full of people exercising this right, then it is even more dire to restrict it. Mitigating a large scale risk, in this case, will always mean restricting a proportionally large scale desire to exercise this right.
Finally, onto the subject of whether the child’s life, in expectation, would be worth living. I highlighted in the previous version of this article that even those who live very difficult lives seem to ultimately be glad they had the chance to live them. This deferral to preference makes sense normally, judging someone’s life to not be worth living when they are alive to judge for themselves is both foolish and dangerous. This is not the type of decision faced in the case of birth decisions however. It is understandable that, when someone may never exist to contradict or be oppressed by your opinion, alternatives to this metric are more appealing. Maybe there are people alive who think that their lives are worth living by at least a small margin, but only because they are affected by their strong fear of death and investment in existing projects and relationships. Someone who is never born will never fear death or develop such attachments, so it may be that we should assume that fewer lives are worth bringing into existence than would prefer to exist once they do exist. In the context of who should be born, it seems quality of life can be judged differently from in the context of an existing life.
This is troubling, and I’m not sure what to do with this objection. I have even heard arguments along these lines that most lives may not be worth being born into. I will assume most of my readers do not believe something like this. That you will agree to the assumption that if people prefer to have been born more often than it was actually good for them, this should move the needle on these decisions only a little unless there are additional reasons to doubt their understanding of the situation. I will say, for example, that those children of blood relatives who come into existence without severe disability, constituting what Bennett et al. estimates is over 50% of these cases, have lives that are worth living, as we may assume most of us do. Furthermore, I think we should assume that those classified as having “severe” birth defects will be more of a mix. The “congenital malformations/SIDS” column perhaps includes many lives not worth being born into, as they could lead to short lives full of pain. Those in the “nonspecific severe intellectual impairment” column perhaps would be more likely to be worth living, as they would be less likely to involve direct pain.
Given this, it seems to me like the overall expected value, even in first degree cases, is probably that life was worth being born into. Maybe this is not convincing if you are a bit more risk averse than pure expected value, but it is also worth remembering that much lower estimates for the risk rate, like those from the Doe study, exist as well. Our intuitions about acceptable risk should also be examined, and I think doubted. In the first place, as I have seen many in the consanguinamory community notice, many other risky forms of reproduction are at least legally tolerated, such as the aforementioned case of a mother over 40. In addition, I believe our intuitions about risk are heavily related to some “baseline” risk. If all reproduction in our area was as risky as that between first degree relatives (and looking at the infant mortality rates in some parts of the world at some points in history, this is not at all a far-fetched scenario), I think many people would find reproduction in general more morally suspect, but most would still consider it acceptable. Likewise, if the baseline risk becomes much lower at some point, say 0.01%, reproduction with the risk of our current average would probably be viewed by most as highly morally suspect. As I hope I have demonstrated however, most plausible theories say that the ethics of reproduction must be viewed based on a particular birth in itself or based on the harm to others, not merely relative to other births (the main reason I preferred using percentage point increases over percent increases). If we accept this, we should no longer consider these intuitions reliable.
Now that I have made the specific political argument, I will briefly make the more moderate political case I alluded to before. I hope these previous arguments, even if they don’t fully convince you, will convince you at least that the case of whether consanguineous reproduction should be allowed or not is a close call. Therefore, if it is legally better to not implement a law if the case for each side of the issue is pretty even, then there aren’t sufficient grounds to illegalize reproduction between blood relatives. While I don’t think this premise, that precaution should usually work against a law rather than in favor of it, is controversial, I will briefly point out a couple good reasons for it.
The easiest way to come to this conclusion is to say that it is worse to wrongly punish someone who is innocent than it is to fail to punish someone who is guilty, so if there is equal chance that you are punishing someone wrongly as rightly, you should refrain from punishment. I think most would agree that if a criminal is in hiding, publicly punishing their innocent spouse is not an acceptable way to punish this criminal even if it is the only way available. Punishing the innocent to incidentally punish the guilty is worse than punishing neither.
A more politically complex reason is that unnecessary laws give more discretionary power to law enforcement. The more laws there are, the more likely it is that any given person has broken some law. Realistically this doesn’t just mean the more likely a given person is to be punished, but it means the easier it is for someone to be punished or threatened by enforcement selectively for reasons other than the broken law. Too many unnecessary laws can erode the rule of law, and make the legal system more prone to abuse by authorities. Of course, specific laws like the one I am opposing here have different specific risks, but the picture the specifics paint isn’t much less sinister. Given the history of eugenics programs restricting reproductive choices, particularly concerning who is allowed to reproduce and with whom, it seems to me we should be especially careful about awarding powers of this sort to governments unnecessarily.
