incest

[4riette]

I can't say anything about the other cultures (mostly becuase I didn't read them ;D), but I can say that this

Western observers even today often notice that Japanese mothers still masturbate their young children during the day in public and at night in the family bed - in order, they say, "to put them to sleep."(156) The average Japanese today sleeps with his or her children until the children are ten or fifteen years old,"(157) - one recent Japanese study found daughters still sleeping with their fathers over 20 percent of the time even after age sixteen.(158) Even when the home contains a dozen rooms or more, parents and grandparents feel "lonely" if they sleep apart from
the children in the family, and therefore go to bed with some child every night (the mean age in one study of children sleeping alone is 12.7 years).(159) Since so many families still practice what is termed dakine co-sleeping - with the parent or grandparent sleeping while physically embracing the child, a practice said to be beneficial to the health of the adult"(160) - and since most Japanese parents still regularly have sexual in-tercourse while the child is in bed with them,(161) one wonders how scholars can continue to maintain that nothing sexual usually happens to the Japanese child in the family bed, particularly since none have yet ask-ed the children themselves about their sexual experiences.

is a huge ass load of bullshit. ALL OF IT. They act like Japan is some 3rd rate country, this would be considered just as odd and wrong here as it is in the US/Canada/Europe.

[Xavier]

I was hoping this thread was going to be about Greg and Marcia Brady...

[Faris]

Some people are so gullible its dangerous, lol.

[Koyuki]

Incest

Is hawt.

[Lordwafik]

I was hoping this thread was going to be about Greg and Marcia Brady...

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Co...h.standard.jpg

[Kiro]

'sup guys i gotta go afk and get a handjob before nap time. *^-^*

One of the most endogenous societies in the world, Japan has approved of incestuous marriages in court circles even in historical times.(152) Preferred sibling, cousin, uncle-niece and aunt-nephew marriages have been so extensive that genetics experts have discovered that the inbreeding has affected their size and health.

That explains a lot, lol..

[Tyr]

Yeah, I wouldn't really take any of that at face value.

At first glance it sounded ridiculous to me, so I asked some friends and they were like "WTF is that guy talking about."

Most likely he focuses on extreme conditions like way rural or very poor families and skews the data to make it seem like something it's not.

EDIT: Also notice how he always starts with facts about adults having intercourse but then has to tag on "maybe the kids get banged too!" with no evidence.

Well said.

I don't know the cases first hand for the likes of India and Japan, but I know, having visited most of the Asian Middle East (practically all of Iran, most of Iraq and some of Saudi Arabia, where the majority of Muslims in the Middle East are), I've never heard of that line of "Muslim holy men" having sexual relationships with children. I am not saying it DOESN'T happen, because I will defer to the possibility of this occurring, but I also find it interesting that the one religious group the author (DeMause) chose to name were Muslims. Otherwise, he noted the people as either part of a culture or part of a larger society.

I again have to agree with Elmer here, had I the time I would sit down and look up his citations, to note where he might be making speculations and where he has actual evidences. Also, the article seems to lend itself to vicious generalizations, something a writer (read: good writer) wouldn't do, unless they have some ulterior motive.

I'm not saying this stuff doesn't/can't happen, and it's very possible it does, however, he really seems to be going overboard in some cases. Toss in the fact that I extremely dislike all these "West v. East Civilization" crap, and you get my opinion on it. I have yet to read the entire article, just the excerpt the OP posted.

[Demosthenes]

note to self, dont stop playing pokemon to browse /bg/

[XxSlusherxx]

One of the most endogenous societies in the world, Japan has approved of incestuous marriages in court circles even in historical times.(152) Preferred sibling, cousin, uncle-niece and aunt-nephew marriages have been so extensive that genetics experts have discovered that the inbreeding has affected their size and health.(153) How often this incestuous marriage system occurred in traditional Japan is still largely unexplored. One indication of what is likely to be found is a 1959 study by Kubo showing that there were still rural areas in Japan where fathers married their daughters when the mother had died or was incapacitated, "in accordance with feudal family traditions.(154) Kubo concluded that incest was considered "praiseworthy conduct" in many traditional rural families. In the 36 incest cases he studied in Hiroshima, he found that there was often community moral disapproval of the families who lived in open incestuous marriages, but that the participants themselves did not think of it as immoral. In fact, when the father was unavailable to head the family, his son often took over his role and had sex with his sister in order "to end confusion in the order of the home." Other members of the family accepted this incest as normal.

