In contrast, Angela St Lawrence sent an article about the effort here in the United States to criminalize bestiality. (Incest between consenting adults, incidentally, is illegal in every state in the union.) Proposed laws in Florida and Alaska are inspired by an incident that occurred in “Seward’s Icebox“:

[A man] was spotted by a local woman coaxing the Labrador retriever into the woods near a ball field. There he allegedly tied it to a tree, taped its muzzle shut with duct tape and had sex with it, witnesses told police at the time. The man had been twice convicted of raping a young boy and more recently had served probation for assault after lunging at a child. While the incident with the dog was reported to the police, Klawock Mayor Don Marvin said nothing happened for two days while fearful parents escorted their children home from school…. In requesting a $10,000 bail, Scott told the court that the state was concerned that if a small child had been available and unattended that day, ‘the small child would have been found taped (and) tied in the woods.’ Shocked by that and other similar cases of involving humans having sex with animals, lawmakers in Florida and Alaska are considering bans on bestiality. They are among 15 states where the practice is not explicitly illegal.

There are some obvious points to be made about these proposed laws. First, it’s wrong to presume that every bestialist might have preferred to attack a human or a child instead. Second, these laws (like others against necrophilia) must doubtless be a response to the fact that, thanks to the internet, perversions have come out of the closet to a degree unimaginable a generation ago. Third, laws against bestiality coincide with the increasing public interest in animal rights. Fourth, at odds with the animal rights trend is the fact that the same folks who would ban bestiality are generally happy to eat meat, which leaves you wondering why it’s ok to exploit an animal for gustatory but not sexual pleasure.

Fifth, the most ironic thing about all this is a point made by the controversial Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. A few years ago, Professor Singer reviewed Midas Dekkers’ book Dearest Pet: On Bestiality. In the course of that review, which you can read online, he made the point that bestiality is not “normal” or even “natural.” What’s more, he objects to animal cruelty. That being said, Professor Singer notes that because “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes,” bestiality cannot be “an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.” In other words, bestiality presumes a dichotomy between us and them, humans and animals, when it may well be a matter of animals having sex with other animals.

In that light, perhaps these anti-bestiality laws are the deviant expression of another trend in America — the alarming extent to which people repudiate Darwin’s theory of evolution. If you can’t believe that man descended from animal, you probably won’t accept the prospect of man fucking animal either.

(Thanks to Geek Space for the link.)

For those whose voyeurism points not at the windows of half-dressed women but at perversions themselves, there is nothing more fun to contemplate than the preacher with his pants down. Somehow it is delectable to see a person who’s always spouting off about God and morality reveal himself as human and immoral. Probably the fun is related to the conceptual pleasure some people taking in deflowering virgins. It’s a matter of seeing the “pure” brought down into the world of filth that everybody else lives in.

There is a terrific poem by Charles Bukowski titled “The Shoelace.” It goes like this (PervScan is transcribing from a performance Bukowski gave, so the line breaks and punctuation may not be exact):

A woman,
a tire that’s flat,
a disease, a desire,
fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them like pieces on a chessboard…
It’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse.
Death he’s ready for,
or murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
No, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the madhouse…

Bukowski goes on to enumerate all those little things — like a “shoelace that snaps” — that can drive a man mad. You half wonder if they can drive a man to this insane level of hypocrisy as well. Here you have a preacher. Does he wake up one day and realize that he has the same name as the actor who portrayed Hannibal Lecter? Does this meaningless little coincidence start to reverberate in his mind? Tease him with visions of criminal genius? Make him toy with thoughts that never would have entered his mind if his name weren’t Anthony but Bob or Chuck?

That detail — that wealth of details — has finally been published. Dungeon Dad Fritzl On Incest, Hitler And “My Proper Family” In The Cellar tells the story in Fritzl’s own words. It also includes a number of fascinating photographs. You should go read the whole article. There are a thousand things to say about it. Not the least of these is to highlight the self-deluding irony of Fritzl’s motivation: he sequestered his daughter to shield her from “bad influences,” yet he was clearly the worst influence on her entire difficult existence — and on the lives of their seven children.

