Word: tabooed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lifting the incest taboo is consistent with the new emphasis on child sex-symbol movie stars and child porn filling "adult" bookstores. I believe the trend is related to the concept of sex as an allegory for power...
...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 intimates are necessary or desirable. What are the benefits of linking a mist of discomfort to the spontaneous warmth of the affectionate kiss and touch between family members...
...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...
...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 is no longer necessary, he says, "human history suggests that the incest taboo...
...lobby against the taboo come about? One strain of its philosophy springs from the fringes of the children's rights movement, which insists that small children be granted all the rights of adults. Some have taken that to mean the right to be sexually active with any partner at all. Says Larry Constantine, an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at Tufts, one such self-styled sexual radical: "Children have the right to express themselves sexually, even with members of their own family...