Incest, in This Economy?
The 21st-Century Family Romance
BRIAN CONNOLLY
In 1977, Paul Gebhard, an anthropologist and sexologist at Indiana University, was consulted for an article in Penthouse Magazine on the incest taboo. With the exception of a “tiny percentage” of incest cases reported to police or psychologists, Gebhard told Philip Nobile, an editor of Penthouse Forum and author of the article, “I’m having a hard time recalling any traumatic effects at all. I certainly can’t recall any from among the brother-sister participants, and I can’t put my finger on any among the parent-child participants.” Gebhard was not a fringe thinker and the “participants” to whom he referred were not part of some fly-by-night survey. Rather, he was the director of the Institute for Sex Research, founded in 1947 by Alfred Kinsey. In fact, Gebhard was Kinsey’s immediate successor as director, a position he would hold for nearly thirty years. The participants who apparently reported no traumatic effects from incest were among those interviewed for Kinsey’s landmark works, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), for which Gebhard was a researcher, and, for the latter, coauthor. Was the incest prohibition, long believed to be universal, coming undone?
Beginning in the 1970s, incest itself was radically transformed. On the one hand, sexologists like Gebhard, joined by a congeries of academics, advice writers, pornographers, and, well, some hack intellectuals, to be sure, articulated what some would call “positive incest.” The term itself was ultimately not widely used—Gebhard himself does not seem to have adopted it—but it is a useful shorthand for those who came to see consensual incest as an acceptable and even beneficial choice. On the other hand, feminist activists worked to make visible and criminalize incestuous abuse, and in so doing changed the legal and therapeutic edifice of the nation. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, both changes permeated American culture: memoirs of incestuous abuse were frequent best-sellers and confessions of incestuous abuse had become common fodder for daytime talk shows, while simultaneously a kind of indifferent acceptance of incest was seemingly everywhere, from prestige television to dating shows, TikTok to The New York Times, presidential declarations of desire for a daughter to psychological experiments showing the irrationality of the prohibition.
This new incest discourse, the interanimation of feminist critique and the positive incest rationale and the legacies of that complicated and contradictory formation, was in part a consequence of the sexual revolution. For some, the prohibition on incest was just one more taboo to overcome on the way to liberation. The Penthouse article, for instance, opened with a cataloguing of recently overcome taboos. “Few things are as powerful as a deviation whose time has come,” Nobile wrote. “Homosexuality, wife swapping, open marriage, bisexuality, S & M, and kiddie porn have all had their seasons. Just as we seem to be running low on marketable taboos, the unspeakable predictably popped up.” However, if one could question whether the taboos on, say, homosexuality or S&M had actually been overcome by 1977, one could also ask whether the taboo on child pornography was worth overcoming—indeed, many of the feminists on the pro-sex side of the sex wars were asking this question. The politics of liberation are fraught, as much a project of domination as freedom. While feminist critics argued that incest was already too common, the positive incest crowd argued that it should be more common, or at least that there should no longer be a taboo at all.
The crisis of the family that dominated American culture in the 1970s and after was even more determinative. It’s a well-worn narrative, but worth rehearsing briefly. The nuclear family in America—as much phantasmatic and ideological as sociological—had a long history of consolidation, beginning in the early nineteenth century emergence of wage labor, the extrusion of production from the home, and the pastoralization of unpaid domestic labor, fortified by the increasing privatization of the family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and secured by the concomitant rise of the family wage, the single-family home, and suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century. This political economic history was coupled with an affective and psychic transformation, evident in, say, sentimental fiction, advice manuals, legal changes, and political machinations that increasingly promoted the unrealized and impossible ideals of companionate marriage, effusive love, and romance as familial ideals. Central to much of this, and crucial for the reconfiguration of incest at the end of the twentieth century, was the transformation of the child into an innocent, vulnerable figure requiring security and protection. The sociologist Viviana Zelizer has called it “the sacralization of the child”; the psychoanalytic critic Lee Edelman has put it this way: “the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.” After its apparent high point between the end of World War II and 1970, the family supposedly descended into a crisis from which many believed it would never recover. Rising divorce rates, single-mother households, the absence of fathers, the breakdown of the family wage and the necessity of two-paycheck families, the moral panics around endangered children, the increasing precarity of homeownership, especially of the single-family home that had become emblematic of middle-class familial independence and stability, and the stagnation of real wages for the majority of Americans were among the most significant indicators.