Finally, it is worth qualifying the relevance of this issue. The risk of having a child with a birth disorder will certainly be very impactful on the parents. It is easy to imagine that many blood related family members who hope to start a family together will prefer adoption, or partial surrogacy, in which a child is only the biological offspring of one of the parents. In fact, this provides both a positive and negative incentive. The more closely related a couple is, the more risky reproduction will be, the less that couple may want to reproduce directly, but at the same time, the closer a relative any offspring of either one will be to the other. Partial surrogacy becomes more appealing the more risky reproduction is.
In addition, as I have said, genetic counseling can be very informative about the case-specific risk, and is the key recommendation of Bennett et al. It may be that many couples who would like to make the choice of whether to reproduce or not based on the risk are unable to find out about this risk right now for fear of legal and social penalties. Perhaps some consanguinamorous couples will be entirely dissuaded from having a child if they can’t be screened, but many others will likely accept the risk. Making it harder for couples to be comfortable getting screening of this sort may prevent some lower risk consanguineous reproduction, while leading to a good deal of higher risk reproduction.
After that comes the next most common group of arguments against consanguinamory, family structure. The idea that the structures of families are incompatible with consanguinamory. To begin with, if you accept this as the key argument, you can’t use it against consanguinamory between family members who aren’t part of the same family structures. Long lost relatives of some sort or another, for example, aren’t touched at all.
This isn’t enough of a reason in itself to dismiss family-structure arguments for all cases of consanguinamory, but ask yourself this for a moment, to understand your own prejudices. Do you think it is ok for long lost brothers to share a bed? To become boyfriends and eventually perhaps husbands? This eliminates both major concerns, reproduction and family structure, so if it still feels wrong to you, it may be worth considering whether your attachment to the consanguinamory taboo is truly motivated by arguments of this kind at all, sound or not, or whether you are merely prejudiced and should more closely examine your position because it is supported by this bias.
But back to the issue of family structures. One charge against consanguinamory is that it’s somehow antisocial or creepy to enter a romantic relationship with someone you’ve known that intimately for that long. There’s a powerful double standard here though, since if you knew someone very intimately for a long time who wasn’t part of your family, say your middle school sweetheart, or a neighbor who you went on playdates with, it would generally be considered cute and romantic. At the very least I doubt people would call it creepy. If the family component was removed, the closeness element would be thought of very differently, so it clearly isn’t the essential reason separating consanguinamory from any other romantic conduct.
Another common line of argument you see used against consanguinamory is that family bonds are supposed to be eternal and infallible, while romantic bonds are supposed to be less dependable. More likely to break over conflict, or even just degrade for no obvious reason, after which seeing each other will be deeply awkward. This is a fundamental flaw in our concept of family structures in general, that they are eternal in a way no other relationship is. It’s a useful flaw, no doubt, a deeply comforting and supportive one, but one that digs its way into nearly everything relating to family life, certainly nothing unique to romance.
Have you ever had a family member whose political ideals were abhorrent to you for example? Whose personality was just unpleasant, so that it was uncomfortable to see them? What about family members who start businesses together, surely that’s another instance of a degradable bond that leaves awkwardness in its wake. How about friendship. You can deny it all you want, but nearly everyone has entered into and left friendships with family members, a kinship and mutual connection that was more than just the ambient family love you feel for other family members, friendship is another more degradable and awkward bond.
If you continue to insist that romance is so different from every other weird thing families go through because life doesn’t stop for the purported sanctity of these bonds, even then, I don’t think there’s very much ethical reason why, after the age of consent, two family members couldn’t just decide to cut it off entirely between each other. They’d have mutual family members still, making the split imperfect, but most people have mutual connections with lovers that make break ups messy and uncomfortable. Once again, life goes on.
This type of split doesn’t sound too essentially different from divorce either. You promise to be eternally loving, you legally enter the same family, and bond in distinctly familial ways, come to love your in-laws as though they were your own family as they in turn love you, and then break it off. It’s tragic, but is it reason for preventing either marriage or divorce between consenting adults? Because it can lead to misery or complication when it’s ended?
