“Incest is Best”–humorous adage
Kinsey’s research was contaminated. His works have been denounced as so flawed as to render them the scribblings of a charlatan. And then there’s the fact that he was a voyeur and a hedonist. That made him incompetent and biased. Writing while you’re horny isn’t the best way to deal with the subject of sexuality.
Warning: this blog deals with adult and disturbing subject matter. Please use discretion. It contains triggers.
Several people in my family, that is to say, siblings, have tried to research and understand what happened to our family and why. A half brother put himself through college because he wanted to know why some siblings were more well adjusted than others. If we were to compare him to myself, for instance, he comes out as the picture of hard-working, intelligent, driven, gregarious and well-adjusted, whereas I have deteriorated and lost my ability for meaningful relationships, which at best were stormy and dysfunctional; or to perform even a part-time job, or stop suicidal thoughts, to ease depression, to cope with anxiety or even eat or sleep healthily or on any schedule.
Abnormal Psych 101
It never took me being a genius to know that what began before I was six years old was “wrong”, and even though that word did not occur to me then, I knew how it made me feel. Tired, preoccupied, dirty, ashamed.
As I grew older I perceived that I was different from kids my age in several ways: I was learning disabled, afraid of everything around me, and that I had this secret which, if I tried to confide in a friend, immediately lost me that friend. The subject was strictly taboo and never discussed. I had to go to my older brothers if I needed to talk. Together, we probably kept each other alive. The brother who would go on to get a degree in psychology accepted my collect calls during crises I couldn’t navigate on my own.
And it was this, as much as anything else, that made his thirst to know why we all turned out so differently unquenchable.
The first time I tried to kill myself he visited me in the psych ward. He didn’t understand why. Why, so suddenly, was I giving up.
He said I was only sick because I wanted to be. I told him to leave. He did not intend harm or offense; his mind just didn’t get how anyone could want to die. He had conditioned himself to be positive in all things, to show no one weakness, to always be ready to offer solutions, suggestions or a shoulder. In a way, he had become the surrogate father in place of the monster I grew up with.
And it wasn’t in him to understand why I grew worse as the years went by. In fact he hadn’t even noticed it. He never thought of me as being that kind of hurt and handicapped. But I was.
In his college education I am not certain which, if any, answers he found.
Even after better studies over the years than anything Kinsey did (how he contaminated his own findings is now an undisputed truth), not many people can claim to have solid knowledgeof why incest is so prevalent yet without boundaries or conditions such as living in urban or rural areas, socioeconomic status, education or intellectual prowess. It is not restricted to the stereotypical mountain dwellers, the south, or poor families with limited living space. A family living in a Manhattan highrise condominium can do things that you don’t want to imagine. No one wants, outside of fantasies, to think about it. Why it is so is one answer I search for.
Kinsey vs Canada
Whereas his volumes Sexual Behavior In The Human Male and Sexual Behavior In The Human Female had the appearance of being exhaustive and had many graphs, his numbers and assumptions were biased because his methods could never accommodate truth. He was, no pretense here, about as scientific as a baby boomer kid with a chemistry set: mom and dad knew that the little shit wanted to make things blow up. They bought it for him anyway. That’s how I view Kinsey. Whatever he looked for, he found. He even took information from incarcerated pedophiles and rapists, among others, and those are notorious for inventing stories with lurid details because it turns them on. (1.)
Or makes them laugh at the gullibility of others who ask stupid questions.
Other (Case) studies with a seriousness putting Kinsey to shame (how could anyone recall having their first orgasm at one year old by contact with the family pet?) have either stood the test of time or laid a foundation for more research that continues today. Without a doubt and in all honesty I find it difficult to talk or write about my mother and that she had sex with two stepsons and two sons. And so far I’ve never come across any texts regarding studies of families like mine. Oh, those families exist, you can be certain of it. But strangely, I have concluded that very few of these families prior to the late 1990s were ever broken up (by disclosure of the victims) over pervasive incest. My thoughts are that, the more children that are involved with incestuous parents, the more the parents had to condition them, and thereby instill fear of disclosure. There could be a family of two parents living in the home with ten children, and not one would dare tell anyone outside of their family. The conditioning is managed over time and involves threats (blackmail), fear of physical harm (severe beatings as discipline) and the occasional reward for reinforcement. In other words, all bases are covered to keep children and adolescents silent. In my case, my sisters were conditioned to tell lies about me out of fear of being punished for some made-up offense. In this way, we ended up in sibling hatred that insured no two of us would, first, have a sexual relationship, and second, combine to turn on him.
But there’s a quirk in the mechanics of incestuous families.
The smaller the family, the more likely that things will end badly for the offending parent. A conclusion as to why this is would require one to consider each case one at a time. For, as much as the nature of the offense remains the same, the effects and any causality in such an ending will have only passing similarities. In other words, we don’t know; it would sound more reasonable if it were the other way around, that smaller families would keep their secrets.