Conceptualization of the incest prohibition as a universal rule of human culture and sociality and one that structured desire and the unconscious grew up alongside this family. From mid-nineteenth-century anthropology and sentimental fiction, through to Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis, to the mid-twentieth century works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Talcott Parsons, to the dead ends of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, the theorization of the prohibition, and with it incest, was never far from the fantasy of the nuclear family. And just as the nuclear family has been figured, normatively, ideologically, and phantasmatically as white and middle class, so too was incest structured by racial capitalism. The developmental histories of early anthropology turned on the incest prohibition as humanity moved from “savagery” to “civilization.” Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nuclear family, the supposed culmination of those developmental histories, was animated by a devotion to the prohibition, to the tugs and pulls of intrafamilial desire and its necessary repression, while everyone else, Indigenous and colonized, the enslaved on plantations as well as emancipated people after Reconstruction, Southern and Eastern European and Asian immigrants, tenement dwellers, and white and Black rural folk were deemed always, at minimum, potentially incestuous. By the 1970s, however, just as this family was apparently breaking down, a new discourse of incest appeared that deemed middle- and upper-class white families incestuous. While feminists documented endemic incestuous abuse in these families, as well as most others, sexologists argued that there was not yet enough incest.
“In short, when the family appears in crisis we seem to talk about sex in the family.”
In short, when the family appears in crisis we seem to talk about sex in the family. This raises a series of questions, at once psychic and social. What were and are the historical conditions for such a transformation? Are we really living through the era of the end of the incest prohibition? What would be the psychic consequences, given the intimate relation between the prohibition, desire, and the unconscious? Is this really the last taboo, after which we will be liberated from repression itself? Would we even want to be?
*
Positive incest was the project of a loose group of sexologists and sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s, some of whom had ties of one kind or another to Alfred Kinsey. They were joined by a number of anthropologists who had begun to question the historical relevance and viability of the incest prohibition. They ranged from reputable, institutionally secure scholars like Gebhard and the Rutgers University anthropologist Yehudi Cohen to fringe provocateurs like Warren Farrell, who held a PhD in political science and authored books like The Liberated Man and, later, works with John Gray, best known as the author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. While some work on positive incest appeared in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals, it was as likely to appear in men’s magazines like Penthouse or Hustler. Largely forgotten now, these thinkers were prominent enough at the time to elicit rebuttals from prominent scholars like Judith Lewis Herman and in national magazines like Psychology Today and Time.
Positive incest was in part a response to the feminist work around incest and sexual violence of the 1970s. Until that decade, incest law in the U.S. was part of the civil law and predominantly concerned with marital restrictions. While it did treat incest outside of marriage, this was almost uniformly understood as a consensual relationship. Violent abuse of, say, a daughter by a father was usually covered by rape statutes. (It’s worth noting that domestic relations law and rape statutes are codified at the state level, so there was variation from state to state.) Rape reform legislation in the 1970s worked to make the language of the law more clinical and less moral. In that process, incest became a subset of rape. This led to the uneven decriminalization of consensual incest in several states. Simultaneously, feminist psychologists and therapists worked to take victims’ accounts more seriously and aimed to heal them of the trauma of incestuous abuse. The consequence here was significant. As the critic Gillian Harkins put it, “from the 1970s to the 1990s, incest was transformed from taboo to trauma, recoded through new narratives by and about women.”
The positive incest crowd did not deny abuse so much as argue that it was overly determinative of, and substantially different than, incest. For them, incest remained a taboo, one that should be overcome. As the sexologist Wardell Pomeroy put it in the Penthouse essay, “the trouble with incest isn’t incest at all [. . . .] It’s pedophilia.” Pomeroy, another of Kinsey’s close collaborators and coauthor of both landmark studies, had by the 1970s become a prominent sex and marriage therapist, first in New York City and then in San Francisco, as well as author of two controversial works on children and sex, Boys and Sex (1968) and Girls and Sex (1970). James Ramey, at the time a visiting professor at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, would make a similar argument in a 1979 article in SIECUS Report, a well-regarded sex education newsletter. As Ramey wrote, “There is no question but that those individuals who use extreme coercion, violence, or rape in the commission of incest should be summarily punished. The problem arises when incest is automatically equated with rape and violence although we know that this is generally not a proper analogy.” The noted German sexologist Erwin Haeberle agreed and posed a rather disorienting barrier to incestuous sexual abuse. In his influential The Sex Atlas, which was excerpted in a 1978 issue of Hustler, Haeberle wrote,
After all, it is difficult to see what possible good the laws against incest can still serve today and what damage their repeal could do. The use of contraception could easily allay the fears of those who worry about genetic problems. Children and adolescents could be protected against sexual assault and abuse by their parents or older siblings in the same way they are now protected against any other sexual exploitation.
