Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Incest

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Incest. It’s not the lightest topic of conversation, we wouldn’t recommend bringing it up as an icebreaker on a date, or when you’re trying to impress new people at a party - but it’s one which has fascinated many of us for centuries nonetheless.But has it always been taboo? How have the necessary degrees of separation between partners grown and shrunk over the years? And why were so many royal families keen on familial relations in the past...Hapsburg chin anyone?Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with Brian Connolly to discuss the history of incest, an episode suggested to us by a listener. You can read more of Brian's work here.WARNING: There is adult content and explicit words in this episode.Senior producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Mixed by Siobhan Dale.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sounds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hi, lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Are you ready? Are you steady? Well, here it comes. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things, and you should be an adult too.

Today, we're talking about incest. I can't tiptoe around it any further than that. Do I even need to warn you where this one is going to go? And if you just don't want to listen to this one today, that is absolutely fine. Get out. Get out now while you still can. And for the rest of you, well, I am ready to do this if you are. And welcome back to the Twix the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. Although today I am not here on my own. I have a listener with me. In fact, this entire episode is because Yasmin emailed us in with this request.

Hello, my name is Yasmin, and I've listened to Betwixt the Sheets right from the very beginning. Never missed a show. I think it's absolutely amazing. Thank you, Kate, for making it funny and interesting. My suggestion is maybe a podcast on incest, because you catch glimpses of it throughout history, and I wondered what Kate had to say about it. Thank you for that, Yasmin. So to find out more about incest, I am joined by historian Brian Conner. If we're so squeamish about incest, if it puts so many of us off and freaks us out,

then why have so many royal families throughout history and around the world been really keen on family relations in the past? Hapsburg Chin, anyone? And how of the necessary degrees of separation between partners changed? Was it all right to marry your brother? Was it all right to marry your cousin? How about your second cousin once removed? At what point do we say that this is okay? And what have Oedipus, Leviticus and Freud got to do with any of it?

Well, today, betwixt the tangled sheets, we are going to try and find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary.

Oh, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Brian Connolly. How are you? I'm very good. Thanks for having me on. It's my pleasure. I have very recently learned that you are in Florida, and it is very, very, very hot in Florida.

It is. It's unbearable, the politics and the heat. That makes you taking the time out to do this even more generous. So thank you very, very much. Oh, absolutely. But what a subject to be talking about? in the humid Florida heat, your research on the history of incest. Yeah, there's a lot to say about it.

Any kind of subjects like this, I always wonder what made you research this? Was this like a gradual, you sort of arrived at it, or was there something that made you go, that's the one for me? In one sense, it was gradual. I'm always happy that I have an easy answer for this because people ask me. I've had a longstanding interest in psychoanalysis, so I was in a history, PhD program. And we were reading Freud for something, and it just came. to me, he has all this to say about the incest prohibition and the erotics of the family,

but I innocently at the time asked, what happens when you actually engage in incest? And then I started looking in people, I mean, some people had written on it, but there wasn't much done. So I just started researching it. This was initially my dissertation, and then it turned into a book at some point. It is a fascinating and utterly bonkers history. Do you know, I think that Game of Thrones has actually warped all of our views on incest, is that we used to be quite like, oh, no, that's terrible. And now I was watching a House of Dragons and thinking, well, they're only first cousins. Right.

How have I got there? Right, but that's how it used to be. Really? Yeah, I mean, really until, I'd say, you know, roughly in the middle of the 19th century, not that everyone thought cousin marriage or cousin sex was acceptable, although in some societies it was, but there was certainly that not a sense or a clear understanding or claim about the reproductive consequences of incest. And when you look back in earlier periods, sort of, oh, somebody,

be born with a tail or something, right? It's always framed as a kind of punishment for a moral transgression rather than an inaccurate claim about genetics. The Catholics banned cousin marriage and then all the Protestants were like, well, no, no, that was people tyranny. So cousins are fine. Everyone marry their cousins. Yeah, yeah.

But is there anything in it that's kind of like genetically hardwired to just avoid having sex with very close relations? Because do you see that in the animal kingdom as well, that like incest is not generally engaged or was that not true at all? So it's really interesting, actually, because there are some scholars who argue that that we are sort of hardwired or that at least over like millennia of evolution, it's become hardwired in us. And that was a popular argument, especially around the turn of the 20th century.

So Edward Westermark, who was a kind of historian and sociologist, he made that argument. He used places like kibbutz's as his example, and that's been a common example. Freud, on the other hand, said no. But in the animal kingdom, it's actually interesting. because one of the things I think a lot of scholars would say is, in fact, it's what marks human culture, right? So anthropologists have argued that once we prohibit somebody, then we have culture. In the 19th century, you had all these people starting to work out genetic arguments about incestuous reproduction,

then comparing us to plants, right? So when plants mixing is good, they would say they'd have these fantastical stories about when sheep get married. Right? Right. Right. So, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, go back. No, no, no, no. Sheep getting married?