But putting any and all human behavior into neat sets of groups has been tried. It doesn’t work. Ectomorph and Endomorph are words which my spell-checker don’t have. I haven’t heard or read those words since high school. Pavlov’s dogs were replaced by canines in shuttle boxes. The Humane Society probably had fits about that.
Research and the knowledge it gives us is astonishing. What marvels we’ve used that knowledge for, and yet, we live on a precipice. We have taken great pains to end up much like the biblical end of days despite so many believing that the whole book is pure fantasy, stories which are the basis for the biggest three cults in history.
My contention is that while we treat ourselves and our children so horribly, yes, we will meet a dreadful end. We’ve turned our planet into a big time bomb. Climate change can destroy in more ways than one, and who cares?
Not as many people as you think.
Why should they care? Look at what they do to their own children. Look at how they end up.
Studies
A paper published in the Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal by Bruno M. Cormier, M.D., Miriam Kennedy and Jadwiga Stangowicz, Psychodynamics of Father Daughter Incest (published 1962?), available in pdf, is startling. Cormier was a early forensic scientist, way ahead of his time. The paper indeed provides insight into why my father fixated on one sister in particular, and why every day for the rest of the time he was free, he displayed some of the most evil behavior any man can manage. Indeed, such was this fixation that it compromised his behavior in every aspect of his life and ended in his own demise.
In the paper, the authors presented two cases of father-daughter incest. Both men were prosecuted. Both unrealistically believed that reconciliation was possible and that they could return to family life even after incarceration. Both accepted that there was a problem, but that’s questionable: were they acknowledging a problem because they honestly knew there was one, or because they got caught?
In one case the father had more than one daughter along with several sons. He paid little mind to the boys but doted on his eldest daughter until she was 14, then began the incestuous relationship. She became his wife in his mind, replacing his wife who no longer gave any reaction to sex, although she never refused him. The term, in the 1960s, for a wife who was unresponsive in sex or didn’t engage in it at all, was “frigid”. A debasing word to be sure, but to western men it’s typical of their attitude toward women. Indeed, if the paper was published in 1962, then cases that began in the 1950s or earlier were no doubt studied. Women, treated even more badly than today, were expected to be wives and mothers who ran the home, did the shopping, raised the children and had supper on the table at 6 p.m. Afterward, when the children were in their beds asleep, they would pour their husbands a drink and be ready to open their legs if their men wanted sex. It was an unwritten law.
The men in the cases presented were unsatisfied with their marriage. One had extramarital affairs, but guilt broke that up. By the time he started the incest, he found in his daughter the things he sought, both from his mother, who had been too firm, and from his wife. The daughter would use blackmail on him for money or nice things, but eventually abruptly left and got a job in Montreal. On her first visit back home, she reported him and he went to prison.
The other man took all four daughters to be his to initiate into or teach them “how to”, regarding each as property or in some way a possession. With one in particular, his “first”, he was jealous, very suppressive of anything she wanted or needed to do. No dating, no time alone with a brother. He was exactly like my father. Except that, when the man in the study tried it with his youngest daughter, she fled and told a neighbor and he too went to prison. All four testified against him.
The Smith Family
At an early age, my sister (second of four) and I were sat down to watch 8mm movies with both parents. One was titled “Mr. Fix-it”. Yes, I really do remember. Just thinking about it now will have me sick for a week. I’ll press on.
Several times following that night we were put together in the same room while our father had sex (rape) with my sister while our mother performed oral sex (sexual assault) on me.
He must have thought he’d done wrong, because after those few times they kept us apart. Let me be clear: by then he had already taken up his mental conditioning and pitted my sisters against me. I hated them, except for the eldest who I have no eyewitness accounts of sexual abuse from our father. And I did try to look out for my younger sister, but she was far more conditioned than I, and would push me past my ability to restrain my temper. True, I took beatings for them. Better me than them. I hated violence against girls even if I did hit my sister, the one I knew was involved. That was in grade school though and I’ve never forgotten it or forgiven myself.
By high school, dad’s paranoia and possessiveness had grown to promethean levels. I drove to school with her and, as I told the story in my blog “Nineteen Seventy Eight” I had a condom break one night when I was with my girlfriend. I left it in the car by mistake, under the seat. Well, he found it. His accusation, followed by an hours-long inquisition, was that I had been having sex with sister Second-of-Four. But it was ludicrous. I hated her. I mean, really hated her. By then she was so hateful that I got used to her telling my father shit that he could never have known. She spied on me. Lord, he’d trained her well.
I eventually heard from her long after she’d moved out and gotten married. For a short time, working as a nurse, she had an apartment in Glen Burnie. You know he hated that. It’s like the case where the girl moved to Montreal. But my sister was still too close to home. Dad demanded a copy of her house key. She refused. He responded by knocking on her door day and night, waiting for her to leave for work, and generally terrorized her.