In traditional Japan, quite young girls were introduced into sex by older boys who visited their bedrooms at night with the complicity of the girl's parents (called night-prowling, yobai). The boys "assembled in communal huts and instructed slightly younger village males in sex approaches and techniques..." Although they recommended "gentle persuasion,"(155) there was no guarantee that all was so gentle in fact, since the parents "looked the other way" in accordance with custom while the older boys had intercourse with their young daughters.

Western observers even today often notice that Japanese mothers still masturbate their young children during the day in public and at night in the family bed - in order, they say, "to put them to sleep."(156) The average Japanese today sleeps with his or her children until the children are ten or fifteen years old,"(157) - one recent Japanese study found daughters still sleeping with their fathers over 20 percent of the time even after age sixteen.(158) Even when the home contains a dozen rooms or more, parents and grandparents feel "lonely" if they sleep apart from
the children in the family, and therefore go to bed with some child every night (the mean age in one study of children sleeping alone is 12.7 years).(159) Since so many families still practice what is termed dakine co-sleeping - with the parent or grandparent sleeping while physically embracing the child, a practice said to be beneficial to the health of the adult"(160) - and since most Japanese parents still regularly have sexual in-tercourse while the child is in bed with them,(161) one wonders how scholars can continue to maintain that nothing sexual usually happens to the Japanese child in the family bed, particularly since none have yet ask-ed the children themselves about their sexual experiences.

Possible BS but I could be wrong, dosen't the mean have to be a whole number?

4. Mathematics.
a. a quantity having a value intermediate between the values of other quantities; an average, esp. the arithmetic mean.
b. either the second or third term in a proportion of four terms.

[Panella]

Doesn't Mean=Average? Are you thinking of Median?

[Marquisate]

They are not harming the children

5 minutes of searching netted me this: "...confusion about sexual identity and sexual norms; inability to differentiate sex from love; confusion between care-getting and care-giving, with lowered respect for adult authority; guilt, shame, anxiety, lowered self-esteem, depression, vulnerability to drug and alcohol abuse, and impaired ability to judge the trustworthiness of others. We also see an age-inappropriate sexual knowledge, and sex acts sometimes compulsively reenacted with other children (19)."

Here's another interesting analysis focusing on homosexual child abuse:

"Certain children are especially vulnerable to abuse--especially the boy who is predisposed to homosexuality. The prehomosexual boy is very often lonely, alienated from his father, and experiencing frustrating and deficient same-sex peer relationships. He quite naturally craves male attention, affection and approval.

Often the same boy is also experiencing an overly intense and intimate relationship with his mother, which makes normal masculine individuation difficult. An intimate relationship with a man is one place of separation and individuation "where Mother cannot go" (15).

When this lonely boy receives flattering attention from an older male, then a link is established between love and homoerotic sex. The boy comes to believe, "If I want love from men, I must have sex with them." Thus the normal and natural developmental need of same-sex love and approval has become eroticized. The boy may then develop a compulsive, promiscous sexual habit pattern, which in gay life is seen fairly frequently.

Many Gay Biographies Tell the Story

In his life story, Breaking the Surface, Olympic diver Greg Louganis tells the poignant tale of his own experience with adult-child sex. He was an unusually sensitive boy, with an intense closeness with his mother, and a distant, fearful relationship with his father. Lonely and starving for male affection, he was molested by an older man he encountered on the beach. In his childish neediness, Louganis--like many victims of man-boy molestation--perceived that relationship as loving. "

This is just scratching the surface of the amount of damage child sexual abuse can inflict on children. Even if a small handful of children later describe the experience as "beneficial" later in life (their skewed perspective notwithstanding), and we somehow ignore that the vast majority of pedophilia victims experience very negative consequences from the experience, we still have moral issues; consent, etc.

the relations are consensual

No, they are not. There is always an element of coercion - a misuse of adult authority, and/or a misuse of the child's need for affection. Even if there weren't, the children still cannot consent because they are under the age of consent (assuming one exists.)

and pleasurable for them.

See first response.

I personally wouldn't, and while I think there is a lot of potential for abuse, I don't believe it is inherently abusive. We as a society need to stop being so afraid of childhood sexuality...They have it, they enjoy it, they pursue it...A lifetime of guilt about it isn't healthy for anyone.