Right. So I don't know. I never found evidence of, you know, the farmer having a ceremony. But they start talking about reproduction and why inbreeding is good for some strains. There's a lot of this about race horses in the 19th century, right? But the writers will often slip into this language, starting with a kind of relatively sterile mid-19th century Lamarckian genetic argument about reproduction. But then they'll slip into saying, well, you know, when two sheep get married or two horses, horses get married, you want to make sure they're coming from this line or that line.

I see. And I think it's in part probably a familiarizing gesture. Although they're usually writing for other farmers and breeders, so I don't know what they're familiarizing. I was struck when I found it, I was like. So it's more like euphemistic. Yeah. We're not going to say have sex. Yeah, right. Yeah. So there's a lot of that. I mean, a lot of the 19th century stuff, especially, is speaking in the language of marriage for humans or animals. Right. And then, but, talking about sex the whole time. So there is, when you think about, there's plenty of incest in the animal world, just when you were saying there about race horses,

of just like dog breeds today are horribly bred, aren't they? Absolutely. I think especially when we think about it for humans, and at least one of the arguments I've made, is that there is not some sort of trans-historical incest that has always existed. You need the prohibition, right? So when we think in 21st century, we tend to, like, oh, my God, first cousins, that's terrible, right?

And that's incest. and then people find it in the past. But when there was no prohibition on it, in fact, even in the United States now, not sure exactly the number. I think something like 22 or 23 states, still legal to marry first cousins, even if it's sort of culturally frowned upon.

I mean, there is a really, really long history of this, and you can find examples of it in the ancient world. The ancient Egyptians royalty used to marry very close relatives. Is that right? Yes, siblings occasionally, at least in Roman Egypt. I don't know that deep in the past as well, but certainly there is arguments and evidence that there was during Roman period Roman rule in Egypt that Egyptians were allowed to marry brother and sisters as long as you were at a certain class.

Kind of blows my mom when I look at something like that because you've got the Egyptians marrying brothers and sisters and you get quite a lot of interest in Roman culture. I think it was Octavia had to change the loss. We could marry his niece and the Habsburgs as well in the 18th century. And I kind of think like did no one figure out what was going on here? By the time you've got like a few generations down and, you know, they've got horrendous health problems. Did no one go, hang on? This might be a bit weird. Yeah, and that's the really interesting thing, right, I think is that one of the things that we see, and I'm no geneticist,

but I've read enough of this stuff at this point, right, to see that the bigger concerns are that when they start thinking about reproduction in the 19th century, I had this one doctor from Kentucky who went to several asylums and then was like, look, these are all the things that can come from, incestuous reproduction. And he's got a list of asthma, deafness, blindness, right? It's this really, really long list. There's really not any evidence for that. It was a large study, but it was very poorly done. He started with people who were already deemed to be suffering from something. And then he kind of fantastically traced it back to often apocryphal stories about mothers and, you know, brothers and sisters. I think a lot of the evidence is that one instance of incestuous reproduction is no more likely to produce any kind of hereditary issues than the average population.

But the inbreeding, what they've called inbreeding depression, right? So in the United States, you see some very rare diseases, very higher rates amongst the Amish in Pennsylvania, because especially when they came here in the 18th century, there was high rates of cousin marriage because it was sort of endogamous community. And the same, yes, so the Habsburg chin and things like that, right? But I think there's also a way in which a lot of the arguments about that was that that was the sign for not so much amongst the Amish, but that for the aristocracy to say that we can transgress the laws that everybody else has to follow because we have some divine connection or we're a better class or however the arguments when.

Wow. What is the science on this? Inbreeding and incest does cause health problems or is that a myth? It can. I mean, most of the stuff I've read would say one instance of it, right, is no more likely. It's like one drunken nights. okay, probably not going to... Right, yeah, right, right.

So even if there was a child, right, even if there was reproduction from it, there could be, right? But over generations, there's pretty strong evidence that if you have close blood relations, marrying frequent... Is this because you sort of basically cross-contaminating genetics? Right. Tell me it like you're speaking to a small child because we're in genetics now and I don't know what I'm talking about. Right, well, I'm going to have to do that too because I barely know. I kind of cut it off at a certain point.

think it's about, well, I'm probably going to get this wrong, the genetic parts of it. But I think it's that you're going to get the same genes, the same gene pool, reproducing over and over. I think the evidence is pretty strong on that, but I think that the concern about one, which doesn't mean, you know, all the cultural and moral and sexual reasons to not have frequent sex or as a norm in the family is probably, you know, with wife, right, keeping even if there's not a genetic argument. Yeah, I think that's a fact.

statement. Although I'll say I just a couple weeks ago, it's funny right when I was contacted for the podcast the day before, my book came out eight years ago, so I'm not getting contacted a lot about incest anymore. Somebody wrote to me from Australia asking me about places where incest is legal for their research. But as I read through the email, I thought like this person's actually asking me for it, but I did not respond. I get emails like that as well, like strange ones and it's just get halfway through it. And you're like, oh, there's a different motivation. here. Right, yeah.