You can say it’s flawed, even uniquely so, such that you wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re not the one taking that leap, making that dangerous but potentially rewarding investment in love with the intelligent consent of someone else willing to take the risk, can you justify the vicious taboo you reinforce against it? Can you imagine, for example, if the same stigma was applied to long-distance relationships that’s applied to relationships between family members? If for the small crime of doing something for love some people would advise against as romantically risky, you were thought of as a horrible pervert?
The “family structures” line of argument also fails to recognize that stigmatizing the fulfillment of consanguinamorous feelings doesn’t make these feelings go away. Leaving a relationship with someone is awkward, but so is spending time with someone you are attracted to, particularly if the feelings are mutual, while feeling that you aren’t allowed to be in a relationship and that you have to repress your feelings. If you feel consanguinamorous attraction, there was always going to be discomfort in the conventional family. Either it will be uncomfortable to be around each other whenever you spend time together, or you will have to avoid seeing each other. Both of these are classic ways you might act after a break-up, reactions people use as an argument against consanguinamory. The difference is you will also lose the chance for positive fulfillment of these feelings, and will be made to feel deep shame for having them on top of it, if consanguinamory is taboo. You can’t remove the presence of these feelings, even if you think removing these urges would be more convenient. All you can do is either criminalize their existence, or allow the best to be made of an inherently difficult situation. Either through possible fulfillment if the feelings are mutual, or simply through lack of shame in an otherwise unchanged situation if they are not.
Try for a moment of empathy here, imagine yourself if you did feel strong attraction to a family member, or were engaged in a forbidden romance with one, and think about our culture as it stands now. Imagine the constant fear and shame, imagine the self-repulsion, the nauseating isolation, think of if you would feel safe going out in public with your lover. In other words, go back to the life ruined I have mentioned earlier, and actually, in your mind, ruin it yourself to see what I mean. And this oppression is in law as well, in some places the legal penalties can be worse than those for rape. As I write this there are people sitting in prison for being in a mutually loving relationship with the wrong person. Is it really fair to make all this happen, create this much misery and loneliness for someone, just because you think it’s a romantic practice that has risks and flaws worth considering?
In the original version of this essay, I left the family structure discussion with the most general arguments. The problems people often have with all consanguinamory within family structures. Someone raised the point to me that some of the arguments concerning parent and offspring relationships are different from those concerning other types of relationships between family members, including those between siblings. An initial reaction of mine was that this seems to draw, to some degree, on the confusion between consanguinamory and incestuous pedophilia/rape. After all, just as it seems likely to me that a bad relationship of this sort between family members may be even more damaging than one between strangers, it is also plausible to me that among the most damaging forms of these bad relationships would be the sort between parent and offspring. If this is all that is driving the special discomfort people have with this case, the same argument, that consensual relationships of this kind should not be judged based on non-consensual relationships of this kind, would still apply. On reflection, I don’t think that this is all that is at play here, there are some unique arguments in this area that deserve to be met.
In the first place, even after the age of 18, relationships with a parent may involve some power dynamic that problematizes consent. The existence of some power differential doesn’t establish a sufficiently bad power dynamic to problematize consent on its own. As consanguinamory ally Keith Pullman for instance has pointed out in his list of “Discredited, Invalid Arguments”, consensual relationships in which one member is much richer or more physically strong than another are usually tolerated without question. Still, there are some power dynamics that are not merely about difference, but are a deeper part of the relationship between people, and I think these can often be reason for concern even among adults. The stand-out example is boss/employee, though professor/student raises similar concerns.
Because financial dependence on a parent is common for a little while after one turns 18, especially with the greater popularity of expensive higher education, a relationship similar to the boss/employee relationship might exist for some time between parent and offspring even after the offspring is a legal adult. It seems worth adding that this type of problem may be even more serious than that between boss and employee. The parent has near-total legal control over their child before they turn 18, and could therefore ensure that a power dynamic of this sort would exist after they turn 18, whereas a boss will have a harder time manipulating a potential employee’s independence before they are employed. This provides a reason for preventing certain types of relationships between parent and offspring, even as legal adults, but not a reason entirely unique to family members, or one that applies to relationships between adult parents and offspring in general, but only to those relationships where a dependency of this sort still exists.