Fritzl’s references to Nazism are particularly striking. It’s not a matter of using “Nazi” as a mere synonym for sadist or brute. It’s more complicated — more insidious — than that. Have you ever read Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil? Arendt argues that the shocking thing about Adolf Eichmann was not his sadism but rather his banality — his unthinking, unreflective, bureaucratic approach to the perpetration of horrors. Something similar appears to have been at work in Fritzl’s insane ménage. The simple passing of years — decades — normalized what began as a monstrous crime. Eventually everyone either accepted it, tuned it out, or had no clue. “It just became a matter of course,” Fritzl said, “that I lived my second life in the cellar.”

When abuse becomes rape, parenting becomes kidnapping, and love becomes incest — and when all of these become “a matter of course” — the banality of evil snakes its way into sexuality and spawns a new phenomenon, a sort of banality of depravity.

(Thanks for the link to Husk, who asked “How fucked up is this?”)

Well, Husk, it’s pretty fucked up. What is even more fucked up is that this is not as uncommon as you might think. There have been three other stories on PervScan about sons raping their own mothers: Sex-Starved Boy Rapes Mother, HIV-Positive Sex Beast Raped Own Mum, and one of PervScan’s favorites, Most Disgusting Sex Crime of the Year. If you read the comments to some of the other incest stories on the site, you’ll see that plenty of guys talk about wanting to have sex with their mothers. And a few mothers reciprocate the desire. Mum Had Sex with Eighteen-Year-Old Son remains one of the most popular stories on the site.

While such incest might appall you and many others, it remains one of the archetypal forms of sexual perversity. In recent years it may have become popular to repudiate the theories of Freud, and yet when you regard all these sons and mothers it is difficult to dismiss the Oedipus Complex entirely. The complex may not afflict every male, but for some it surely remains a potent force lurking somewhere deep in their libidos.

In addition to Freud, there are a lot of different theories about incest. Current thinking suggests that family members are “imprinted” with an innate aversion to incestuous behavior. Anthropologist Edvard Westermarck has convincingly described a phenomenon now known as the Westermarck Effect, which asserts that children raised in the same household for their first 5-10 years are “desensitized to later close sexual attraction.” It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that a similar imprinting occurs with mothers and sons.

In this particular case it is obvious that “normal” family boundaries were breaking down. The parents were separating. Both had called the police on their own sons, claiming that the boys had assaulted them. Once an individual takes to attacking his mother and father, it isn’t such a quantum leap to consider raping one of them. That’s what feminist thinkers have been saying all along: rape is not sex, it’s violence.

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

There is a great old jazz tune whose chorus goes, “Everyone has sex appeal for someone, or many of us wouldn’t be here.” That’s a clever way of saying that beauty is relative. Bear that in mind when you go look at a picture of the two perps, the pedo guy and his incestuous mother. His receding hairline and humongous ears — does anyone else imagine his mother yanking on his ears? — don’t exactly give the guy movie-star looks. And his mother looks like she needs dentures. Beauty may be relative, but odds are that few of you want to imagine that mouth doing anything sexual.

It’s a funny thing about perversion. In the abstract, it almost has some glamor to it. It’s practically chic. Everybody wants to be a little naughty, wants to sport a badge of kink as though it were a designer label. But then you contemplate some of the awful things people do to each other, and then you look at how awful some of these perverts look, and it sure takes some of the shine off of sexual deviance. “If this is incest,” you think, looking at these two mugs, “then I don’t want anything to do with it.”

And that’s not to say anything about the other issues this particular case raises. In most stories about incest that have appeared here on PervScan, commenters have taken the position that, if some act occurs between consenting adults, authorities should keep their noses out of it. But here you have a more complicated situation: the mother fucks the son, but the son molests little girls. If deviant behavior really does tend to form chain reactions, as many theorists believe that it does, would you still support the right of the mother and son to go at it behind closed doors? Is that tantamount to supporting the son’s rights to perpetuate the abuse?

