![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Happy birthday ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
naiasf!!!!! I hope you have a fabulous day out by that beautiful sea!
And I apologize for putting a birthday wish in a post about incest.:-)
The subject's come up recently and I'm kind of surprised by the emotional reactions to it--to me it seems like incest’s always been a popular Gothic convention and will probably continue to be so. Last night, readingajhalluk's lj I was so happy to have one incest-related question cleared up. In my freshman year colloquial on Gothic Lit we were talking about Wuthering Heights and I referred to what I assumed was the commonly known possibility that Heathcliff was actually Cathy's brother. The whole class looked at me like I was crazy. What's more the teacher *told* me I was crazy--and this was a teacher I loved. I never mentioned it again-until last night, when ajhalluk said, "... if the informed reader wasn't supposed to assume Heathcliff was Earnshaw's bastard by a Liverpudlian half-breed whore, then colour me orange and call me a carrot."
Needing to tell someone about my vindication I told my roommate, who spent the rest of the night wandering around grumbling about feeling stupid for never thinking of that herself. I assured her the only reason I knew of it when I did (probably in high school) was because MY MOTHER told it to me. I just thought it made perfect sense, despite my class disagreeing.
Obviously, there are different types of incest. I'm not particularly into the parent/child version. I think it's because I'm not quite so interested in issues of power, which that genre gets into. I don't like non-consensual incest either, since I'm not big on non-con in general. Though I think all of these can be done well--in fact, I think mother/son would probably read to me very differently than father/son or (my least favorite) father/daughter. It's funny the way we seem to have such issues about this when don't the French quite happily make movies about this subject? There was that recent one about the brother and sister, and I saw Murmur of the Heart, which has a mother/son incest scene. Needless to say, I do not think real life sexual abuse within families is appealing or acceptable.
Anyway, the incest I tend to go for is brother/sister. Perhaps this is due to the Flowers in the Attic craze of eighth grade, but I think really the reason those books were SO popular with girls my age is that they appealed to some common fantasy we already had. For me, this probably goes along with a general brother/sister fixation. I love boy/girl stories, especially stories about a lost boy and the girl who goes to find him--The Snow Queen was my absolute favorite story as a kid. I remember talking to a friend after seeing The Blair Witch Project, and I said how much I liked it and she said, "Oh yeah, well, you've got that whole Hansel & Gretel fixation." I hadn't ever thought of it that way, but she was absolutely right. Hansel & Gretel, Gerda and Kay.
In grad school my thesis script also centered around a brother/sister love affair (a chan one, come to think of it!) that was completely unspoken so nobody got it except for one guy who thought it was plain as day. The second big thing I tried to write (well, I did write it even if it's unpublished) was sort of based on The 7 Ravens, though my story was about a girl who was searching for just one missing brother, not 7.
With that kind of background, you can imagine why it would puzzle me that anyone wonders what the appeal of sibling incest stories are. They're all part of the same genre to me. It's not about abuse it's about...finding your other half, I suppose. The yin-yang, the reciprocal self, the male version of the female self (I've not much thought about it from the other way round...I always made the girl the rescuer, I think). Unlike parent/child incest, it's not about power because the whole point is that the two people are completely evenly matched. They need each other. Even when the boy needs rescuing, there was never a sense, for me, that he was a damsel in distress. It was more like the boy was gaining knowledge where he was, and he would bring that knowledge back with him when rescued.
Where parent/child incest often gives one partner an understanding far beyond the other's (since they are older), sibling incest stories are often more about a mutual understanding that's just...intimate. It doesn't always have to be safe, since they can use that understanding to hurt each other just as anyone can. It just doesn't start out with the same power dynamic. I'm not saying this particular kink is better than parent/child, btw, fictionally speaking. They're similar songs in a different key.
An interesting thing about brother/sister incest, too, is that if you take away the power issues by making the two characters the same age and equally matched you do bring up the question of exactly what the harm is. I mean, what is it that makes it wrong? I don't think that's a dismissive question. People *should* be able to articulate why something is wrong when it is. With parent/child it's immediately obvious because there's clear issues of betrayal, but with a hypothetically consensual brother/sister it's less clear. That's why, imo, it's almost too easy to create situations where it seems just fine--Flowers in the Attic is an obvious example. Had these kids not been shut into an attic for three years during puberty, and forced to form a surrogate family where the older brother and sister were parents to the younger two, Chris and Cathy would probably not have gotten together. But still, in the end, it just makes more sense that they are with each other than anyone else because their relationship really is more like husband/wife. (Besides, who else are they going to find who speaks in that same flowery language??)