I could tell. He didn't ask directly, but I was like, yeah, I'm not responding to this. What kind of incest was he asking about? Father, daughter. Oh, I don't know. And I suspect he wrote to me

because I guess about six or seven years ago, New York Magazine had a sort of expose article of an 18-year-old woman who was living somewhere in the Midwest in the United States, and she had not grown up with her father, and she met him when she was 18. And they, according to the story,

They fell in love and they wanted to move somewhere where they could live together and have children. And so they were going to move to New Jersey because New Jersey did not have, in their interpretation, did not have a law prohibiting consensual adult incest. And so I had written about how that had come about. I guess this guy found the article, the essay I wrote. Just don't reply to things. It's not even worth it. But I have read, though, that there is a phenomenon.

You might know what the proper temper is. of that when family members are separated for a long time, then we meet up as adults, that that can often manifest as a sexual attraction. Yeah, I mean, there's a really, there was a famous case in Germany. It was really a tragic story. These two people were, they were siblings,

they had no idea, they both had been put up for adoption at birth. They were, I think in their 20s or early 30s, they met, had no idea, had a long-term relationship, ended up having four children. And then I think the, the chronology was that at some point they decided to get married and then it came out that they

were siblings and the state took their children away from them. Fuck. Oh my God. Yeah. And so it went to the high court in Germany. I don't know if they ever resolved it because, you know, they were like, look, we're not even opposed to this law, but this isn't what you're saying it is. We have a normal family. We're, you know, we're comfortable with one another and they said, well, no, it's incest now. Right. So I really do think it's a strong argument for why genetics aside, the incest prohibition is a cultural form. And if you're, you know, if you don't know that it even happens, which is a big 19th century, like in fiction, there was a lot of fiction of people accidentally ending up in an incestuous relationship. So when you say about prohibition, where did that come from? Because it's kind of like now with

cultural attitudes towards incest, but we will get to those attitudes. It's kind of hard to think that there was ever a time when it was just fine? When was the prohibition? That's an interesting question. I mean, I can trace places that it changed dramatically, but it's a lot of anthropologists. The interesting thing for me was that when people really started turning to when exactly the incest prohibitions start. It was anthropologists in the 19th century in the United States and England and some of them in Western Europe, who at least in my argument, were living in a society where they were still sure that incest was bad, but they no longer really knew why. Okay.

Because there were changes in the religious probate or their commitments to them. So they started speculating. So most famously, the French anthropologist Claude Levy Strauss in the middle of the 20th century would go on to argue. And it takes a lot of speculation, right? Because he says the moment in the deep, deep past in which one man, of course, he's making some patriarchal argument, right? A man exchanged his daughter to another man so that they would have some. some alliance with one another or kinship, right, to protect themselves. And the exchange was that woman, right?

So what he, and he says that's the move from nature to culture. Oh. Right. So as many feminist theorists and critics have criticized him for this rightly, which is that he said, well, then all culture has to be patriarchal, right? Yes. And so I think there's a lot that one can do with thinking about that, though, that doesn't have to be committed to the sort of patriarchal argument that he had put forward

which is say at some point some kind of kinship existed and that meant saying these people are in my group and I'm going to have my sexual and kin related like out of the group right however that manifested itself

but you see it in all different kinds of ways so you can kind of trace the biblical prohibitions if you read through the way they get laid out in the Bible they don't really make any sense to us there's a lot of non-blood relations who are prohibited

and then other people who we would think how could they not have prohibited that one scholars argued that, and they're all in the book of Leviticus, had argued that, like, look, there's all these stories of incest in the Old Testament, right? And that in Leviticus, it's essentially a going back and saying, we don't want you to do these things, right? Yes. So I think the real origins of it can only be speculated about. And they get wrapped up in the colonialism of anthropology as well. So they'll say, like Lewis Henry Morgan, who was one of these people in the 19th century, who came up with like an evolutionary scale of kinship, which of course, like the highest stage,

just so happened to coincide with monogamous marriage and the nuclear family, totally shocking. Of course, he was married to his cousin. Look at that. Look what happened then. So, right. No, right. So he then argues that, like, he calls the origins, originally stage promiscuous intercourse, right? So there was no rules. And then he says, they come into being, but the only ones that we have evidence for, he says,

and this is in the 1850s and 1860s. He says, is what he calls the Hawaiian custom. He makes a claim that there's brother-sister marriage there. It's mostly a total misreading of the evidence he had. So, yeah, it's hard to pin down, but you can find places where it changes, for sure. I am always very wary of anyone who starts an argument with this kind of throwback to this ancient time when we were half monkey, half human, like running around in loincloth. Because we've got absolutely no idea. You can say anything you want.