On one hand, this seems like a no-brainer result. Basically it amounts to the fact that the more time you spend with someone, the less sexually appealing they become. Old married couples know this. And siblings share that “familiarity breeds contempt” quality with long married couples. In most cases, they know each other too well to find each other attractive. (It’s interesting to note that, in the comments on Genetic Sexual Attraction Syndrome, many “sufferers” didn’t live with their siblings when they were young.)

On the other hand, to simplify this research to such a level is unfair. Professor Leda Cosmides and her collaborator John Tooby are pioneers in the field of evolutionary psychology, and if you read some their actual research on incest avoidance you find insight after insight. For example, their work seems to give a biological foundation to the notion that opposites attract: “when it comes to a choice between two alternative mates, the less related mate will produce fitter offspring: kinship should be antierotic. As a result, selection is expected to have shaped adaptations that govern mate attractiveness so that less related individual will seem more attractive than more related individuals, other things being equal. Of course, when the choice is between mating with a relative, and not mating at all, selection would favor mating.” No doubt this is why many people are attracted to exotic men or women: they may not realize it, but exotic mates promise better babies.

Another interesting point — and one which seems to jive with the landscape of perversion — is that women have a greater incentive to avoid incestuous behavior than men. A woman can only have a baby once a year or so, thus she has a very strong evolutionary motivation to avoid any behavior such as incest which might produce an unhealthy child. Conversely, a man is almost unlimited in his (potential) fathering opportunities, and thus he risks little by engaging in couplings that might produce unhealthy offspring. And of course this all has psychological ramifications. For example, evolution provides a material basis for the feelings engendered by rape:

This is a tragic fact about the selection pressures that are likely to have shaped human sexual psychology, and may provide the explanation for certain patterns of abuse. For example, among our ancestors the fitness payoffs for a man of inseminating a woman who has only a 50% chance of being his daughter could have easily been positive. For the possible daughter, however, any substantial chance that a potential fertilizer is her biological father leads to a strongly negative average payoff, and her psychology should be selected to experience such a possibility as horrifying.

It would be interesting to see to what extent the exceptions — the perverts who practice incest — confirm or deny these findings, particularly since the subjects involved in the research seem to have been “normal” in the first place. Also, it’s hard not to wonder how these evolutionary impulses hold up today, when the imperative to reproduce has lost its punch (see the declining birth rates in industrialized countries) and when people are aware that they can divorce the pleasure of sex from the necessity of reproducing. Does evolutionary psychology pertain to people who fuck just for fun? Are these people mutations? Or is everyone really just a sexual automaton powered by a primal impulse to perpetuate the species?

(Thanks to Asmo for the link.)

It’s no secret that two wrongs don’t make a right, but this story actually features three wrongs. In the first place, the foster son was wrong to spew his boy-goo all over his mom’s photos. No matter how horny you may be or how voluminous your ejaculate turns out, it’s not nice to damage other people’s pornography, especially when it belongs to your mum. In the second place, Ms. Anton was wrong not to store her valuable photos in a more secure place. If you possess any item equal in value to the down payment on a house, shouldn’t you keep it under lock and key or perhaps in a safe deposit box? In the third place, Ms. Anton is wrong to sue the foster agency for her and her foster son’s acts of idiocy. How is the agency to blame? Did they knowingly provide her with a child who had chronic masturbation problems? Doesn’t every teenage boy have a chronic masturbation problem?

For that matter, “problem” is too strong a word. The boy didn’t know the pictures represented his foster mother, so he wasn’t even betraying incestuous inclinations by getting off on them. He was just doing what boys do. But it would be interesting to know what he felt when he learned he’d wanked to old nudies of his foster mom. Did it disgust him? Did it turn him on? Did it add a sexual tension to their family relationship? Did Ms. Anton consider returning him to the foster agency?