Then there's also this question of the "universal taboo" which really isn't that universal. Two siblings raised apart are, I believe, no more or less likely to be attracted than two strangers. Perhaps they might be unconsciously drawn by physical similarities (they look like each other/like their parents). The point is the thing that makes sibling incest so weird isn't that we're physically repulsed by people closely related to us but that we grow up not thinking of them that way, which suggests in a different culture we might grow up thinking of them that way. It also seems that people are now pretending that cousin incest is this incredibly bizarre thing when, uh, why? I mean, my own cousins and I are never going to have an affair (I'm not going to sleep with my brother either-ewwww!), but that's probably because we've grown up with relationships that make it seem weird. Cousins can and do marry each other, though, in many countries and in parts of the United States (I think it's legal in 19 states). I once met a guy whose parents were cousins, and his so were his grandparents! (And he went to Dartmouth so presumably he was not too brain damaged to write an application essay, at least.) The risk for birth defects coming from cousin marriages is not significantly higher than it is for strangers--but you wouldn't know it from the commonly accepted idea in the US that, to quote a character in Brighton Beach Memoirs, "You can't marry your first cousin. You get babies with 9 heads!" That's a far cry from that throwaway line in Gone with the Wind,: "You know the Wilkes always marry their cousins!" This used to be a very common thing in the US. It's really rather odd that people think it's a big deal when in fact, it makes sense. Two people who are probably close in age and come from similar backgrounds but are not brother and sister do not have to be psychologically unsound to fall in love.
In fiction, incest is often associated with weird families-one of the few things Anne Rice has ever written that I really love is that file on the Mayfair Witches from The Witching Hour. In HP, the only sibling incest stories out there are about the Weasleys, and I have no interest in those. There's nothing appealing to me about Ron/Ginny or twincest. The Malfoys, though, come firmly out of the Gothic tradition, which is why I don't understand why people think it's strange when people associate them with the practice. Not because it's canon but because they really are linked to that literary tradition--the obsession with bloodlines and family, the big house, the bizarre, dark instruments of power hidden under the floorboards. Poor Sirius was just some non-gothic changeling. The gothic trappings aren't shallow, they are part of the genre-a genre that, I might add, has a history far richer and more fun than the more modern incest genre with its graphic descriptions of abuse and numbness. It just seems to me that in many stories, expecting Draco to react in that style to incest is like...well, like expecting Harry Potter to wet the bed his first night at Hogwarts because his emotional abuse at the Dursleys + a move to a new and strange environment would realistically lead to stress-related enuresis.
Finally, in HP, I always think it's interesting that people talk about this series as if its especially wrong to write about either sex or incest in this universe when JKR mentions Lolita as one of her favorite books and describes it as "a tragic love story." Now, I think Lolita is an incredible book and I don't think there's anything strange about her writing one and loving the other. But I'm also not one who would consider Lolita a love story-at least not a love story between two people. It just makes me feel like the author of this particular canon has an even larger fantasy/reality gap when it comes to pederasty and surrogate father figures having sex with young girls. So maybe it's not all that odd the universe lends itself to odd pairings more than some. Who knows?
naiasf!!!!! I hope you have a fabulous day out by that beautiful sea!And I apologize for putting a birthday wish in a post about incest.:-)
The subject's come up recently and I'm kind of surprised by the emotional reactions to it--to me it seems like incest’s always been a popular Gothic convention and will probably continue to be so. Last night, reading
ajhalluk's lj I was so happy to have one incest-related question cleared up. In my freshman year colloquial on Gothic Lit we were talking about Wuthering Heights and I referred to what I assumed was the commonly known possibility that Heathcliff was actually Cathy's brother. The whole class looked at me like I was crazy. What's more the teacher *told* me I was crazy--and this was a teacher I loved. I never mentioned it again-until last night, when ajhalluk said, "... if the informed reader wasn't supposed to assume Heathcliff was Earnshaw's bastard by a Liverpudlian half-breed whore, then colour me orange and call me a carrot."Needing to tell someone about my vindication I told my roommate, who spent the rest of the night wandering around grumbling about feeling stupid for never thinking of that herself. I assured her the only reason I knew of it when I did (probably in high school) was because MY MOTHER told it to me. I just thought it made perfect sense, despite my class disagreeing.
Obviously, there are different types of incest. I'm not particularly into the parent/child version. I think it's because I'm not quite so interested in issues of power, which that genre gets into. I don't like non-consensual incest either, since I'm not big on non-con in general. Though I think all of these can be done well--in fact, I think mother/son would probably read to me very differently than father/son or (my least favorite) father/daughter. It's funny the way we seem to have such issues about this when don't the French quite happily make movies about this subject? There was that recent one about the brother and sister, and I saw Murmur of the Heart, which has a mother/son incest scene. Needless to say, I do not think real life sexual abuse within families is appealing or acceptable.
Anyway, the incest I tend to go for is brother/sister. Perhaps this is due to the Flowers in the Attic craze of eighth grade, but I think really the reason those books were SO popular with girls my age is that they appealed to some common fantasy we already had. For me, this probably goes along with a general brother/sister fixation. I love boy/girl stories, especially stories about a lost boy and the girl who goes to find him--The Snow Queen was my absolute favorite story as a kid. I remember talking to a friend after seeing The Blair Witch Project, and I said how much I liked it and she said, "Oh yeah, well, you've got that whole Hansel & Gretel fixation." I hadn't ever thought of it that way, but she was absolutely right. Hansel & Gretel, Gerda and Kay.