Other arguments in this area go too far in my opinion, making the case that the parent/offspring family dynamic problematizes a relationship beyond repair even when both are financially independent adults. The objection here appeals to some sort of “grooming” problem. That the parent could emotionally manipulate a child from a formative age, so that the offspring could never be trusted to rationally, independently consent. I don’t doubt something like this may occur, or that grooming is a repulsive form of emotional abuse. I am less convinced that it is something we should consider sufficient to prevent someone who is a trusted self-representative by all usual measures, who is a financially independent adult, from choosing to enter an apparently fully consensual relationship with a parent.
It is true that parents have an unusual amount of control over their child’s future, and in cases like grooming, this is bad enough to warrant serious legal action. Likewise the problem might be raised that even if grooming is illegal, parents could get away with it. Many forms of abuse of children are possible even if they are illegal, including sexually abusing someone while they are a child. It is true that grooming may not be easy to see in all cases, and so it is hard to prosecute as it happens, however, as I have said, the same is true of nearly any form of abuse of children by parents, emotional, physical, and/or sexual. This is very worrying, a good reason to make abuse of this sort punished more harshly, as well as to avoid situations where it is especially easy to hide, such as a child being kept insulated from other authority figures as they grow up. Agreeing that grooming of this sort is worth preventing and that some people might get away with it does not present a unique situation, but a difficult class of issues concerning child abuse in general. Prevention of grooming should not occur in a way that incidentally harms the innocent, but through greater penalties, and fewer opportunities for action, for the guilty.
All of these sorts of family structure arguments also assume that the way family life works and is thought about is fixed, or currently ideal. We should be open to the possibility that things would seem very different if families accepted the possibility of these relationships coming about, and felt more prepared. We don’t know what a family open to the possibility of consanguinamory would be like, and are biased fundamentally in making value judgements about the role of consanguinamory in a world that accepts it. I can’t assume it would solve or even lessen some of the issues that could make these relationships awkward or risky to enter into, although I am almost certain these associated issues would not seem so big or compelling. Still, it’s wrong to dismiss the possibility of cultural evolution that better accommodates consanguinamory, especially in light of how much our cultural ideals about family have changed over the course of history already in light of new social developments, from the empowerment of women to the acceptance of homosexuality.
Then you may argue that, yes, maybe consanguinamory would be fine in a different culture, but this isn’t that different culture. Right now the strong taboo against consanguinamory makes these relationships very damaging, isolating, and harmful. Essentially, consanguinamory is bad because the taboo against it makes it so harmful that it is wrong to engage in. Although this reasoning seems paternalistic, and the goodness of love and harm of repression can’t be ignored, maybe you could argue it is true on an individual basis or in the short term, but for the long term we must move away from this taboo. We can’t let it self-perpetuate by being considered good enough reason for its own existence. Even if culture is an external force, it is made up in its entirety of individuals. If enough of those individuals change their minds, it will change the culture. It happens all the time, faster than most people can keep up with over their lifetimes. And even if it were still too harmful to engage in consanguinamorous activity right now because of the taboo, which I maintain it is not, it is still unethical to perpetuate the stigma surrounding it just because of this, when if the stigma were destroyed, the situation would change entirely.
Unfortunately, many people may still be hesitant to stand up for consanguinamory because of fear that this would hurt other areas of activism. Take LGBTQIA+ advocacy in general, consanguinamory seems like it would fit very well with such activism. It is a culturally reviled but consensual sexual and/or romantic practice, it mostly fights vacuous arguments about reproduction, family structures, and people finding it icky, but even most of the most liberal, socially concerned of these activists shrivel at the idea of adding a “C” onto that expanding acronym of acceptance and unity.
I want to clarify that this article is not meant to be taken as a specific argument for tying the arguments in defense of consanguinamory to those in defense of, say, same sex relationships, though noteworthy parallels exist. While it would make sense to me for other people invested in queer issues to care about consanguinamory, I do not think rejecting my arguments should lead anyone to reject other marginalized relationships and attractions. There are ways to see consanguinamory as an exception within a consent-focused sexual ethics, I simply don’t think any of these ways hold water.
Additionally, I don’t think consanguinamory necessarily should be considered a queer identity, though I think it eventually could be. A decent comparison would be to polyamory, which is often allied with canonical queer identities as part of a coalition, but either may or may not be considered a form of queerness itself depending on who you ask. Whether it is better or worse for it to be included under the umbrella, I don’t intend to come to a conclusion about, as I don’t think answering this is necessary to treating these relationships with respect.