Lewis Henry Morgan's stuff is a lot more problematic. For somebody like Levy Strauss, a lot of what he was doing for all the problems that went into it was sort of extrapolating from what he deemed to be the evidence he had now. Even saying at one point he says in there something like one trace of this is that even though there's no good social or cultural reason that we still go through the performance of a father giving away the daughter in a marriage, right? He's like, now there's all kinds of other historical explanations between the origins of culture and when he was right. in 1949. And most scholars would say that one of the few rules that is universal is that all societies have an incest prohibition. Is that true?

I don't know that it's absolutely true, but it's hard to find. Like there's actually one of Levi Strauss's last anthropology students found a society in China, in southwest China, that he argued did not have an incest prohibition, that the way that they structured their kinship relations was that all men lived with their mother through their whole life. there was a room in the house where women would go into in the dark and men would come in and there would be sexual relations and then they would leave right so there was no way to trace paternity and so therefore he argued that this is an exception to the rule and there's all kinds

of wild stories about this when Mao is trying to like going through the cultural revolution he tries to insist that they have to have the bourgeois nuclear family in this society because that's the only way they'll move forward and he totally fails like they're just you know they don't change. Is this something to do with eugenics as well? Was that thrown into this mix, that kind of like panic about keeping the races pure and breeding better people? Oh, absolutely. You see it in all kinds of ways, right? So one place you see it in, I would say, probably more of a proto-ugenics and not worked out scientifically is, you know, southern slaveholders who will say, you see higher instances of cousin marriage in some of the southern states or some particular locales, because what

the claim they'll make is that they know that they're preserving kind of whiteness. right? I mean, they don't put it in quite that language, but that's what they're saying. Now, of course, they're making all these assumptions about that there was no interracial sex or sexual violence, rape on plantations. We know that that's not the case. Do you see it there? The place you really see it in the 19th century is phrenology, which, you know, at one point, and I wrote extensively about this, we tend to think of phrenology as a pseudoscience. And sure, in 2023, if I met somebody who was pulling the forceps out to measure the bumps on my head,

I'd send them away. But in the middle of the 19th century, it was really popular. Science is probably an overstatement. But they actually are really interesting because phrenology makes this argument that our brain has either 35 or 47 different faculties. Right. So they identified like the base of your skull is amitiveness, which was sexual desire. Right. So that was what we shared with the animals with all animals.

Right. And what they say is to be a sort of well-adjusted person, they would measure your skull and give you these. scores and say you have too much destructiveness, but you don't have enough of amitiveness, and they make all these racial arguments about it. What's interesting is they're some of the first to say that they have all these concerns about like your moral, so they believe morality can be transmitted through genetics, right? So they're going to say you have to match your scores so you have good, healthy reproduction. So they're making these kind of proto-ugenics, which then get all wrapped up in racial arguments. But at the same time, they say, if you don't exercise

your amitiveness, your sexual desire, it will die off. And so all their recommendations in their early works in books like this guy, Orson Fowler was very famous for writing these. He was the best, though, in the phrenologist of the United States. He says, well, you know, the best place to exercise it is to develop the erotic relationships between, like, parents and children, but do not reproduce, right? And that's what's interesting to me is a lot of it is not that the family is, like, a safe space from sex.

It's constantly there. and we have to ward it off. Pop about with Brian and incest after this short break. Sing muses. Sing to me a history of Olympus and the deathless gods who govern earth, sea and sky. That is Zeus's command. It's the ancients from History Hit.

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Join us as we explore some of the most fascinating deities history has ever known. Listen and follow on the ancients from History Hit wherever you get to your podcasts. So when did these laws come in? What kind of dates are we talking about in the United States anyway? The big changes are, in fact, in the 19th century, because one of the things that happens is that during the 17th and 18th century, in the colonies, most of them are based on English law, right?

And in English, incest prohibition are rooted in this table of kindred in an affinity, which actually came out of the formation of church, right? So Henry VIII wants to have his marriage annulled. Right. So he gets everybody together and then, you know, the Pope says no. And then he gets all these scholars together and they say, oh, yeah, you actually don't have a marriage. And then at one point in that debate, they make this argument that the marriage isn't legitimate because it violates some Levitical. You shouldn't marry your brother's wife or something like that.

