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Literary Incest

ON MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES - by G.L. Horton (01/28/02)

BG writes: Of course, there's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and certain Swedish movies about brother/sister intercourse. You've omitted Virginia Woolf. Her brother was much older, though, and creepy-coercive.

I did some research on brother/sister incest for a play I wrote, "Good Blood and High Standards". Brother/sister incest is pretty common, at least in circumstances where the kids have unsupervised time together and/or sleep in the same room.

However, most of it is between siblings near in age and is exploratory in nature-- "playing doctor" -- and is forgotten or repressed when the sibs mature. The incidence dwindles when kids are raised under constant adult supervision -- as they usually are in the prosperous middle-class families who were the subjects for psychoanalysis. Not much lit on it, and the stats are from broad surveys rather than clinical practice. Victims seldom show up in clinical practice. You do see in the tabloids cases of brother/sister couples who have assumed new identities in order to live as if married, if they happen to be discovered and prosecuted.

I was an "only" till age 8, and baby brother never interested me much, but I did hear of brother/sister sex play from friends, mostly farm kids from large families who fooled around in the barn. These kids seemed otherwise normal to me.

 

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