One’s left wondering if Haeberle understood the problem itself.
As the wider society fretted about the moral and social life of the nation while its supposed pillar of virtue and base of economic security, the family, slid into acute crisis, feminists like Herman, Louise Armstrong, Karin Meiselman, and numerous others would bring to light damning evidence that the family and the cultural reverence accorded it was in large part what had obscured the prevalence of incest. The positive incest sexologists took a counter position: without denying intrafamilial sexual abuse, they set out to save the family by liberating it from unnecessary repression. Benjamin DeMott, a cultural critic, was onto this. “If, in the end, the campaign to modify the incest taboo wins broad support,” DeMott wrote, “the emergence of the permissivists as concerned friends of the family—a strange turn of events—will surely be partly responsible.” Liberating incest will save the family.
Such sentiments littered the positive incest defenses. “American families have been so imbued with prohibitions against incest,” Ramey wrote,
that they bend over backward to avoid any possibility of incestuous involvement or the possible accusation that they might become involved. This results in either complete and total abandonment of all parent-child physical contact at puberty [. . .] or in seductive behavior that never culminates in any manifest sexual activity, which [. . .] affects the child more negatively than does actual incest [. . . .] Who knows how much psychic damage we cause our children with such well-meant yet inhuman attitudes?
Warren Farrell was even more strident, asserting that “millions of people who are now refraining from touching, holding, and genitally caressing their children, when that is really part of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves.”
The emblematic figures of the newly traumatic incest were the abusive father and the vulnerable daughter. By 1986, Karin Meiselman, a feminist psychologist who was at the forefront of the movement to expose incest in the 1970s, would note that two major surveys estimated that one in twenty women had suffered some form of incestuous abuse from a father or stepfather. In order to defend the necessity of liberating incestuous desire from a repressive taboo without overtly advocating abuse, positive incest writers shifted the terrain from the hierarchical father-daughter relation to lateral sibling relations. Gebhard, Pomeroy, Ramey, and Farrell all posited brother-sister incest as both the most common and relatively harmless. Here they were joined by others not normally part of the positive incest crowd. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, at the time America’s most famous sexologists, wrote in Redbook in 1976, “Of the three most stigmatized types of incest, the one professionals encounter oftenest is that between brother and sister. This appears to be the least damaging of the three types, probably because most of the time it is no more than transitory experimentation on the part of young teen-agers—a continuation, as it were, of earlier episodes of ‘playing doctor.’” Sexologist John Money and psychologist Gertrude Williams, in a book they edited on child abuse, concurred, writing, “It is highly probable that sibling incest is both more prevalent and more prevalently benign than is parent-child incest.” [1]
Nonetheless, the stories and scenarios they included were predominantly father-daughter. Pomeroy, for example, at once fantasized an ideal incest scenario and then disavowed it for himself. Emphasizing, as did everyone, that consent was paramount, Pomeroy’s “ideal” scenario was a twenty-five-year-old daughter and fifty-year-old father. “Here’s a husband who’s fairly mature,” Pomeroy told Nobile for the Penthouse article, “and thinks of incest only as a stepping-stone for his daughter in developing her sex life.” Pomeroy, however, would not dip his own toe into this fount of familial desire precisely because he was a father himself. “The fathering principle kills the sex impulse. It certainly does for me. I wouldn’t consider sleeping with my daughter although I’ve given it much thought and even talked to her about it. And she said to me, ‘You’re a great father, but you don’t turn me on either.’” One wonders how consensual incest would come about, given the force of this supposed fathering principle.
“‘You’re a great father, but you don’t turn me on either.’”