Right. Yes. Your brother's wife. Yeah. That's in the book of Leviticus. I have a lot of people, theologians in the 19th century, coming out with all the reasons that, like, they have to follow Leviticus. on incest, but they don't have to follow it on these other things that they don't want to do, right? They want to eat what they want to eat. So they're like, well, we don't have to do that.

That's just for the Israelites. Right. So you get that. Yeah. Yeah. What the Anglican Church does basically take the Levitical prohibitions and then they make them rational. So in the table of Kinderden and Vinty has 30 men and 30 women who are prohibited as incestuous relations. What becomes a big deal in the 19th century in the U.S. and England is your deceased wife's sister, right? You can't marry her. Right. Okay, your deceased wife's sister. Why that one? Why did that? I mean, it sounds like a set up to a porn hub vid. Right, exactly. Yes. I've thought, going back to writing about incest and the sort of explosion of porn hub incest videos, but I actually... We will get to that.

Yes. Okay. So I think the way it comes about is interesting because what it does is that the deceased wife's sister is not in Leviticus, but it's part of this like sort of rationalizing of evangelical prohibitions. But at least in the U.S. case, what happens is you start to have especially rural Presbyterian and Dutch reform ministers marrying their deceased wife's sister, right? Their wife dies. They marry the sister. And then they're told they can no longer be a minister, right? Because they violated a lot. Did that happen quite a lot then? I don't know that it happened a lot, but it happened enough that I was able to write a whole chapter of a book on the debate they had over it.

I mean, that that is quite a lot, isn't it? Right. And the argument, yeah, is that for many people. of them. Some of them are like, look, it's fine. It's ridiculous that you're telling me I can't do this, right? And then some are like, if anybody who could ever be in your household is also potentially a sexual partner, then your house will, as one says, turned into a space of abominable impurity. People talk about this making the house a brothel, right? Others will say, who better to replace your wife than her sister? Wow. Got its own logic. And what's interesting is this prohibition is dying down. United States, it actually in 1835 becomes law in England. It took us that long. Right.

So they had it in the ecclesiastical law. So one of the things that happens in the colonies is because all these prohibitions are in the ecclesiastical law in England and no ecclesiastical courts come to the colonies, some of these laws never make it. So some of the early colonies, like, it's not that incest is legal. There's no law prohibiting it. And then it comes about pretty quickly. So they start to standardize them in the 19th century.

and you have this sense of like the liberal individuals should be able to use reason, follow their own desires, use reason to prohibit them. Then they're like, well, none of these things make sense, right? So they start changing the laws in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s. And then it's just a wild mess of laws.

Colorado has two different incest laws. One law for what used to be part of Mexico before the Mexican-American War. Another law for the part that wasn't part of Mexico. How did the laws differ? I would have assumed that it just said don't commit incest, but now I actually think about it. The definition of what is incest could be your wife's sister, right? So, like, how are these laws differing?

They don't make a clear statement about what was going on in Mexico in the law. They just say if you were there prior to it becoming part of the United States, then you can follow Mexican law. And if you were not in that part, you can't. I suspect that part of it is that Mexico came out of Spanish colonialism. So there was probably much more traces of Catholic prohibitions, and there were Protestant ones. Most incest laws about consensual relationships.

It's not about in the 19th century. It's not about sexual violence and abuse, even though, of course, there's a lot wrapped up and covered in it. But like Ohio passed a law that says it's not incest until the man has ejaculated. So they, I mean, they say seminal omission, right? But, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

And then a bunch of states copy that. So in the United States, because that level of law, what was called domestic relations law, is almost entirely state-based rather than for the nation. You have these varying laws. So, well, some people will go to another state to get married to somebody because they can't get married in their own state. Do you have to go to a different state to come as well? You may have to, right?

I guess, well, yeah. So weird. I never thought that there'd be this much nuance. But when you actually kind of break it down, trying to work out what constitutes a family member and where you stop drawing that line. It's really kind of obvious when it's like your immediate family and kind of everyone goes,

right. But I suppose when we're into like the second cousin, third removed, New Year Aunt Daphne, went to church on a Sunday and was married to such and such. And where do you stop drawing the line at? When do you go, well, now you're no longer related closely enough? Right, exactly.

And there's even issues where, you know, they at least legally, they think marriage is so important to instituting like social order, right? That you have cases of like, there was a case in the 1830s of an aunt and a nephew getting married in England. And now that wasn't legal there, but in England, an incestuous marriage was this legal distinction. Avoid marriage was something that even if somebody had gone through the ceremony, once you're

find out about it, it says if it never existed. So if you had children, they're now illegitimate children, right? But avoidable marriage is one that even if you broke the law, it's in place until you have it taken apart. Right. So incestuous marriages were voidable. These people moved to Boston. in 1840, the wife loans some guy in Boston $1,000. She wants to be repaid.