From another vantage point, the story seems to confirm something that feminists have said about art for the last thirty years — which is that the nudes decorating the hallowed halls of major museums are not just objects of disinterested aesthetic contemplation. They’re basically girlie pictures, centerfolds, nude calendars, pornography glorified. You can imagine that a hundred years ago a young boy might have stumbled over Courbert’s L’Origine du monde and mucked it up with his cum. Now it hangs in a museum in Paris. So what’s the borderline between pornography and art?

Without denying the myriad ways in which this act of sibling incest changed and traumatized people’s lives, there is something extremely unsettling about it becoming a court case forty-two years after the fact. In the first place, times have changed. In 1964 this was still the way that families handled difficult events like a teen pregnancy. Was abortion even legal in Canada in 1964? How else should the parents have handled it? Should the parents have turned their son over to the police? Wouldn’t that have just worsened the family’s trauma? Would the victim really have felt any retribution, or would she have felt guilt for sending her brother to jail? How would you handle it? Wouldn’t you try just to minimize the damage? Plainly it was a fucked up situation, but the parents probably managed it the best they could. Passing judgement on it now is like passing judgement on the practices of a different era. Something doesn’t seem fair about it.

In the second place, what point does it serve for people approaching retirement age to create a court case out of something that they’ve already been living with for forty-odd years? Ok, the victim suffered. What her brother did was wrong. But at some point isn’t the psychologically healthy thing just to get on with life? To accept the past, however difficult it may have been, and to move on into the future? There are living victims of the Holocaust who seem to have done a better job letting go of the past. Is it insensitive to say that? Perhaps. Please comment if you think so. But in the end it is difficult to see how this really rights any wrongs — and if it doesn’t, then you’re just left with a melodrama of selfish vengeance, the victim becoming a victimizer.

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

Nobody can twist words like a religious person. Apparently the same mental defects — er, qualities — that predispose a person to believe in superhuman beings also enable him to create the most fantastic excuses for his egregious behavior. Was this loving father motivated by lust? Of course not! Why, he was simply following his own special incestuous interpretation of the Quran. And, oh yeah, praise Allah, there’s nothing like incest to relieve the pressure of supporting x wives * y children. And, um, sure, there’s a moral benefit as well. You can keep your hussy daughters — didn’t you raise them right to begin with? — from screwing all the neighbor boys. Allahu akbar!

When you continually read all the pathetic excuses and silly justifications that people invent for actions motivated by the most obvious of desires — lust — it’s hard not to think with admiration of the legal institution known as the Miranda rights. You have the right to remain silent. How many criminals would find themselves ahead of the game if they could only refrain from blabbering out so many flimsy rationalizations for their behavior? But then perhaps that’s too much to expect of people like this “loving” dad. If guys like this can’t keep their dick in their pants, how can you expect them to keep their mouths shut?

Here’s a picture of Mr. Lowe, a former sheriff’s deputy. Additional details about his case can be found in an article about his original conviction, and also in this legal brief. The brief makes for quite interesting reading, since it details the arguments and legal precedents utilized by both sides.

In the incest stories published here on PervScan, commenters have generally supported the right of people to commit incest when all parties involved are consenting adults — adults. And certainly there is merit to Mr. Lowe’s contention that he should not be criminalized by a law plainly designed to protect children. The legal brief notes that the law forbidding sexual relations between stepparent and stepchild make no mention of age, so the conviction is technically correct on that score. But still, it doesn’t seem very reasonable. If both adults wanted to do it, then why should authorities intervene?

But did both adults really want to do it? Mr. Lowe’s stepdaughter may have been of legal age, but she was also sleeping off a state of inebriation when Mr. Lowe jumped her bones. By most definitions, that’s rape regardless of how old she was. Indeed, she ended up reporting it as rape — and that really seems to be the complication of the entire case. To convict Mr. Lowe under the law preventing stepparents from having sex with their stepchildren is technically correct but rather unreasonable, given the age of both parties. However, to charge and try him for rape would be perfectly appropriate. After all, how consensual could the sex have been? You don’t see the victim making a public declaration of her stepfather’s innocence.