Typing this, I can already hear in my head people from the queer community rushing to tell me “we reject incest from our community”. As I have said, it is not necessary to my points that it is brought into this community, but furthermore any possible interpretation of this type of statement that I can think of insults my intelligence. If you are saying “the majority of the queer community does not support these relationships”, I suspect you are correct, or I wouldn’t feel nearly as much need to argue my case. The case that, regardless of whether you do accept these relationships right now, you ought to. If by this you just mean that you don’t think you ought to accept these relationships, you aren’t telling me any more by this than saying “I personally disagree” without giving any arguments, or even explanations of which specific points you disagree with me on.
In large part I think the comparison is a sore spot for this activism because of the slippery slope arguments it has fought against on issues like gay marriage, people asking things like “what’s next, incestuous marriage?” As though this question was any sort of argument. I don’t doubt I’ve opened some wounds appealing this case, brought back knee-jerk attempts at distancing the movement from highly taboo practices. This is understandable, and unfortunate. If you think it is a minor concern however, one that doesn’t affect enough people profoundly enough to be worth the controversy, you lack imagination.
Consider the powerful state of this taboo right now. Do you, first of all, think that we know what actual portion of the population has consanguinamorous feelings and is suffering deeply from this taboo? How many people do you think hide it well, never come out about it? And on top of those who are vocal online, there are prominent cases we can look at of consanguinamorous attraction and relationships from history even with this limitation. Both Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin married cousins of theirs, Lord Byron’s brooding and secretive air that served as the basis for the “Byronic Hero” literary trope is often credited to a secret affair he is suspected of having had with his half-sister (to better understand what this means culturally, think of consanguinamory the next time you are, say, watching “Batman”). Beyond just knowledge of notable cases of consanguinamory, and the vast number of people in this situation we may never know about, it would make biological sense for a population at least as large as that of say homosexuals to experience such feelings. Think of consanguinamory in natural selection, risky reproduction is more likely to pass on associated genes than no reproduction, making, at least heterosexual consanguinamorous couples, more likely to pass on any associated genes than homosexual couples.
In the first version of this paper, I concluded this argument by saying that the population of those affected by the taboo could well be as large as any of the canonically queer demographics, based on the natural selection argument. In retrospect, this is a misleading statement that I should qualify better. The harm of oppressing homosexuality comes in part from the shame in one’s feelings, but also in large part from the prevention of one’s relationships. Someone who is gay has very strong odds of finding someone they could be in a mutual relationship with who they will be prevented from being with if homosexuality is oppressed.
While the shame remains for those with genetic consanguinamorous dispositions, the odds are weaker that they will have a family member who will share their feelings, since they only have a few close family members. This does not prove that the population is very small, in fact, under the assumption that there is a genetic component in this attraction, the odds of a family member sharing this genetic factor are higher than average, but however big the population of those suffering from current norms is, the subset of this population being kept from a relationship is bound to be smaller.
Still, these arguments are limiting since they view consanguinamory as a sort of specific sexual/romantic preference. While this may be true, consider the case of someone who is related to you, but who you fall in love with without at first knowing this, as in the scenario I presented towards the beginning of this article. Do you think that this is because of some disposition you didn’t know you had, or just ignorance? The psychological mechanism usually credited with deterring relationships between family members, known as the “Westermarck Effect”, is driven by the social relationship you had with the person growing up, not blood relation. Many in the consanguinamory community even subscribe to the controversial view in psychology that some “Genetic Sexual Attraction” or GSA effect exists, which makes blood relatives without the Westermarck Effect somewhat more likely to be attracted to each other than average (possibly because we are attracted to those with whom we have things in common). If this view is correct, it is easy to believe that even many people who don’t have some natural preference for consanguinamory will end up attracted to a family member.
Jane Doe tried to estimate the percent of people who are in or have been in consanguinamorous relationships in the post “The Consanguinamory Study Analysis”. She estimates it is about 2.28% of the population, certainly not an insignificant number. This is a very rough estimate, based on a fairly small study (159 participants), and assumptions about the prevalence of “GSA” relationships. Still, it may be as good an estimate as we can currently get. I suspect it is in between the proportion of people who are at some point in a relationship with an immediate family member, and the proportion of those who are at some point in a relationship with an immediate or extended family member (out to first cousins). The study itself included extended family relationships, but I suspect they are underrepresented in the study, and I also suspect that non-GSA relationships are a higher proportion of these since the Westermarck Effect is less likely to affect extended family members even under the usual circumstances. Given the assumption of a fixed GSA population Doe worked from, this would indicate a higher overall population for a pool fully representing extended family consanguinamory.