He's like, I'm not repaying you. Of course, coverture law still exists. So her husband has to take him to court. And when they're in court, he says, yeah, she loaned me $1,000. I'm not paying it because that's an incestuous marriage. And he has no right. So the court goes through the whole court and they say, we find it abhorrent, but it was never void it in England.

So we have to say it's fine. It's an okay marriage. Pay up. Yeah, so he had a payout. I mean, that's some legal fidgety-witchity that is, isn't it? Absolutely. That is impressive. Yeah.

I understand that the work of every sexologist's favorite person, Sigmund Freud had quite a lot to say on this subject when he was sat around having a good think about this stuff. Yes, absolutely. And I think I find a lot of Freud, you know, for all the problems that might be there, a really compelling way of thinking about it. Because for him, right, you know, when he takes the story of Oedipus and basically, says in perhaps a more complicated sense that I'm going to put it here. But there's some moment where you lose the sense that you could be fully satisfied, right? That all of my desires

can be satisfied. Although there's lots of confusion, I think, in his writing sometimes. It's more of a psychic process, right? But that you feel like as an infant that it's the mother, right? That you're at the breast and he makes this argument that that's really where sexuality comes from, not to say that it's sexuality in the way we think of it as adults, but it's that your breastfeed, the infant, and then there's also a pleasure that's not just about food. And then at some point, the father figure steps in and says, no, that woman is mine, and you have to go. And you're always trying to recapture that, right?

So that's where the desire and erotics circle around that sort of incestuous scenario. Then you, you know, according to Freud, you want to kill your father, right? So it's the perfect edible scenario, and you have to not do that, which is much different than saying we're hardwired not to do it. His argument is in some sense is if we were hardwired to do it, we wouldn't have to think about it, right? We just wouldn't do it. And he's not even saying that we're all thinking about it consciously.

But in all of our dissatisfactions and all of our desires, all of our attempts to do these things, he's going to argue in some complicated sense is trying to recapture. I think that he in fact will say, we never had. We just think we had it. Right.

It's like a kind of fantasy. This is always one of the most difficult discussions I have with my students trying to explain this particular edipus theory of because like we sit there and the conversations will always go like this. What do you know about for Sigmund Freud? And then it'll go quiet. And then eventually someone will say, didn't he think we all want to shag our mums? And then there's this like tumbleweed moment and it's like, well, yes, I know.

I'm used to I can get them to the point where they agreed that our parents actually have quite profound influences on our sexuality growing up to the extent where a girl might marry her father, quote, unquote, or you know, the boy might become a mama's boy. But they're never, ever comfortable with this idea. I can never quite get them to the point where it's like, yeah, but maybe you fancied your mom. And they just can't deal with that. No. And that's what was so fascinating about writing about the 19th century because what I found was,

even though he had a more complicated and dense theoretical framework for thinking about it, it's everywhere that people see this as a problem. It's these freeologists who are saying like, hey, that's great. There's other, there's like in the 1830s, there's a masturbation scare in the United States. So there's all these pamphlets, right, that are published. In the UK as well, yeah. Yeah. And so a lot of the pamphlets in the U.S., at least, will say, in so many words,

your son is going to want to masturbate. There's nothing you can do to stop it. But it's your responsibility as a mother to try to stop it. And what you should do is displace the desire. He should turn it into loving you, right? So while I'm interpreting a little bit, it's essentially like substitute the mother for the penis. Oh, that's a serial killer in the making. Right. Yeah. So you get these things, but they're writing as like bourgeois moralists, right? It's the mother's responsibility for sort of regulating all the desire of the children and the father and the husband and all of these things, right? So you see it in fiction all over, you know, these sort of incestuous relations. So it didn't seem quite as shocking to then think about Freud writing this where I'm like, he was seeing it all the time. In fact, his own family to some extent as well, or at least him to

his own self-analysis. The thing that Freud's always got to fall back on, as is every psychologist ever since, is that they get to get, yes, but it's subconscious. When you go, I don't fancy my mom. They go, no, no, no, no, it's not conscious. It's subconscious. And you go, but I really don't. And they go, yeah, I know, it's subconscious.

Right. You know, in that, it's not unlike the anthropologist saying, well, it started millions of years ago, I think. And this is how it happened, I think. I love that I think. Yeah, right. And so it's interesting to me the way in which like having an incest prohibition for all of them at minimum becomes the condition for being able to think anything, right? It has to exist.

It has to have always existed. And we have to explain. Why? When Freud published that and he'd sat around and had a good old thing. And do you know what? Like a lot of his theories have been kind of blown out the water and, you know, his penis envy won. And as soon as women could write back, they were just kind of like, sot off. But I think that his Edipal and Electoral work, that has stood the test of time, I think.

