The New York Magazine story has become a national and international sensation (I was first informed of it when someone sent me an article from the Daily Mail in England), but the voices of disgust were loudest in New Jersey, where the woman said she and her father-lover-husband were planning to move. Incest produces disgust and moral revulsion when abusive and/or reproductive, but there seems to be a special kind of disgust reserved for consensual incest, an incest marked not by trauma but by love and sentimentalism. This was certainly the case a few weeks ago when New York magazine published a voyeuristic interview with an anonymous 18-year-old woman from “the Great Lakes region” who claimed to be engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with her father, a relationship that she said would lead to marriage and children. “Distaste or disgust involves a rejection of an idea,” Immanuel Kant wrote in 1798 in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, “that has been offered for enjoyment.” Freud, who has taught us more about incest than anyone else, wrote in Totem and Taboo that “we are ignorant of the origin of the horror of incest and cannot even tell in what direction to look for it,” in part because we choose to obscure its origins. But this is not to say that many thinkers have not tried to explain it. Incest evokes in us a visceral disgust that escapes easy explanation. THERE ARE FEW moral absolutes left to us these days, but one we all seem to accept, nearly without question, is that incest is absolutely wrong.
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