#westermarck effect

[dumbingofage]

[ask-a-vetblr]

I’m trying to find the post about the person asking if dogs know not to mate with their siblings, but I can’t find it. What if the name of the evolutionary thing that humans have that makes the thought of mating with siblings unideal? The wildermarck effect?

Prynhawn,

It’s the westermarck effect, and here’s the post!

-mod @whalefromwales

[hernameisgabe]

Future Plans

Articles that should be showing up in the near future are

Synopses of why I support things like consanguinamory and polyamory, and the advantages and disadvantages to these practices

A comprehensive study on the Westermarck Effect, analyzing whether it's a valid hypothesis.

Articles about my views on touchy topics like feminism and social justice

Some personal posts about my own struggles with subjects on this blog

A resources page with other great blogs and helpful links

If you have any suggestions, questions, etc, let me know!

[defilerwyrm]

Incest vs Consent

king of meta s/he says, good lord /dies

You're probably thinking of the Westermarck effect which is basically the inverse of genetic sexual attraction (GSA). It's important to note that it's a hypothesis, not a theory, but there is supporting evidence for it. The Westermarck effect describes a phenomenon by which people raised in close proximity to each other are less likely to form sexual or romantic bonds, and those who do "intermarry" (be it in a formal or informal sense) often find the sexual/romantic portions of their relationship crumbling quickly. GSA, by contrast, describes the phenomenon of closely-related persons who were not raised together being sexually attracted to each other when they meet in adulthood – eg Oedipus and Jocasta.

Taboos against incest exists for two main reasons. The first is reproductive: inbreeding brings out recessive genes which may be deleterious, resulting in congenital defects and diseases (eg, haemophilia, cranial distortions, infertility, infant mortality, immune system issues).

The second is sociopolitical (Lévi-Strauss posits this argument pretty strongly): "marriage" (and I'm not just talking about the Judeo-Christian construct of marriage, of course) has been used as a strategy for making pacts between family groups for millennia, be they for economic exchange or political gain, and "keeping it in the family" means giving up those pacts. Bear in mind that marriage as a trade agreement between households wasn't/isn't just for nobility and royalty: even serfs paid each other dowries. If you were to have a case like Martin's Lannisters wherein none of the offspring of a strategic marriage are actually the product of both spouses (Baratheon's kids are all by various other women, Lannister's kids are all by her brother) it removes the claim of inheritance from one family which is a betrayal of the pact; here the taboo against producing bastard children overlaps the taboo against incest. 

The fact that incestuous relationships involving partners that grew up together (whether sibling/sibling or parent/child) are inherently abusive and have massive consent issues should, logically, be the primary reason for the taboo(s), but humans are just a little too monstrous yet for that to be the case. More on this later.

In cases of GSA (eg, Patrick Stübling and Susan Karolewski), consent is not an issue because the two weren’t raised together, so they did not have a familiar power dynamic growing up. Siblings who’re reared together, however, do. While as I pointed out here (section 1), parent-child relationships by nature have a far greater imbalance of power than sibling relationships; however there is still an inherent and far more complex power imbalance at work based on age-rank dominance, and for a sexual relationship to be truly consensual, there can be nothing of the sort. In theory, older siblings are expected to protect, defend, aid, and teach younger siblings, who are in turn expected to obey older siblings (though not to the exclusion of a parent or other authority figure who outranks the elder sibling). In practise, older siblings are sometimes demeaning, manipulative, and domineering towards our younger siblings, who in turn often manipulate others against their elder siblings. Elder siblings often resent younger siblings “always getting their way” while younger siblings often resent elder siblings being perceived as more mature or responsible. This is NOT a relationship of equals.

Because of this, sibling incest is inherently manipulative. If the younger sibling is the one pursuing the older it plays on the older sibling’s ingrained (by which I mean learned, not necessarily instinctive, though that can also be a factor) sense of responsibility to tend to the needs of the younger. If the older sibling pursues the younger it takes advantage of age-rank dominance, the younger’s ingrained notion that the older must be obeyed – I’d argue this is even more problematic because it’s closer to coercion than seduction.

I mentioned earlier than non-GSA sibling incest is abusive. That doesn't necessarily mean that one sibling beats the other: there are many forms of abuse. It's because a relationship in which one party has been coerced or otherwise manipulated into entering rather than doing so voluntarily is by definition abusive. As much as I would like to erase all knowledge of That One Episode From Season 7 from my mind it's actually a really good example of what I mean. In any setting (that isn't 110% skeevy) in which "love spells" exist, they come with warnings if not outright taboos, because love compelled is love untrue. Which is a pretty way of saying "sex minus consent equals rape" bar goddamned none. Given that Sam was manipulated/coerced into that marriage, consummating it would have been rape. The fact that it was magical coercion is irrelevant: it was still coercion.

Now then.

If we were to ignore the maternal-filial nature of the Winchester brothers’ relationship and presume, for a moment, that they’re just brothers, you can’t ignore the fact that they were specifically and painstakingly raised with a chain-of-command power imbalance. All this still applies: you’ve either got Dean taking advantage of Sam’s hero worship and instilled instinct to go along with what Dean wants (and let’s not kid ourselves – he may argue, he may rebel, he may run away, but in the end he almost always comes back and gives in), or you’ve got “take care of Sammy” being perverted into the idea that if Sam wants a romantic/sexual relationship then Dean has to give him that. Either way it’s not healthy and not truly consensual even though they’re adults.

It's true that there's no threat of either of them bearing deformed young given they're both cismen, the likelihood of either of them entering a strategic marriage is slim to none (and Slim's out of town), and they're already outlaws who exist on the periphery of society and sustain themselves on breaking taboos (eg dabbling in various forms of magic, desecrating graves, stealing, lying, fraud, etc). With all that in mind, were they raised apart then I'd agree that Wincest would have no appreciable consent issues and would in fact make a lot of thematic sense, given the Gothic basis of the series.

But they were raised together. One raised the other. Their imbalanced power dynamic is part of the foundations of the show. Therefore there's no way Wincest can exist without problematic lack of true consent or without abusive elements.

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More of my meta can be found via my master post or my meta tag.

[pagesofkenna]

latiburona replied to your post: latiburona replied to your post: the-candy-van...

I feel like most people ship Kaoru/Hikaru. IDEK MAN.

oh... yeah, you're probably right there. idk - I've got nothing against incest ships on principal but I'm also a huge follower of the idea of the Westermarck Effect and I GET REAL TECHNICAL WHEN IT COMES TO SHIPPING LIKE MY SHIPS HAVE TO FOLLOW CERTAIN RULES so that theory is one of my rules and very few incest pairings make it past that.

[panlight]

/36650387268/twilightlifefacebookpage-jacob-should-i-start so umm... is he starting to see "Nessie" differently?? (I still think imprinting on a baby is creepy)

It really is creepy.  I just can't wrap my head around the idea that right now he loves her as a big brother or uncle, but someday, some switch will flip in his brain and he will see her as a romantic partner.  HOW can you do that?  How can someone be 'family' and then suddenly be 'sexy?'  How can RENESMEE switch how she sees him, too?  That's not how healthy minds work.  She should always see him as a family member.