What was the reaction to that at the time when it was published? Were people outraged by that? Oh, lots of people were. Yeah. I mean, this is like a lot of his break with some of his early collaborators, especially when he's writing like studies on hysteria, where he himself, who's like a neurologist and is not, he really wanted a university position and it didn't seem like it was forthcoming. So he's working with this guy, Joseph Breuer.

and he starts even arguing that these symptoms of hysteria, the origins of them are in some sort of sexual relationship, right? Okay. That's been repressed. And then he starts speculating that maybe it's in the family. And privately, Breyer is like, maybe, but publicly, they have a break. I mean, he just, like, I'm not going to go down this road because what you're saying is that the bourgeois norms of the family are highly sexualized.

And so then he starts talking about. things. In some sense, it's a slow build in the early, even though he's saying these things by the time he writes the three essays on the theory of sexuality, he's often talking about what he calls the nuclear neurosis, the nuclear complex in the neuroses, right? And what he wants to say, he has, like, examples we'll say, well, you know, the child wants to know where babies come from and they ask and they get some, you know, half-assed story from the parents. And he says, they don't know what the real answer is, but they know that that doesn't make sense, right? So this creates this sort of sexual conflict in the family. And then by 1911, he starts talking about more commonly about

the ed of his complex, although it's there in sort of form, in some form earlier. So a lot of people just find it horrifying, but also the context of sexology where you're seeing these more radical arguments about sex, at least among some of the sexologists, is a context that Freud's quite familiar with and also quite skeptical of because he wants to be taken seriously as a scientist. and he thinks that too many of them are also advocates, like, for something, for free love or, you know. Like the person who emailed you. Yes, right. So he doesn't want that person on its side.

We've got to talk about, and I know it's a leap from Freud to present day, but one of the most interesting compelling cases, I think it probably goes against this idea that we're hardwired, we're hardwired not to commit incest, is the fact that incest pornography is one of the biggest subcategories on porn hub worldwide. Yes, yeah. I was totally blown away by finding that out. It's mad. Yeah, and then when I thought about a lot of it, and I was like, well, I have to see what's going and how it's structured, right?

Because when I first heard of it, I was like, wow, they're just really going for like father, brother, sister. It's mostly structured, right, around step families. Step sisters. step months. And I think it really, in a lot of ways, as a fantasy, it really is some evidence of the claims Freud is made and the claims that were made by a lot of these 19th century writers. And then with like a, you know, a 21st century spin, which is that like the fantasy is that there's convenient sex in your house, right? And it's not confined. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't know. I haven't interviewed people to know why they're watching this, right?

You'd be careful because our listeners will write in. Right. I know. I'm not giving advice out on how to watch Pornhub or how to have an incestuous marriage in Australia. But I think that that at least is the way it's structured, that you don't like this person or you have some conflict with them and then you end up having sex with them, right? It's a fantasy of convenience, which is what some of the people in the 19th century would say, who wanted to say we're close to hardwired against it, would say that because you have such close proximity to these people, there's some internal. drive not to have sex with them, right? Because there are arguments would often be because you have to make a society, right? And if you didn't go out and make a society and have social relations outside the family,

where they're implying in some sense, the only reason you're, you have a society is to have sex, right? I don't know that I'm fully on board with that argument. But I think it's what follows from some of these people writing about the incest prohibition. I think the same thing is happening here, right? That it's just like, well, we're in the house and I'm bored. You're here, I'm here in your mini skirt, up a ladder as stepmums are want to do. Right.

And you are right that when you look at these videos and this genre on PornHub, it does tend to be one step removed from full. We should also say it's like they're not actually related. Right, yes, right. They're just pretending to be. But even then, it's stepmother's half brother, half sister, step sister, stepbrother. So again, it's got that certain distance. We can't even in porn, even a fantasy, even when we know,

that the actors aren't actually related. They're pretending, we still don't go the whole hug. I'm sure there is that porn out there before anyone listening goes. I think you'll find Kate. Yes, but by and large, the incest of porn is kind of, oh, stepbrother, step sister stuff. Right. And they're always quick to say it to, at least in the some,

and the few I've watched where it's like, well, we're just step, whatever. We're not related. Brothers, step sister, stepmother, you know. So do you think it's sort of. creates a safe space and one step removed for us to explore some pretty primal fantasies. Yeah. I think it still privileges the idea that a choice has been made somewhere, right? And I think that the blood family, the blood relations, at least in, you know, father, daughter, cis siblings, has some specter of like no choice being made, right? You didn't, you didn't choose

to be related to these people, but in some sense, there was some choice somewhere made for somebody. So, and I think that that's the, you know, the fantasy. of 20th and 21st century sexuality that it's entirely about choices that we can make in a liberal society. So apart from there being a bizarre amount of

faux incest porn on porn hub and other porn distributors, where are we up to today with incest laws? It's sort of a strange thing, like if you said it to anyone, they go, no, but when you're just through talking to you, breaking it down, but it's not quite that straightforward, is it?