Then there’s another idea that probably allows many people to distance themselves from this issue, the idea that, unlike for example homosexuality, consanguinamory is an urge that people may have in some cases, but one that they could find an alternative to. The idea is that perhaps they could find love elsewhere and be happy, so why fight for it. To start with, the assumptions of this argument are flawed and overly confident. Few have any real-life experience that could feed this, or any such assumption about the nature of consanguinamory. I have talked to at least one person in a relationship with an immediate family member who said they consider their relationship irreplaceable, and it is not hard to imagine that a relationship with so much emotional history would be irreplaceable for many. Even if they could have other close relationships, there would be tremendous loss in keeping people who feel this way apart for no good reason. Even if it were correct though (which despite being a problematic default assumption is not unlikely in many cases, especially for those who meet late in life and don’t know about their blood relation at first), this argument would also exempt you from advocating in other areas, such as interracial romance. If you believe love across racial lines is worth fighting for, I doubt you could justify this reasoning in the first place.
So if this is a significant issue, one worth caring about and whose counter-arguments don’t hold up, you may remain suspicious that so little has been done about it. That it is essentially a non-conversation. Why is it that gay rights has flourished and grown as a movement with almost unprecedented speed since the 60s, while consanguinamory rights has remained an extremely marginal movement? I have discovered that such a movement exists online since the first version of this article, but it remains, as far as I can tell, obscure and fairly recent. I think there is a reason for this, but not a good, or especially morally-motivated reason.
One thing you might think could be a reason is that consanguinamory requires cultural upheaval. That we won’t be able to think about families the same way, and this change is hard for most people to accept. This is certainly something that could contribute to discomfort, but I disagree that it is the key difference from gay rights. Many people might look at my thesis and feel the place of the family is threatened, that it will no longer be safe from the possibility of sexual tension, but this is a discomfort that early institutions must have felt similarly threatened by in admitting the existence of homosexuality. Private schools, sports teams, bathrooms, these and many more spaces where people built large portions of their lives and close relationships have been institutionally split into male/female divides for the very reason that this was supposed to make them spaces free of sexual tensions. Homosexuality was seen as a threat to this, and so homosexuality’s existence was denied validity in large part to preserve this ideal. It doesn’t seem like this is a less significant source of cultural upheaval and reconsideration than consanguinamory would be, all areas of life considered. In fact, I would like to think cases like this have already taught us that denying the existence of feelings doesn’t make them go away.
I don’t think this is anywhere near the main reason for this silence. The key difference, in my opinion, is community. Gay rights made the advancements they did because of a queer community. There has been, for a great deal of time now, a recognized queer community, including queer cultures and subcultures such as lesbian culture, gay man culture, bi/pan/poly culture, transgender culture, and coming into more recent recognition non-binary culture, among others. Some of them are even more specialized than that, like the “bear” or “leather” subcultures. These have all made headway because they have formed recognizable, loud communities, full of activists who refused to be quiet when they were told to, when they were told not to exist. The history of gay rights and the related activisms it stood with is not one of thoughtful allies realizing their culture’s harm and irrationality and making a ruckus for populations they never met. Allies have certainly played a role, but their role was on the whole minor compared to the queer people they stood with.
There has not been, at least before the internet, opportunity for such a sub-culture and community for consanguinamory to form. When queer folks were desperate and oppressed, they grouped together to find each other, to find others they could love, strangers they were forced to trust in shared experience. It is very hard to imagine such a gathering for Consanguinamory. Consanguinamory is contained within a small sub-community already, a shared family, that is how it is defined. Desperate consanguinamorous love will not be found in a group of like-minded strangers in the same way. Those in love would have held onto what little open connection they may have already had for dear life against the rest of the world, if they were in a mutual relationship with a family member. Oppressed homosexuality breeds organization, oppressed consanguinamory, before internet communities, bred isolation. Think about it this way, there could be no Stonewall riots without a Stonewall Inn. It is hard to imagine how a Stonewall for consanguinamory could have come about.