Farrell claimed that over ninety-five percent of sibling, cousin, and uncle-niece/aunt-nephew relations were positive and seventy percent of mother-son relations were positive for the son and “most mothers.” He acknowledged, however, that when it came to father-daughter, while sixty percent of fa pleasurable experience, only fifteen percent of daughters felt the same. Nonetheless, he shared the story of an erotic encounter between a father and daughter. Nobile, the author of the essay, asked, “[W]hat’s in it for the 15% of daughters who inform Farrell that they liked it? The answer is a tender, nonfumbling, and loving introduction to sex that is wildly arousing for all its wickedness and devoid of the usual teenage back-seat trial and error.” Farrell told the story of an apparently happily married New York City writer who engaged in a loving sexual relationship with his fifteen-year-old daughter. Deprived of sex since his wife had undergone an operation five months prior to the incident, the father saw his daughter nude while at their beach house, showed her his erect penis, and told her “that he missed sex.” She immediately performed fellatio on him “to orgasm.” They later came to have sex regularly, including a threesome with one of her friends. When her mother found out “she was relieved that her husband’s strong sexual demands could be met at home rather than with hookers, and she hinted that she’d like to watch the two in bed.” Incest as safe sex.
In the midst of the positive incest boom, an odd book of marriage and family advice appeared that would take the discourse in another direction. Davidyne Mayleas was an eclectic writer, mostly of romance novels and career advice. In 1977, Basic Books published her book Rewedded Bliss: Love, Alimony, Incest, Ex-Spouses, and Other Domestic Blessings, a gossipy, sensationalistic account of the new families of the decade. Mired in the kind of pop psychoanalysis regnant in 1970s Manhattan, with frequent accounts of her own psychoanalytic sessions peppered throughout the book, she even thanks “Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, and Harry Stack Sullivan for having been alive and well in the first half of the twentieth century so that their original and fruitful insights were available to me for survival, to say nothing of what is owed to them by millions of others.” The book is neither a lament nor a critique of the family; rather, for Mayleas, the world was in the midst of an epochal, liberating change in the history of the family and marriage. The monogamous family, which she erroneously asserted had been the dominant form for millennia, was now outdated and being replaced by lives with two, three, and four marriages; multiple sex partners; and complicated, fluctuating kinship arrangements between parents, children, and siblings, which she called the “synergistic family.” It came, as one might suppose, with some new libidinal challenges.
For Mayleas, the synergistic family was a final realization of the imperative of the Declaration of Independence that we pursue our happiness as the satisfaction of our individual, previously unquenchable desire. But, in this maelstrom of sex and marriage, of undulating bodies and reconfigured kinship, was everyone a potential sexual partner? Mayleas was not a fellow traveler of the positive incest crowd, but she did title a section of her book “The Joy of Incest.” “What this section is concerned with,” Mayleas wrote, “is the nature of the basic, primary emotional interaction between parents and children in the synergistic family. It is concerned with first causes; in a sense, with the fundamentals of sex education. Yours, not theirs. It is about incest.” For Mayleas, this simple but repressed assumption needed to be laid bare: the first principle of family and sex is incest. The incest taboo, so aligned with the long history of the monogamous family, was becoming “water[ed] down.” Mayleas had company, at least regarding the passing relevance of the incest prohibition. Anthropologists Yehudi Cohen and Seymour Parker also argued that the utility of the incest prohibition had passed. They shared the basic anthropological assumption that the prohibition of incest was effectuated in order to promote exogamy and broader social relations, underpinning trade networks that were rooted in the organization of kinship. For both, industrialization and the privatization of the family did away with the utility of the prohibition. As Parker put it in 1987, “sex relations among closely related consenting adults are best left to personal choice.” Indeed, as Cohen wrote, the prohibition existed “to promote the greatest flow of manufactured goods and raw materials,” and since that was no longer necessary to make the economy work, the scene of intrafamilial desire should of necessity change too.
Mayleas had a similar sense of the effects of modernity on monogamy but had a different sense of what to do about incest. The synergistic family heightened incestuous possibilities, with so many family members coming in and out of the house. With the configurations no longer reducible to the nuclear family norm, the sensual possibilities were almost unlimited. “Will you, the poly-mother of a handsome, young teen-age son, be able to shield yourself—will your poly-son be able to shield himself—against the sexual fantasies you may have about each other?” The answer was no, unless all those incestuous fantasies of synergists the world over were made conscious and acknowledged so that the taboo itself could go on prohibiting. Ensconced in perpetual incestuous fantasies, the new families would survive. Otherwise, incest would appear common and, more detrimentally, what Mayleas called “Fuck You Sublimation” would become the defining feature of the family. Here, every single antagonism and conflict was grounded in the refusal to acknowledge incestuous desire and fantasy.