No, it's not. There's a big change, actually. So most incest law in the 19th and first half of the 20th century were mostly marriage laws, right? They were who you could marry and who you could not marry. And the implication was that you should also not have sex with these same people because now we know there's an enormous amount of evidence that people had sex outside of marriage. But the law was implying that like, well, you should be having sex with people you would marry or be married too. In the 1970s, at least in the United States, is where you see. see a big change. And that's in large part because the change starts in sexual violence and rape laws in the United States, most of which had been written in the language in the 19th century, which was like moral turpitude, right? And they were very favorable to saying, and I found a lot of this in my research in the 19th century of like, well, yes, this happened, but my daughter seduced me, right? Yeah. Yeah, I've read crap like that too. Yeah. Yeah. It was almost all incest law was consensual. So you'd see some laws in the 19th century that would say, like, there were rape laws and there were rape of daughter laws in some states, right, which carried a bigger

punishment. So then in the 1970s, through actions of second wave feminists who, in a lot of ways, forced the laws to be changed so that they were more sort of sterile and clinical legal language, right? So there wasn't about all this language of morality, who's being moral, who's being immoral. But one of the things that happens in some of the states is that, like in Michigan, accidentally, incest law falls out because they changed the law and they kind of forget that incest was part of this. So they fix it. You know, it's not the idea of a group of the group of senators set around and going to,

we forgot the incest. Let's get it back in. This is the amazing thing. Like the story I was talking about earlier about this sort of anonymous, I think, possibly apocryphal story of this 18-year-old woman who wants to marry her father and go to New Jersey. The next day after the story comes out, the New Jersey legislature in one of their few bipartisan in moments is like we have to pass a law to stop this, right? And the thing is, it's like, you know, I don't have a stance on the, on the morality of it so much, but adult consensual

relations, it becomes a complicated relationship legally. So you see that the place that there's the most complications now are through new reproductive technologies, right? So if you were both from a sperm donor. Have you seen that documentary as well on Netflix? Yeah, yeah. And you see these communities that meet up and then like are they actually violating an incest prohibition I think is actually an interesting and complicated question because it's not just a buy it there was no culture or they created some cultural relationship or they can and it's similar to that adoption story in germany right where they that wasn't sperm donors but they didn't know each other hasn't there just been some concern about was it new zealand very recently they've realized

they only have like four sperm donors who've just donated all the sperm oh wow I didn't see that I might have just dreamt that, actually. Well, it's entirely possible. But that, sorry, New Zealand, if you're listening. I might have just been just horribly besmirching you. But that issue of, well, what happens if people are donating sperm habitually all the time and you can't trace it back to where it's come from? How do you know if you were conceived through artificial insemination?

Who's related to you? Who's not? Right. And it raises, like, such an interesting question just about kinship and family, which is for such a long time of human history. and there's all these arguments about, how did patriarchy come about? Well, it's because you couldn't solidly prove paternity, right?

You knew who the mother was, and the mother may know that it was definitely this one man, but there was no way to establish it until you have, like, paternity tests in the 20th century. But then this system, a lot of which around the world, there's closed system, so you actually can't find out who the donor was. So it creates these conditions where, yeah, you have a whole new sort of kinship, organization of kinship.

and potentially incest. That is an ethical nightmare, isn't it? I didn't even know how you go about resolving something like that. Sorry everybody. Sorry everybody out there who's just dealing with this stuff. But it's a completely bonkers situation. I guess it was inevitable, ultimately. Oh, God.

Can you still marry cousins across America today? What's like the cutoff point? The closest relations? Yeah, in some states you can. So I would have to double. I don't think there's any state. that prohibits second cousins. And there are some states in the United States

that don't prohibit first cousins legally. It's definitely frowned upon, isn't it? But it's not unheard of. Yeah. Like I said, the 19th century, it was not uncommon. Brian, you have been fascinating to talk to. I didn't even think that there'd be so much nuance in this. And if people want to know more about you

and your research, where can they find you? Not to email you weird shit, but just to look up. what you do. Yes, most of my stuff is on my faculty web page at the University of South Florida, which I can't remember the exact website, but usf.edu, and I'll be found there. And I have a book called Domestic Intimacy's Incest in the Liberal subject in 19th century United States, which was published by University of Pennsylvania Press. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You have been fascinating. Great. This was terrific. Thank you for listening. And thank you to Brian for joining me.

and to Yasmin for sending us the request. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.