Oh, he sexually abused the two younger daughters too. And my youngest brother. He was taken for testosterone therapy by a quack country doctor to increase his penis size. Yeah, like that works. How could two parents claiming to be teaching us about sex be so stupid? Well, they managed it.
Actually when it comes to incest, a lot of parents like to claim their son’s or daughter’s virginity and say that they’re “teaching” them about sex. In one of the cases from the 1962 Canadian publication, the father claimed exactly that. Implying it was his right and his duty to show his daughter how, only to discover that she “knew more” than he had anticipated.
And he must have felt cheated and angry, believing that she wasn’t even a virgin, or at least had engaged in some kind of sexual contact.
The possessiveness continued both with my father for my sister and with my mother for me long after both of us were married. In the study, one girl was described as married and well adjusted.
Just as with my half brother who is still mystified by my enduring and worsening condition, he seems so untouched by it all.
Appearances can be deceptive. I know better. He may not have the troubles I do, but nobody comes from incestuous parents and gets away unhurt. Nobody.
I can’t say that I know of or have studied any adult-onset incestuous relationships, in other words, sexual relations initiated between adults and their parents. I must leave it to “consenting” adults to ruin their lives if they feel they must. But the adult raised in incest is never well-adjusted. Some do handle it better than others, sure. But what you don’t see is the hidden, deeply buried pain and memories they usually master on their own. To go to treatment, to see a therapist, is to open that deep hole and face things they know they can’t handle, so they don’t. They will never admit that the past hounds them just as much as any other victim. Indeed, the pain of other victims is rarely noticed.
But the difference is a mystery; why does it happen, how is it possible and why do others spend the rest of their lives as I have?
I’ve been promiscuous, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a sex addict, an adulterer, a porn addict, and not once have I ever had a “normal” relationship with a woman. I’ve loved very much, but always knew it wasn’t going to end well.
I became a voyeur and a porn addict and after marriage would buy hardcore magazines and masturbate in my car because my wife could not fully replace what my parents had made me want. Two 8mm movies. That’s all it took. I’d have times when it was more satisfying to masturbate while looking at pictures than having real sex. The fact that I got caught a couple of times by women walking beside my car and who even, in so doing, witnessed an ejaculation, just thrilled me more, made it more appealing. I was in hell. And I didn’t even know it.
I can forgive the authors of the study for using the term “well adjusted”. Back in 1962, the same year my sister Second-of-Four was born, trauma wasn’t as widely recognized or understood as it is today, and post traumatic stress disorder was not yet a psychiatric diagnosis. What we know as dissociative thinking was considered back then to be daydreaming or, perhaps, a reaction to street drugs, depressants and psychedelics mostly.
I am forced to wonder if the victims ever reported nightmares or anxiety that restrained certain activities. Because usually the victim doesn’t associate those with past trauma until diagnosis, should they ever seek help. But in 1962, I wonder if the authors would have made that association. They were obviously ahead of their time, keen researchers and analysts, but they were the beginning of learning the extent of damage caused by incest. I’m gratified to know that the four sisters stuck together and were so courageous, but the authors do note that cases where daughters turned on their fathers were hardly unknown.
After years of research myself, I’m no closer to being over the damage, understanding the mechanisms or the problem of child abuse and incest, or why such a horrible thing is so pervasive. I don’t understand the aftereffects on victims or the sexual dysfunction. What made me a voyeur and an exhibitionist, a porn addict, a horrible boyfriend and husband? I’m further away from peace than I ever was, and I’m haunted by the past. I would never do those things now, but I’m also diagnosed and in treatment. I can be fairly objective in researching this topic, but in the end, the accumulation of horror stories only trigger me more. I climb back into a hole with walls around it where nobody can get to me. And I stay there with my god damned memories.
(1.) – On forums (remember Penthouse Forum?), message boards and porn sites that accommodate story submissions, presently incarcerated men have been widely known for their stories, in both first and third person narratives, of sex between women and animals, incestuous relationships with their fathers or brothers, and other very degrading behaviors. Clearly they’ve committed some sort of crime that has netted them an extended period behind bars. The nature of the crimes is, on the surface, easily deduced and yet there’s no way to know. The only clear fact is that some stories are written by the same people; women are deemed trash, and the writing fills some sort of need to degrade women.
We can guess that their upbringing and development was interrupted by divorce, that the mother was either absent, overbearing or negligent. Anything else is invalid based on the fact that all cases must be evaluated individually by trained professionals.
Kinsey’s handouts were clearly taken as fact, ignoring the obvious need for lewd fabrications by some participants. Claims of pedophilia and rape, bestiality and adultery, even masturbatory behavior, must therefore be considered fiction.
Memoirs of an American Asshole 