Word: incest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wardell Pomeroy, co-author of the original Kinsey reports on males and females, is far more blunt. "It is time to admit that incest need not be a perversion or a symptom of mental illness," he says. "Incest between . . . children and adults . . . can sometimes be beneficial." Indeed the new pro-incest literature is filled with the stupefying idea that opposition to incest reflects an uptight resistance to easy affection and warmth among family members. Writes Anthropologist Seymour Parker of the University of Utah cautiously: "It is questionable if the costs (of the incest taboo) in guilt and uneasy distancing between...
...SIECUS Report, the publication of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States and an unfailing indicator of fads and fashions in the sex research world, published a major article attacking the incest taboo. Though the journal's editor, Mary Calderone, and her colleagues ran an ingenuous editorial denying that the article was advocating anything, the piece in fact depicted the taboo as a mindless prejudice. Wrote the author, James W. Ramey: "We are roughly in the same position today regarding incest as we were a hundred years ago with respect to our fears of masturbation." Ramey...
...propaganda campaign, the words and terms used to describe incest are beginning to change. The phrase "child abuse" is distinguished from "consensual incest" involving a parent, and "abusive incest" is different from "positive incest." Some try to give the argument a bit of serious academic coloration, ransacking anthropological literature for a tribe or two that allows incest, or arguing that the incest taboo is dying of its own irrelevance. Rutgers Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen offers a simplified pseudohistorical argument: the taboo is a holdover of a primitive need to form personal alliances and trade agreements beyond the family. Since that...
...whatever reason, public interest in incest as a subject seems to have increased. Hollywood provides a good index; one survey shows there were six movies about incest in the 1920s, 79 in the '60s. The numbers are still growing. Recent films on the subject include Chinatown, Luna and the made-for-TV Flesh and Blood. But probing a sensitive subject for better understanding is one thing, and justifying incest is quite another...
...most of the pro-incest thought rises logically enough from the premises of the sex-research establishment: all forms of consensual sexuality are good, or at least neutral; problems arise not from sex, but from guilt, fear and repression. That kind of faith is bound to lead its believers in crusades against all sexual prohibitions, including incest...