While gay rights activists were able to lean on a supportive community as they fought hard, taxing battles for recognition, what would have happened with consanguinamory? Groupings of people who had this shared investment for consanguinamorous relationships generally came in two at a time at most. And if you weren’t in a relationship at the time, and had nothing like the queer community, you had no persistent community identity to keep you strong, to fight for the legitimacy of your feelings. It is easy to drown out isolated pockets like this. There were too few people in one place to form a real organized support network in person, so any raising of voices for consanguinamory was likely to be quickly silenced and disgraced. In this situation, would you raise your voice? Is it really any wonder we haven’t heard such activism before the internet, when you think about it? The community that currently exists is still new and small. It doesn’t have the same historical structures or avenues for in-person support as the queer community was able to build. And since such a community failed to form, there is no comparably established cultural identity associated with it. Where you have all of these above mentioned queer cultures, and more, you have no publicly recognized consanguinamory culture. Consanguinamory is not thought of as a valid identity in its own right, so it is only thought of as an inferior instance of other identities. Here lies the key and fatal difference.
Given that I have found a burgeoning community around this issue online since writing the first version of this article, I am more optimistic about the future. I suggested in the earlier version that allies need to play an unprecedented role in advocating for the acceptance of consanguinamory. At this point, I see that there are alternatives. Even if allies are slow to speak up, there is hope that the suffering and oppression of those affected by the consanguinamory taboo will be relieved. Still, allies are in a much better position to speak up than those more directly affected by the taboo. What I am writing now undoubtedly has social consequences, possibly quite drastic ones, which is why I am using a pseudonym. Someone who is vocal and was once in a relationship of this sort would face the same stigmas as me, as well as social, and quite possibly legal, consequences for their past relationship. Someone who is vocal and is currently in such a relationship would face the same social consequences as me, additional social consequences for their relationship, possible legal consequences, and a threat to the survival of this relationship, which may be among the most devastating risks to them. If you are in the position to be an ally, silence seems hard to justify.
I would also like to briefly address those reading this who are consanguinamorous, here at the end. This article has been primarily addressed at a hypothetical audience of people who are not convinced, and not involved in this issue. If you are in a position where you have had these feelings, or been in such a relationship, I also hope that you have been convinced, if you weren’t already, that there is nothing wrong with you or your feelings. You are also not alone in this, there are many people in your situation, and many others who will support you. If you want to find out more or get involved in the community, the “Kindred Spirits” forum is a good place to meet people.
It is also possible, if you are currently in a consanguinamorous relationship where it is illegal, to move to one of the places where it is at least legal, which could make the eventual possibility of coming out to loved ones less risky. If you are in the EU, or particularly the US, moving from somewhere consanguinamory is illegal to somewhere it is legal does not even require the usual immigration barriers between countries. If you are siblings, the same is true of Australia.
I believe that we, as a culture, are ready for this conversation, please help me start it. Please consider the validity of experiences you may find repulsive, and remember how many other experiences our culture has found repulsive before feeling justified in even this repulsion. Review what reasons you have for your ideas about relationships between consenting adult family members, and if you find that they don’t hold up, I beg of you, abandon them.
Finally, here are some relevant links,
This is the Kindred Spirits forum I mentioned: https://ks2016.forumactif.fr/
This is a useful map of the different laws around the world, it’s a few years old, but I think mostly up to date: https://thefinalmanifesto.blogspot.com/2015/01/global-map-of-incest-laws.html?m=1
This is the Keith Pullman article I reference when talking about power differentials: https://marriage-equality.blogspot.com/p/discredited-invalid-arguments.html?m=1
This is the Jane Doe study on reproductive risk I mentioned: https://consanguinamory.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/the-consanguinamory-reproduction-study-the-results-are-in/
This is the Jane Doe study surveying the consanguinamory community I mentioned that estimates the prevalence of consanguinamorous relationships: https://consanguinamory.wordpress.com/the-consanguinamory-study-analysis/
This is the article “Genetic Counseling and Screening of Consanguineous Couples and Their Offspring: Recommendations of the National Society of Genetic Counselors” I reference when discussing reproductive risk: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1014593404915
This is the book Reasons and Persons I reference when discussing population ethics: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reasons-and-persons-9780198249085?cc=us&lang=en&#
Sorry the last two sources require significant payment. If you have a college account, you might be able to access the article for free, I’m not sure. Reasons and Persons you could probably find either directly or on loan from your local library, as it is something of a modern classic of its field.
