Word: incest
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...cruelest, if most honest, of the three villains if Ferdinand, the Duchess' other brother. Shiels and Raymond have gambled heavily here, casting a woman, Kate Levin, as the lustful Ferdinand, but their bet pays off. Ferdinand is passionately in love with his own sister: Levin's casting makes incest all the more unsettling. Insanely jealous of his sister's husband, Ferdinand destroys his sister rather than see her happy with a man he thinks unworthy of her. Unlike Cort and Sands, Levin moves awkwardly--on purpose. Ferdinand struggles against an over-whelming passion, giving in to impulse and then regretting...
...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...
Traditional academics have tended to look down on sex researchers as pushy, ham-handed amateurs, and the arguments for incest will do little to change that view. The literature shows absolutely no attention to psychological realities: that often an adolescent and surely a small child can hardly produce anything like informed consent to an adult it depends on for life and guidance; or that the lifting of the incest barrier would invite the routine exploitation of children by disturbed parents. The sex researchers may get the shocked public reaction they expect, but their arguments are truly too simple-minded...