Mayleas closed “The Joy of Incest” with several invented scenarios in which the repression of incestuous wishes in synergistic families leads to conflicts and tragedies. The lesson at the end of each scenario is that, had the members consciously shared their incestuous desires, they would have avoided the conflicts and tragedies. All the scenarios are set in the homes of the middle and upper classes. So, too, is Farrell’s father-daughter seduction; recall that Pomeroy, himself a prominent Manhattan sex therapist, held discussions with his daughter about their potential incestuous relations. As the material conditions of the middle class—the single-family home, let alone the vacation home and beach house—became more and more precarious, these writers fantasized these families as saved by the practices and fantasies of consensual incest. Was consensual incest the repressed libidinal scene of the normative family? What would remain if and when the social and material crises abated?
*
By the turn of the twenty-first century, accounts of traumatic incestuous abuse were common in American culture, a legacy of the feminist activism of the 1970s. From Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolinato Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, the confessions of daytime talk show host Oprah Winfrey to the revelation and confession of 1958 Miss America, Marilyn Van Derbur, to People Magazine in 1991, the trauma imaginary, which has been so prevalent in structuring psychic life over the last fifty years, was filled with survivors’ accounts of their incestuous abuse. Positive incest, on the other hand, appeared to have been left behind—few remember writers like Ramey, Farrell, Pomeroy, and Gebhard. Yet that would be only a superficial picture. If positive incest does not have a clear legacy in psychiatric or legal realms, that might be because it dispersed into wider American culture. As the family remained in its perpetual crisis, the fantasy worlds of incest tended to be staged in the McMansions and resorts of the shrinking leisure classes.
This is is perhaps most apparent in the explosion of incest porn in the twenty-first century. Searches for incest and various configurations of family and stepfamily terms—mother, daughter, stepsister, etc.—routinely top searches on porn website Pornhub. As the legal scholar Elaine Craig notes, popular incest porn “eroticizes not simply incestuous sexual activity but incestuous sexual violence [. . .] and [. . .] frequently replicates the same sexual scripts reflected in the offending patterns of sexually abusive fathers and brothers.” Much incest porn is presented as ostensibly consensual and an unexpected benefit of the break-down and reconstitution of families; remarriage becomes a site of overt eroticization of the family home. Like the positive incest of the 1970s, contemporary fantasies of consensual incest are imbricated in the sexual violences endemic to the family.
“The family is not only a sociological unit, but a whole constellation of homes, property, wages, representations, desires, and wishes.”
These films stage their erotic families in the McMansions that are one of the key signifiers of the untenable and precarious housing market that has wracked American family life since the late 1970s and metastasized in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Indeed, in porn series like PropertySex, the fetishization of the property competes with the actors in the scenes. As Connie Scozzaro and Jeff Nagy note, the series “repositions pornography in the home, setting itself the task of imagining an erotic resolution to the post-crisis problem of frustrated property ownership and impossible rental markets.” In incest porn, similarly set in the McMansions of California and Florida, the attempted resolution of the crisis occurs through incest.
It’s almost as if the willingness to stage familial sex is what secures this fraught housing. The family is not only a sociological unit, but a whole constellation of homes, property, wages, representations, desires, and wishes. These films suggest that perhaps that constellation follows from the incestuous scene.
While there are specific modulations to contemporary internet incest porn, it is not a new genre. In fact, amid the positive incest boom, Taboo, which now bills itself as “adult video’s all-time best-selling series,” debuted in 1980 with a depiction of mother-son incest. The film opens with a husband leaving his wife, Barbara, because she would not have sex with the lights on. The next morning, while working through the divorce, her college-aged son, Paul, tells her he has “the best-looking mom in town” just after the camera pans down to her breasts. Barbara, concerned about her post-divorce financial security, nonetheless discourages Paul from dropping out of college and finding a job. Instead, she finds a job with a family friend who immediately sexually harasses her but later becomes her boyfriend. In the meantime, Barbara goes on a date with someone else who takes her to a swingers’ party, where she is uncomfortable and refuses sex. When she gets home, Barbara masturbates, fantasizing about an unidentified lover. In the middle of the night, she ends up in her son’s room and begins to perform fellatio on him. When he wakes up, Paul exclaims “Jesus Christ!” and then joins in. While Barbara is mildly troubled afterward (her desire had taken over), Paul is entirely satisfied. When Barbara confesses her transgression to her friend Gina, instead of being scandalized, Gina is turned on and masturbates the entire time, asking questions like “did you suck his cock?” Ultimately, Barbara and Paul have sex again and then, at the end of the film, she moves on to a relationship with the friend-turned-boss who had previously harassed her. Mother-son incest is figured as a way station on the way to a divorcee’s healthy post-divorce sex life—one that is also, to be clear, masochistically prohibition-restoring, thus intimately connecting psychic health and masochism. Barbara and Paul realized their transgressive fantasy once the nuclear family broke apart. The transitional key to post-divorce stability, for Barbara, at least, was sex with her son. Not unlike the sexologists of the era, the end of repression liberated and fulfilled both Barbara and Paul, who were only slightly perturbed by the trace of an outdated social opprobrium.
Incest porn in the twenty-first century is resolutely organized around what Mayleas called the synergistic family. Series with titles like Moms Teach Sex, Step Siblings Caught, My Family Pies, Sis Loves Me, Family Therapy, Bratty Sis, and Family Swap turn on the libidinal scenes of remarriage and tend to emphasize that there are no blood relations. Unlike the positive incest writings or even Taboo, these films tend both to transgress and uphold incest prohibitions. The breakdown of the family, highlighted by divorce and remarriage, is a site of new sexual possibility and extravagant conspicuous consumption.
Incest porn staged all kinds of sexual relations in the family, libidinally charged familial relations did not always have to culminate in sex for the incestuous desire to be realized. This was the case with a plethora of mother-child scenarios of the twenty-first century. Most writers in the 1970s posited mother-son incest as the least common, but if actual incest was uncommon, staging the mother-child libidinal scenario was less so. John Money and Gerturde Williams wondered in their volume on child sexual abuse, if “[t]he mother who has an orgasm from suckling, while her infant at the breast has an erection could be accused of incest.” Where the positive incest sexologists of the 1970s worried that the incest prohibition was inhibiting touching, pleasure, love, and passion between parents and children, a series of stagings of maternal desire over the last decade or two suggest otherwise. “Boy moms” of TikTok, some of whom garner millions of likes, pronounce their abiding love for their sons and fantasize their courtships and romances. Often soundtracked to Taylor Swift songs of sex, romance, and loss or other pop songs like the 1984 hit “Let’s Hear it for the Boy,” these mothers tend to favor their sons over their daughters and pose themselves as sexual and romantic rivals to future girlfriends, a persistent imposition of the heterosexuality of incest. The more mature, and perhaps more unsettling, version of “boy mom” TikTok is the reality dating show MILF Manor, which premiered on TLC in 2023 and has had two seasons. The show probably generated more commentary on its premise than actual viewership, drawing less than one million viewers per episode (to compare, The Bachelor averages well over three million viewers per episode). The first season of MILF Manor sends a group of young men and older women to a resort mansion for a dating show and various sexual escapades. It is only when they get there that they learn that these are pairs of mothers and sons. (The second season shifts from mothers and sons to fathers and sons competing for the same “MILFs.”) While the mothers and sons never engage in sexwith each other, the entire show, like most of this genre, is an alcohol-fueled libidinal nightmare. The incestuous overtones are, of course, obvious, but the participants refer to them ad nauseam. As one sexually disappointed woman tells a producer during a confessional (a standard feature of reality television), performing a conversation with her suitor, “Listen, bro, you like, say one thing and then your actions say something else. I just don’t have time to play games. But if you want to go sleep with your mom, enjoy.” Another mother, discussing her breasts with her son, reminds him that he loved them when he was a baby. Maybe they were the mother-son duo that inspired the orgasmic breastfeeding fantasy in the Money and Williams volume.
Such libidinally charged, incestuous love is hardly confined to TikTok or dating shows. In 2005, a journalist recounted her fraught love affair with her children in The New York Times. It was a scene of physical entanglements and libidinal cathexes of her children and the disdain and discomfort they elicited. As Linda Baker wrote of a public experience at Powells Bookstore in Portland, Oregon.
I’m canoodling [. . .] with my gangly, 65-pound, 10-year-old son. It started out very innocently. [. . .] [b]ut before I knew what was happening, he was seated firmly on my lap, hands thrust into my hair, and I was stroking his cheek and punctuating my caresses with tiny kisses. [. . .] But what can I say? I’m finding it difficult to keep my hands off my son. And frankly the feeling is mutual [. . .] I often feel as if my son and I are participating in an elaborate courtship ritual, one that is better suited to the one-horned rhinoceros.
In a similar manner, the psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, now appearing in the Showtime documentary series Couples Therapy, penned something of a love letter to her son—she calls it “a short meditation on desire, sexuality, gender, and maternal love through the dialectical frame of feminism, queer sensibility, and the dreaded essentialism”—called “My Hot Toddler,” which appeared in Studies in Gender and Sexuality in 2013. The affective relation was a highly sexual scene, one that everyone seemed to be in on and to which her son was a willing, if coy, contributor. Guralnik turns the banal, everyday qualities of a toddler boy into a sexual performance—or she discerns the incipient sexuality in every affective familial scene. In any case, she ends her quasi-erotic tale having been taken over by her son while watching him sing and strum a guitar. “I am baffled. Enthralled. He is so darn good looking and I am helplessly possessed.”
In 2001, unwittingly inheriting a half-century of the new incest discourse and choosing a favorite of the positive incest crowd—sibling incest—Jonathan Haidt, best known today as a pop diagnostician of anxiety and attention, shared a fantasy with readers of The Psychological Review. The article, an effort to discern the place of intuition over reason in moral judgments, opens with the incest fantasy. It’s worth quoting the fantasy in full.
Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it OK for them to make love?
This was derived from an earlier study Haidt conducted with colleagues, using some of their undergraduate students as test subjects. The aim of this story was to provide an example in which all the conventional oppositions—inbreeding, abuse, harm—were carefully controlled for. For those of us thankfully not subjected to the dictates of modern psychological research, the idea that the story is carefully written to control for such can only be read as patently absurd. Incest is not Haidt’s primary concern here; rather, it’s foundational social rules that, in his estimation, have no basis in moral reasoning and thus require what he calls social intuition. Assuming he concocted an outlandishly transgressive scenario that is revolting without reason, Haidt was unaware of just how common this transgressive scene had become.
Once again, the incest scene of the twenty-first century is figured as primarily middle- and upper-class white families and their domiciles—at least as we imagine them. The incest porn popular on Pornhub, for example, is almost exclusively shot in the devoid, anodyne (and most likely rented) setting of twenty-first-century McMansions; so, too, the backgrounds of most of the “boy moms” content on TikTok. MILF Manor, like most other dating shows, is set in enormous mansions, with Season One at “a villa in Mexico” and Season Two at “a lakefront chalet” in Canada. Linda Baker opens her story in Powell’s Books in Portland, a signifier, if not of wealth necessarily, then of a bourgeois status recognizable to readers of the “Modern Love” column. Haidt’s fantasy is set in a beach cabin during a French vacation. In short, the incest imaginary of the twenty-first-century suggests an erotic plentitude at the heart of our alienating and alienated homes. In the midst of barely holding onto family property, these transgressions of the taboo suggest you can still get what you really want.
Incest as a liberation from repressive and outdated inhibitions, a personal choice among a plethora of sexual proclivities, ensconced in the white nuclear family or its blended, synergistic descendent, and sustained by the precarious circuits of financialized capital, set in lavish resorts and imposing, massive homes, is captured effectively in what is, in most other regards, one of the least compelling commentaries on late modern wealth, The White Lotus. Season Three, set at a resort in Thailand, features a scene of sibling incest that should by now be unremarkable, other than the fact that it is between two brothers. Here the brother-brother incest is facilitated by the loosened inhibitions of MDMA use and a threesome with a woman. While they are having drug-fueled sex with a woman (Chloe) to whom neither is related, the younger brother, Lochlan, reaches over and gives his older brother Saxon a hand job. Prior to this, they had passionately, if uncomfortably, kissed one another.
When they awake the next morning, they slowly remember what happened and are, at minimum, uncomfortable, and then mostly in nauseating denial. While sitting next to the pool with Chloe and her friend Chelsea, who had witnessed everything but had not participated, Saxon is informed that he received a hand job from his brother. Chloe exclaims, “I didn’t force him to jerk you off!” And while Chelsea notes, “God, I don’t think there’s a drug in the world that would make me get with my brother,” she subsequently remarks, “Hey, I don’t judge,” while Chloe follows up with “It’s fine—everyone has their thing, it’s fine.” Saxon shifts into denial, first refusing the knowledge that it happened and then insisting, “No, it’s not a thing. It’s not a thing. It’s definitely not a thing.” Of course, as viewers, we know Saxon has already remembered—and vomited while recalling—the incestuous hand job.
“Are we, then, actually come to the end of the incest prohibition.”
So no, it’s not quite fine. In The White Lotus all the families are miserable despite, or because of, their fabulous luxury. Despite Chloe and Chelsea’s indifference, Lochlan and Saxon are disgusted with having transgressed the prohibition. Or, rather, their responses differ. Saxon is disgusted in no small part because as a financial acolyte of his father, he lost control of himself to familial lust. Lochlan, though initially shocked, reduces all desire to the same thing and sees his function as facilitating its circulation when he finally talks to Saxon about it. “All you care about is getting off,” he tells Saxon, “I’m, you know, a pleaser . . . I just want to give everyone what they want and I’m in a family full of narcissists.” Just as they are about to lose all their wealth, which none but the father knows, Lochlan provides an incestuous hand job. The wealth that has been the backdrop of white bourgeois incest is here revealed to be a precarious scam, wrapped up in the nefarious dealings of their father. Indeed, Lochlan nearly dies—not because of his incestuous dalliance, which would have been the fate of so many nineteenth-century characters, but because his father, who is about to lose his fortune and potentially go to jail for illegal financial transactions, accidentally poisoned him when considering killing the rest of the family, including himself (he had planned to spare Lochlan, who told him he could live without wealth). The incest was a minor event, an ultimately indifferent choice. The world of abundance is a sham, financially and libidinally.
*
Are we, then, actually coming to the end of the incest prohibition? It would be a monumental event, seeing as how it has structured human culture and society for millennia. Has the proliferation of incest fantasies in late modern American culture brought us any closer to liberation from supposedly outdated repression? Will any of this save the family from this newest iteration of the slow crisis that is the family? The answer to all three questions is “no,” and this is because, in the end, the new incest discourse misunderstands desire, conflating social relations and symbolic laws while disavowing psychical reality. Moreover, it is perpetually stuck in the impossible promises and dictates of the family in crisis to which it has been attached. In fact, we might well say that the proliferation of incest fantasies further obscures the psychical reality of the incest prohibition itself.
This is evident in a minor moment in the new incest discourse that is also a major moment in the history of psychoanalysis: the abandonment of the seduction theory. This was the key moment in 1897–1898 when Freud abandoned his claim that the etiology of hysteria lies in childhood sexual abuse and replaced that account with one centered on psychical reality and fantasy. For Freud, this was momentous and made the subsequent theorizations of psychoanalysis possible. For many critics, especially some of those in the new incest discourse, this was an abandonment of victimized girls in favor of protecting the fathers and other men in their lives. This was how Judith Lewis Herman, for instance, read Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory, writing, “[t]o incriminate daughters rather than fathers was an immense relief to him.” Leaving aside Freud’s complicated relationship to many of his patients, such a reading is an abandonment of psychical reality, fantasy, and the unconscious. Indeed, what the positive incest writers, feminist critics and activists, and much of the wider American culture have shared over these years has been a commitment to conscious social reality over and against psychical reality and the unconscious.
After Freud turned to psychical reality—which is not falsehoods and lies, as so many have suggested, but another register of reality—the incest prohibition changed. Freud would continue to identify the social functions of the incest prohibition—he does so, for example, in the definition of it in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)—but increasingly the prohibited figures were also actors who exist nowhere in social reality, figures like phallic mothers and primal fathers. These losses, we might say, are constitutively unrecoverable. Think, for a moment, of Freud’s 1927 essay on fetishism. What is the fetish at once avowing and disavowing? Not the loss of the mother, or of the penis, but something else altogether: “The fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and [. . .] does not want to give up.” Incest, then, is a figure for irreparable loss.
Perhaps this is why, even as incest has become so common in American culture as to be banal, it still always evokes disgust. It’s as if it never happens, even though we have been inundated with documented evidence and cultural fantasies for decades. No matter the frequency of the repetition of incest, the repetition of revulsion keeps pace. The sociological reality of incestuous relations—we know they happen!—may approach the psychical reality that has been repressed, but it can never traverse the gap between the social and the symbolic. It can never recover the lost object. This is what the new incest discourse misunderstands. And it is part of being trapped in the circuits of the family. It’s not so much that incest will save the family as its material and social foundations collapse, but rather that these incestuous fantasies are the last vestiges of that family form that has come with so many impossible and empty promises: that we can satisfy our desires, that we can have stability, that the family will secure our material conditions. As the family collapses, for good and bad, and a catastrophic abundance wreaks havoc while promising salvation and satisfaction, is the normalization of incest all we have left of that violent and sheltering form?
[1] It’s worth noting here that Money himself was accused of child abuse by David Reimers, who was the most famous subject of Money’s influential and now highly criticized gender reassignment practices. For the abuse claim, see John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (Harper Perennial, 2006). His practices in general, now widely criticized, have been described as cruel, especially toward children. See, for instance, Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).