In grad school my thesis script also centered around a brother/sister love affair (a chan one, come to think of it!) that was completely unspoken so nobody got it except for one guy who thought it was plain as day. The second big thing I tried to write (well, I did write it even if it's unpublished) was sort of based on The 7 Ravens, though my story was about a girl who was searching for just one missing brother, not 7.
With that kind of background, you can imagine why it would puzzle me that anyone wonders what the appeal of sibling incest stories are. They're all part of the same genre to me. It's not about abuse it's about...finding your other half, I suppose. The yin-yang, the reciprocal self, the male version of the female self (I've not much thought about it from the other way round...I always made the girl the rescuer, I think). Unlike parent/child incest, it's not about power because the whole point is that the two people are completely evenly matched. They need each other. Even when the boy needs rescuing, there was never a sense, for me, that he was a damsel in distress. It was more like the boy was gaining knowledge where he was, and he would bring that knowledge back with him when rescued.
Where parent/child incest often gives one partner an understanding far beyond the other's (since they are older), sibling incest stories are often more about a mutual understanding that's just...intimate. It doesn't always have to be safe, since they can use that understanding to hurt each other just as anyone can. It just doesn't start out with the same power dynamic. I'm not saying this particular kink is better than parent/child, btw, fictionally speaking. They're similar songs in a different key.
An interesting thing about brother/sister incest, too, is that if you take away the power issues by making the two characters the same age and equally matched you do bring up the question of exactly what the harm is. I mean, what is it that makes it wrong? I don't think that's a dismissive question. People *should* be able to articulate why something is wrong when it is. With parent/child it's immediately obvious because there's clear issues of betrayal, but with a hypothetically consensual brother/sister it's less clear. That's why, imo, it's almost too easy to create situations where it seems just fine--Flowers in the Attic is an obvious example. Had these kids not been shut into an attic for three years during puberty, and forced to form a surrogate family where the older brother and sister were parents to the younger two, Chris and Cathy would probably not have gotten together. But still, in the end, it just makes more sense that they are with each other than anyone else because their relationship really is more like husband/wife. (Besides, who else are they going to find who speaks in that same flowery language??)
Then there's also this question of the "universal taboo" which really isn't that universal. Two siblings raised apart are, I believe, no more or less likely to be attracted than two strangers. Perhaps they might be unconsciously drawn by physical similarities (they look like each other/like their parents). The point is the thing that makes sibling incest so weird isn't that we're physically repulsed by people closely related to us but that we grow up not thinking of them that way, which suggests in a different culture we might grow up thinking of them that way. It also seems that people are now pretending that cousin incest is this incredibly bizarre thing when, uh, why? I mean, my own cousins and I are never going to have an affair (I'm not going to sleep with my brother either-ewwww!), but that's probably because we've grown up with relationships that make it seem weird. Cousins can and do marry each other, though, in many countries and in parts of the United States (I think it's legal in 19 states). I once met a guy whose parents were cousins, and his so were his grandparents! (And he went to Dartmouth so presumably he was not too brain damaged to write an application essay, at least.) The risk for birth defects coming from cousin marriages is not significantly higher than it is for strangers--but you wouldn't know it from the commonly accepted idea in the US that, to quote a character in Brighton Beach Memoirs, "You can't marry your first cousin. You get babies with 9 heads!" That's a far cry from that throwaway line in Gone with the Wind,: "You know the Wilkes always marry their cousins!" This used to be a very common thing in the US. It's really rather odd that people think it's a big deal when in fact, it makes sense. Two people who are probably close in age and come from similar backgrounds but are not brother and sister do not have to be psychologically unsound to fall in love.
In fiction, incest is often associated with weird families-one of the few things Anne Rice has ever written that I really love is that file on the Mayfair Witches from The Witching Hour. In HP, the only sibling incest stories out there are about the Weasleys, and I have no interest in those. There's nothing appealing to me about Ron/Ginny or twincest. The Malfoys, though, come firmly out of the Gothic tradition, which is why I don't understand why people think it's strange when people associate them with the practice. Not because it's canon but because they really are linked to that literary tradition--the obsession with bloodlines and family, the big house, the bizarre, dark instruments of power hidden under the floorboards. Poor Sirius was just some non-gothic changeling. The gothic trappings aren't shallow, they are part of the genre-a genre that, I might add, has a history far richer and more fun than the more modern incest genre with its graphic descriptions of abuse and numbness. It just seems to me that in many stories, expecting Draco to react in that style to incest is like...well, like expecting Harry Potter to wet the bed his first night at Hogwarts because his emotional abuse at the Dursleys + a move to a new and strange environment would realistically lead to stress-related enuresis.
Finally, in HP, I always think it's interesting that people talk about this series as if its especially wrong to write about either sex or incest in this universe when JKR mentions Lolita as one of her favorite books and describes it as "a tragic love story." Now, I think Lolita is an incredible book and I don't think there's anything strange about her writing one and loving the other. But I'm also not one who would consider Lolita a love story-at least not a love story between two people. It just makes me feel like the author of this particular canon has an even larger fantasy/reality gap when it comes to pederasty and surrogate father figures having sex with young girls. So maybe it's not all that odd the universe lends itself to odd pairings more than some. Who knows?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject