Sexual Ethics

As an easy example, how do I feel about underaged sex? My first reaction is say it is wrong because they need an adult mentality to deal with it well. But I remember being young and wanting sex... Am I being unfair because I know it doesn't relate to me anymore? So one thing I do is see where the taboo lines are and why.

I've always understood that adolescence involves a lot of practice for being an adult. Teens put on personas to try them on for size. They try different types of activities to find those that fit. They experiment with life--and sex is part of that. I fear a lack of development if an adolescent isn't interested in sex.

Sexual activity ranges from snogging to petting to masturbation to oral sex to penetration and all variations thereof. I expect teens to experiment with all of that at some point as preparation for being an adult. I really don't care with whom they experiment, as long as it is consensual and nobody's trying to take advantage of somebody else's inexperience and naivete. I also don't worry if they get disappointed or heartbroken in the process--welcome to the human experience!

Pedophilia involves children who are simply physically not ready for sex at all, let alone being of an age to where they're practicing for adulthood, so that one I think is firm. Incest can lead to severe inbreeding and birth defects, so that's always a concern; it can also interrupt the regular functioning of a family, so I think it still something to be very wary of. I suspect many of the other sexual taboos we have arise from the ease with which things can go horribly wrong--preying on somebody's innocence for an unhealthy relationship.

So, while I think some of our taboos--adolescent sex, for instance (which is a fairly recent taboo, actually)--aren't necessarily warranted, some others appear to be highly useful.

Yeah, I know, this had squat to do with poly. It was just something that kept banging on the door to get out of my head as part of the discussion. We now return you to posts that might actually discuss sexual ethics as relating to polyamory....
 
Thanks for those words, Crow. My concept in starting this topic was to discuss sexual ethics in general -- and poly in relation to that. So you're right on topic!
 
This is really in response to Redpepper's comment about the media and influence on our culture -

I was talking to Ouroboros last night about this. How in language many of the derogatory words stem from something sexual... (I will try to be as proper as possible with examples as this is meant to be purely an academic argument) For example, C**t, Slut, Whore, S*ck my D*ck, the list goes on... (again I apologize if this is insulting to anyone, it is not meant to be - moderators, please feel free to delete if you must)

How horrible that we use these terms to degrade someone? This type of language is not only degrading to sexual acts and natural and beautiful parts of the human body, but is in a way a form of abuse of power... It relates power to sex and in a negative way...

It is no wonder that people have a hard time defining ethical sex. So much of our language is poisoned by this type of negativity.
 
We use derogatory sexual language. We hear about sexual acts, often ones that objectify and are even violent towards women, in our popular music. We watch teen dramas which revolve around who is having sex with whom. We are constantly inundated by ads using sex to sell. Our celebrities are hounded in the media over their sex lives. Our young celebrities are pressured to have more sex appeal. Yet abstinence is preached. Proper sex education is not taught in our schools. Parents don't talk to their children about responsible sex until it's often too late. Open and honest discussions on sex are taboo. Yup. Pretty back-ass-wards.
 
I was talking to Ouroboros last night about this. How in language many of the derogatory words stem from something sexual... (I will try to be as proper as possible with examples as this is meant to be purely an academic argument) For example, C**t, Slut, Whore, S*ck my D*ck, the list goes on... (again I apologize if this is insulting to anyone, it is not meant to be - moderators, please feel free to delete if you must)

This forum allows for adults to express themselves using all necessary words. Not only is your post not going to be deleted, I'll spell the words out clearly:

Cunt, Slut, Whore, Suck my dick; and expand on it a bit: cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, twat, pussy, cock, prick, to include terms for actual intercourse, such as fuck, bugger, etc....

These all arose out of the Puritanical bent of western culture, as strongly influenced by the actual Puritans and those like them. Remember, any earthly pleasure--to include sex in any form--is supposed to be sinful and something to be reviled.
 
Remember, any earthly pleasure--to include sex in any form--is supposed to be sinful and something to be reviled.

Heh. And they call us perverts!
 
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And of course the only thing going through my mind is George Carlin and his seven words...boy I'm going to miss that man!
 
What kinds of sexual activity should be socially discouraged? And why?
http://www.polyamory.com/forum/showpost.php?p=4401&postcount=17

After reading over the excellent posts by others in this thread I realized that the topical areas are ones that we would naturally gravitate toward. They are all important, incest, underage sex, prostitution, even infidelity. And each one of these topics, if viewed both culturally, and historically, have been at times both embraced by mankind and rejected. The things I think of immediately when posed with the question, "what sexual activity should be discouraged?" are acts of brutality. Whether they be true sexual acts, or acts perpetrated within the parameters of sex activity,........ rape, murder and torture, regardless of the age or sex of the victim, should never be tolerated; should never be excused.
 
siblings daring

This question is for all who want to answer it -- and isn't directed at anyone in particular.:

Does the thought of two sisters (or brothers) dating the same guy (or gal) ... rub you the wrong way?

Should such a practice be socially discouraged?

If yes, why?

an emperuc NO, it is perfectly ok for siblings dating the same person, i dont find anything wrong about and the society at large has nothing to say about, and it cant even be termed as incest

Also i agree completely with Barry abour what acts should be discouraged and should never be excused
 
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Kant's ideal of dignity and how it applies to sex

While I'm new and I don't want to offend anyone, some of what I've read does bother me. There are several areas that I'd like to address:

-age
-harm principal
-human dignity

While it does bother me from a conditioned standpoint, a cultural one that I soaked up from growing up inside a parochial culture, intellectually it bothers me that the age of a potential other be lower than what is at least legally mandated. While these are merely rules of thumb, they are important rules as the human brain is nowhere near mature, nor is emotional maturity sufficiently advanced.

Personally I would not engage in a romantic attachment to anyone who was not both emotionally and intellectually mature enough to:

a) see me as more than an authority
b) see me as more than a trophy
c) see me as a stage of development

All three of these evolutions are stages of emotional development that lead to adulthood and can be directly responded to in understanding Kant's ideal of human dignity. That being, no person is a means to an end.

While Kant's ideas are limited, they are valuable as they inform the harm principle. The harm principle being that consenting adults may do as they please where no harm is committed.

The problem here is that if at any time attachments form between two wholly different stages of development one or the other exists as a means to an end and not a means in and of themselves. Being utilized as such is, according to Kant's principle, unethical as it denotes 1) harm to the dignity of at least one partner in a relationship who is being specifically used as a means, 2) a relationship where power and control are likely to play a lopsided factor and can harm emotional and intellectual development and thusly human dignity, and 3) both parties are not likely to fully understand the harm done to each of their selves and others that may share a stake in that relationship.

The harm principle, as you can see above (at least where Kant is concerned in this example) has absolutely nothing to do with wider society and their goals as society's goals in regard to non-monogamous relationships and children are equally well served.

What I see that's missing from this discussion is the idea of human dignity and how it relates to sexual and polyamorous relationships. In what way are individuals limited by empathy toward and care for the dignity of their partners? I think that's the meat of the question of ethics in poly relationships and no one has seemed to answer it.

In some relationships, as one I am currently in, BDsm play is involved to a degree. And, while it took me a while to understand that it was empowering for her, I did eventually see how that care was mutual and the temporary physical harm was, not justified, but warranted under the human dignity principle. Because it's mutually beneficial, and the relationship power is shared, the play becomes ethical specifically because it is equally empowering. Each are empowered and subjugated, even the dominant. That I understand.

Without that arrangement, where power is shared from the start, and the experience itself is empowering for each partner to an act, it is a violation of the dignity principle. So, I would have to disagree with incest as an acceptable format for a poly relationship. As a parent can never be anything but an authority in some sense, a parent-child relationship is unethical. It can be nothing else. The growth of each of the individuals is stunted by a relationship that relies on, and feeds off of, a power dynamic that does not change substantially. Ages do not matter in this regard as emotional maturity, as stated above, cannot exist within this dynamic.

In short, cousins can meet as equals, but a parent and child cannot. Consent cannot exist inside a power dynamic where one actor is an unquestionable authority. And any relationship that relies on consent must rely on equally empowered actors. Otherwise one is always a means to the other's end.

This is what I think.
 
What kinds of sexual activity or relationship are morally or ethically inappropriate?

What kinds of sexual activity should be socially discouraged? And why?

Age of consent is an arbitrary number picked out of a hat by politicians. However, until there is a way to concisely evaluate an individuals ability to choose and consent, there needs to be *some* cutoff point. For now, it might as well be the dumb, arbitrary age picked by our trusted authority figures.

Brother and sister, mother and daughter, elderly person and nurse, boss and employee... go for it, knock it out of the park.

As far as the concern about the ability to give consent, this would obviously be a case by case basis that would be sussed out by the people involved and adjacent (as well as HR departments and the police if it gets weird). To make sweeping assumptions about what configuration makes consent impossible is to punish the many for the potential sins of the few.

This thread started by asking about when it is appropriate to "socially discourage" (repress) a certain kind of sexual activity or relationship configuration. When in that context, unless someone is overtly removing someones ability to choose, I think society can go solve an actual problem.
 
As long as it's mutually consensual, I am okay with it.
 
Hm!

Well the cornerstone is consent, but I think that there should be a bit more to it.

Agree with Marcus, that the age of majority is arbitrary and silly.

BUT. I do believe that sexual interest in the pre-pubescent, on the part of the post-pubescent, is wrong. That, to me, is a big biological cutoff point, where I do feel that the age difference of participants is meaningful, simply because of the amount of development and maturation that goes on in those phases of human growth.

I'll never, ever be ok with anyone who is, say, 13-14 and older, messing around with a 6 year old or an 8 year old or a 10 year old. Would I freak out to find that a 9 year old child was "playing doctor" (exploring sexual play) with another child of a similar age? So long as there was no hurt, harm, or coercion, I would not be appalled by that. I was certainly enjoying my own body from a VERY young age, to the point that upon recently hearing boys say that they discovered masturbation around puberty, was very surprising to me. You mean you weren't doing it well before then? I was.

I don't view humans of any age as completely non-sexual or having no aspect of sexuality to their nature, nor do I feel that, as a natural thing, it carries any inherent evil to it.

One consideration that I put out there in cases of age differences, power/authority roles, and incest... So first of all, inbreeding risk should be mentioned. That's bad. Setting that aside in the day and age of reproductive choice, and assuming that there was no coercion... Let us look at a case such as in the Jeremy Irons film, "Lolita," which my Zen recently had me watch. He felt it was a cautionary tale of how a man's life was destroyed by giving in to the sweet temptation of a teenage girl. Really now. I have a hard time seeing things the same way, because I was not merely sexually active as a teenager, age 14 onward, but I was very aggressive and sometimes pursued older men when it pleased me. What was wrong about Lolita? Well first of all I had tremendous sympathy for the mother in the story, shrew though she was. She gave her heart to this man and he deceived her, and I hate that. Deception flies in the face of consent. Then you come to the power/authority issue. It isn't merely that he is in this role...because she has little other choice in the matter, due to the situation and her place in it, her consent is thereby compromised. She cannot withdraw it effectively at any time of her choosing. She has this ongoing relationship with this man as her legal guardian, which means she can't just get away from him easily.

I don't think it was wrong for his character and hers to have had sex, if they had come together as strangers and parted ways thereafter. But for him to engineer this ownership of her, this keeping of her, I found wrong. She was not old enough to consent to serious commitment and blending the roles of parent and lover to a developing child was problematic.

I would argue the same for people in workplaces. If ceasing the relationship could mean someone has to lose their livelihood, then that is not a good relationship to be having. Same for students and teachers...although it does bring up the trickier ground of what about students and students? You cannot simply escape someone if they sit behind you in class.

Another important biological cutoff happens around age 25. This is the approximate point where one's frontal lobes are fully developed, which is the part of the brain that handles evaluation of consequences. That in my opinion would be a far more appropriate age of consent...but it would preclude a number of nice, young, healthy, fertile breeding years for females in particular. Socially speaking, it simply wouldn't fly...and with men of all ages being drawn to youth in women and having a hard enough time keeping their hands off teenagers younger than 18, I mean look at the prevalence of "barely legal" porn...for most men, a woman of 25 is nearing the end of her most attractive phase of life anyways. Sad, but perhaps true. Not for all men, thankfully...but there it is. It's a thing.

Back to the point. So when I was 14-18, I had many partners, and some few were adult men in their 20's. My first at age 14, was 19 at the time. Fortunately, my mother had the sense to get me on birth control pills, and have me visit the Health Department office for STI screenings frequently. These precautions in place, I feel that I was competent to make sexual choices and give sexual consent. What I was NOT ready to consent to, were such matters as becoming pregnant and a Mother. In fact I didn't want to do so at all, but when at 18 I was off the pill and we were using condoms, and I became pregnant, the hormonal effects caused me to fall in love with the entire business and carry the baby and keep the baby and raise the baby...just as nature intended. And because of that, I was stuck in an abusive relationship with a man 11.5 years older than I, as his third miserable marriage, and my ability to withdraw consent to it was heavily influenced by the fact that as a very young woman, I had no idea how to live as an adult, let alone support small kids, by myself. And he treated me sometimes like a child, grilling me on who I shared my time with, telling me that other men and boys only wanted one thing, demanding that I be accountable to him with no reciprocation, since he was a man and beyond all reproach.

The power imbalance there was not something I signed on for.

And it was created mostly from the fact that doing right for my offspring was more important to me than it was to him, and I knew it. But I will always feel that he came along when I was not fully mature, and hijacked my life.

At 18, I was not ready for the choices I had to make in that relationship. But hey, I made him feel good, so it wasn't unethical for him to pursue me as a means to his own happiness, I was legal and all, so no big deal.

I don't object to the sex, I object to a man coming into my life and seizing me as his property, and cementing the deal by getting me pregnant. No rules were technically broken, except that he was cheating on his second wife with me at the beginning, but still. It feels unethical. And part of that too, was deception. I told him many times from the beginning that I did not want to have kids, and he did not tell me that it was a huge life goal for him and his second wife had miscarried 18 times trying to give him a child. I didn't find that out until we were getting divorced.

I feel that had I had sex, only sex, well protected with no expectation of a serious relationship, with a 60 year old man when I was 15 years old, it would be less ethically bad, than a man expecting that at age 18 I was ready to commit to him for LIFE.

Now. The other area that, clearly, I feel is unethical, is "cheating." But again, it goes back to where I think that if deception is involved, then informed consent is not clearly possible. I also take issue with a very common practice of trying to obtain sexual consent from inebriated persons. "Picking up women at bars" is something I find deeply distasteful. I like sex. I've never needed to be intoxicated even slightly, to feel ok with consenting to it when I wanted it.
 
So first of all, inbreeding risk should be mentioned. That's bad.

If we have any geneticists on board, please feel free to correct me, but I have never seen any evidence of the anti-incest gene that causes mutation. To my knowledge, no such function exists. People get the "if you inbreed you get mutations" idea from entertainment, because it's a cool addition to a horror story.

No doubt there have been mutations displayed by many, many generations of exclusive inbreeding but that's the same as a pure bred dog. If the genes of a family are almost exclusively bred, then whatever genetic liabilities that family line has will have less chance of being bred out and introduced to other healthy genes. This would then promote a family line carrying down whatever defect is associated with their genes. It should be noted that this is the same with healthy genes being kept within the line.

Breeding with a mix of lines of genetics isn't any kind of guarantee that genetic deficiencies won't follow us around and cause all manner of problems (obviously), but it does at least lower the risk of it being predictably reproduced.

The "if you impregnate your sister it will come out a fish" stuff is just fun fiction made to socially enforce the idea that incest is evil. It is a perfect example of the "social discouragement" the OP was asking about.
 
If we have any geneticists on board, please feel free to correct me, but I have never seen any evidence of the anti-incest gene that causes mutation. To my knowledge, no such function exists. People get the "if you inbreed you get mutations" idea from entertainment, because it's a cool addition to a horror story.

No doubt there have been mutations displayed by many, many generations of exclusive inbreeding but that's the same as a pure bred dog. If the genes of a family are almost exclusively bred, then whatever genetic liabilities that family line has will have less chance of being bred out and introduced to other healthy genes. This would then promote a family line carrying down whatever defect is associated with their genes. It should be noted that this is the same with healthy genes being kept within the line.

Breeding with a mix of lines of genetics isn't any kind of guarantee that genetic deficiencies won't follow us around and cause all manner of problems (obviously), but it does at least lower the risk of it being predictably reproduced.

The "if you impregnate your sister it will come out a fish" stuff is just fun fiction made to socially enforce the idea that incest is evil. It is a perfect example of the "social discouragement" the OP was asking about.

You think?

Personally, I'd like some more science. I tend to think that if you have genetic conditions that might be recessive and you bring them together with siblings, you have greater odds of expression...but that could be as benign as eye color, not necessarily mental dysfunction or physical deformity.

Still though, the histocompatibility logic doesn't work out so well.

In my recent attempts to force myself to a greater emotional acceptance of porn, I've run into tons and tons of incest themes...where it isn't necessarily likely that the actors and actresses are in fact related, but in the title and flimsy plot line, they establish a familial relationship. Evidently people find this titillating. I find it squicky. In fact I am repelled by men who resemble my father, even though I like older men, if they LOOK like him, I'm disgusted. I cannot even consider sex with a man who has the same balding pattern or facial hair style, it is one of few appearance related factors that will unilaterally make me reject a possible partner.
 
I get uncomfortable when there's any sort of clear "power over" situation or coercive element. To me, that's where it becomes untenable.

A teenager gets involved with someone who happens to be a teacher? Let's say the former is 18 & the latter 23. Out in the wild world, it's NOT a terribly huge gap. However, if that teacher is working in the kid's school, there IS an inherent power differential; this only widens if the teacher leads one of the student's classes. And if that teacher has some sort of primacy -- being with the kid for hours a day, or teaching a course important to the student's hopes for college-- it's (IMNSHO) entirely untenable.

Connecticut explicitly factors "position of authority" into determining whether consent of a teenager was valid.

Years ago, the University of Minnesota recognized that it (as an institution) really didn't have much power to prevent that sort of thing from occurring. However, it put in a simple rule, basically If a student complains, and we find a relationship to have existed (or any proof there was pressure in that direction) then the professor/instructor/graduate aide is WRONG -- period. The union sided with this, guaranteeing thorough investigation & proper defense but very little latitude for appeal. Complaints dropped off dramatically; rumor is that some profs basically started saying, "sure I'm interested... AFTER you graduate."

Age of consent? A total maze in the United States.

Here's a chart that contains acceptable age differences, sometimes referred to as the "close-in-age exemption," which varies by state from 5 years down to zero... except in Utah (naturally :rolleyes:) where it's TEN.

There's all sorts of local variations that add to confusion. For instance, in Alabama, sexual consent is 16, yet two 14-year-olds can marry if all parents consent... but a 14-year-old who's already been married :confused: doesn't need parents to agree. In New Hampshire, boys can't be less than 14, girls less than 13 -- the only exception to age 14 being the lower limit.

In most states, parents & a court may agree that a kid can marry at a younger age "by reason of pregnancy or the birth of a child".
 
FWIW, in the early '80s I made a case that statutory marriage ought to require court approval until at least age 25.

If it's "going to last a lifetime," why NOT wait? I saw where Society was shifting away from damning & punishing pregnant girls, & "cohabitation" becoming common, not even raising an eyebrow from any neighbors. Live together, iron out the hassles, & if the two of you are still together THEN start planning the big-top wedding.

Another common excuse is that marriage "creates a stable happy environment for children." When I think of the happy unmarrieds & toxic marrieds I've known, this claim is ludicrous. Two teenagers, too young to sign contracts, are cut adrift because they committed the sin of fornication & now we can punish their bastard offspring too, yee-haw.
 
Personally, I'd like some more science.

Me too. My current understanding of how genetics works lends me to disregard the screaming alarm about breeding with family members. Note, I'm not on a crusade to get family members to breed with one another, I'm talking about "should it be socially discouraged"... and I say "demonstrate the danger or shut up, Society".

I tend to think that if you have genetic conditions that might be recessive and you bring them together with siblings, you have greater odds of expression...but that could be as benign as eye color, not necessarily mental dysfunction or physical deformity.

Like being tall, short, symmetrical, predisposition to... whatever. Yes, it seems to make sense that selective breeding among a narrow set of genes would have a higher probability of perpetuating all traits within that system to at least some degree.

Still though, the histocompatibility logic doesn't work out so well.

How so?

In my recent attempts to force myself to a greater emotional acceptance of porn, I've run into tons and tons of incest themes...where it isn't necessarily likely that the actors and actresses are in fact related, but in the title and flimsy plot line, they establish a familial relationship. Evidently people find this titillating.

Things that are socially "bad" tend to become titillating. It's what a society gets when it "socially discourages" practices. It's a double edged sword that is waved around without thought.

I find it squicky. In fact I am repelled by men who resemble my father, even though I like older men, if they LOOK like him, I'm disgusted. I cannot even consider sex with a man who has the same balding pattern or facial hair style, it is one of few appearance related factors that will unilaterally make me reject a possible partner.

*shrug*, I am also not attracted to my family members in a sexual way. That's just my personal feeling, though.
 
Aye...it is of intellectual interest.

Well the histocompatibility thing. So I have watched with keen interest as labs in recent decades have tried to explore the unconscious drivers behind human mating choices and behaviors.

They have done the thing with women smelling sweaty t-shirts, with women wearing the color red and with people grading attractiveness when sober or drunk, they studied what women wore to nightclubs with intriguing results...the women who exposed the most skin and danced in ways that moved their bodies the most in surveyed bars, as measured with a video camera and objective analysis metrics, were the women who had committed male partners, but were not out WITH them. Women have a native predisposition to seek casual sex partners when they have a provider already in their lives, according to this experiment. When women ovulate, male testosterone spikes in response and when women scent this, they are drawn to it if they are fertile and repelled by it when they are not.

And...histocompatibility, supposedly women are able to "taste" in the male saliva during a kiss and to lesser extent detect in the scent of a mating prospect, if there is a wider variance of genetically expressed resistance to disease. (Major Histocompatibility, or chemoreception studies.) At least that is the theory. I know that there have been instances where I was into a guy, until we kissed, or I got very close, and then for reasons I could not pin down I was utterly repelled nearly to the point of panic. Other women I have spoken to have described experiences that were to some extent similar, where they kissed a man and "there was no spark" or they were just turned off at that point, and had a difficult time expressing quite why. This theory is a sound hypothesis for that and some of the behavioral studies in a documentary I watched seemed to support it. This suggests that genetic diversity promotes better immune health.

The other thing here is that you seem to be saying that excessive inbreeding is where the danger lies, such as with breeding animals, where you start getting mutations and the like. Which would mean it's ok if it's only occasional. But the danger with "socially acceptable" versus NOT socially acceptable, is how do you say what is too much and what isn't? When we were taking about remote communities with not very many families in large geographical territories, it was hard to avoid SOME inbreeding (cousins or what have you)... But there was a legit worry that the gene pool might really get too shallow. I know this because of my own family history in rural North Carolina tobacco country going back to like the 1600s. When you're doing genealogy research and find that at one point two brothers and two sisters married, and then five or six generations later, the descendants of those two pairs married and produced your Grandpa...and you sit there staring at this weird circle in the diagram of your family tree... Yeah. I think there was a danger of things getting too close there. But what were they going to do, when there were only a few families in the whole county and while they each produced about a bajillion kids, they all intermarried constantly...and they were too poor to relocate...? Were there mutation effects? Well, I do know that asthma and scoliosis both run quite strongly in that side of the family, and that every relative with so much as a drop of that blood has a similarity in the shape of our (always brown) eyes.

But again, nowadays sex and breeding just aren't necessarily the same thing. My main objection to incest, ethically, has much more to do with the fact that there is too often a coercive power imbalance situation, including even with siblings, and one where it is difficult to escape if the nature of the relationship is abusive.
 
And...histocompatibility, supposedly women are able to "taste" in the male saliva during a kiss and to lesser extent detect in the scent of a mating prospect, if there is a wider variance of genetically expressed resistance to disease. (Major Histocompatibility, or chemoreception studies.) At least that is the theory.... This suggests that genetic diversity promotes better immune health.

That's pretty thin. I expect there will need to be quite a bit more data to even suggest such a thing without chuckling... like mountains of data.

The other thing here is that you seem to be saying that excessive inbreeding is where the danger lies, such as with breeding animals, where you start getting mutations and the like. Which would mean it's ok if it's only occasional.

Can we be honest for a second? I have never encountered someone who was against incest purely because they had some 'thing' about the potentiality of mutation due to inbreeding. Like... they just can't stop talking about genetics and interbreeding is one of their primary interests. I don't mean to suggest that they don't exist, just that I've seen plenty of railing against incest and the root cause was never genetics.

Do you think that your strong aversion to incest is related to what could happen if two related people had a baby?

But again, nowadays sex and breeding just aren't necessarily the same thing. My main objection to incest, ethically, has much more to do with the fact that there is too often a coercive power imbalance situation, including even with siblings, and one where it is difficult to escape if the nature of the relationship is abusive.

Removing consent, coercion, rape, abuse, slavery... I think we can all get behind the idea that these are not good things and should be minimized.

Because one behavior is frequently taking place in association with another does not make one behavior the cause of the other.

Romantic relationships are a predictable source of frustration, anger, fear, etc. We should definitely make sure people aren't having romantic relationships anymore - right?
 
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