Child-child sexual relations are not the same as child-adult sexual relations. They may have similar detrimental psychological effects on children, but the legal and morality issues aren't there. Regardless, you need to be more specific... what exactly do you mean by "we as a society need to stop being so afraid of childhood sexuality"? There's a big difference between saying "we should just accept that adolescent and post-adolescent children will be sexually active to certain degrees" and "mothers should be allowed to sexually stimulate their infant or pre-adolescent children" or "adults and adolescent/post-adolescent children should be allowed to have sexual intercourse." Each of those statements presents unique social, personal, psychological and moral issues, ranging from the increased risk of childhood pregnancy to malacceptance of social norms by children who experience sexual intercourse at a young age.

[Zigma]

What is it with you and finding the most deviant papers/videos possible? lol...

Its the internet :/

[Maguspk]

They are not harming the children

5 minutes of searching netted me this: "...confusion about sexual identity and sexual norms; inability to differentiate sex from love; confusion between care-getting and care-giving, with lowered respect for adult authority; guilt, shame, anxiety, lowered self-esteem, depression, vulnerability to drug and alcohol abuse, and impaired ability to judge the trustworthiness of others. We also see an age-inappropriate sexual knowledge, and sex acts sometimes compulsively reenacted with other children (19)."

Here's another interesting analysis focusing on homosexual child abuse:

"Certain children are especially vulnerable to abuse--especially the boy who is predisposed to homosexuality. The prehomosexual boy is very often lonely, alienated from his father, and experiencing frustrating and deficient same-sex peer relationships. He quite naturally craves male attention, affection and approval.

Often the same boy is also experiencing an overly intense and intimate relationship with his mother, which makes normal masculine individuation difficult. An intimate relationship with a man is one place of separation and individuation "where Mother cannot go" (15).

When this lonely boy receives flattering attention from an older male, then a link is established between love and homoerotic sex. The boy comes to believe, "If I want love from men, I must have sex with them." Thus the normal and natural developmental need of same-sex love and approval has become eroticized. The boy may then develop a compulsive, promiscous sexual habit pattern, which in gay life is seen fairly frequently.

Many Gay Biographies Tell the Story

In his life story, Breaking the Surface, Olympic diver Greg Louganis tells the poignant tale of his own experience with adult-child sex. He was an unusually sensitive boy, with an intense closeness with his mother, and a distant, fearful relationship with his father. Lonely and starving for male affection, he was molested by an older man he encountered on the beach. In his childish neediness, Louganis--like many victims of man-boy molestation--perceived that relationship as loving. "

This is just scratching the surface of the amount of damage child sexual abuse can inflict on children. Even if a small handful of children later describe the experience as "beneficial" later in life (their skewed perspective notwithstanding), and we somehow ignore that the vast majority of pedophilia victims experience very negative consequences from the experience, we still have moral issues; consent, etc.

[quote:07e5c]the relations are consensual

No, they are not. There is always an element of coercion - a misuse of adult authority, and/or a misuse of the child's need for affection. Even if there weren't, the children still cannot consent because they are under the age of consent (assuming one exists.)

and pleasurable for them.

See first response.

I personally wouldn't, and while I think there is a lot of potential for abuse, I don't believe it is inherently abusive. We as a society need to stop being so afraid of childhood sexuality...They have it, they enjoy it, they pursue it...A lifetime of guilt about it isn't healthy for anyone.

Child-child sexual relations are not the same as child-adult sexual relations. They may have similar detrimental psychological effects on children, but the legal and morality issues aren't there. Regardless, you need to be more specific... what exactly do you mean by "we as a society need to stop being so afraid of childhood sexuality"? There's a big difference between saying "we should just accept that adolescent and post-adolescent children will be sexually active to certain degrees" and "mothers should be allowed to sexually stimulate their infant or pre-adolescent children" or "adults and adolescent/post-adolescent children should be allowed to have sexual intercourse." Each of those statements presents unique social, personal, psychological and moral issues, ranging from the increased risk of childhood pregnancy to malacceptance of social norms by children who experience sexual intercourse at a young age.[/quote:07e5c]

I agree.

Trying to legitamize incest might be the most stupid thing someone has ever done on BG forums. I noticed the two who did it both had feminine names too. One name ending in "a", the other cryptically similar to "Lindsay". This leads me to the assumption that they are females, which is very interesting; perhaps they are biased in the matter being sexually exploited at a young age explaining their attachment to an MMO (no offense but it makes sense you'd have a weakened sense of self after being exploited and revert to an online world to "escape").

There is no way to say a young child is capable of being able to decide whether or not they want to engage in sexual activities with an adult. Also, the adult will almost always use their obvious advantage in persuasion and like the quoted section, their authority, to gain a foothold in the sexual coercion field.

[Charla]

So um... what was the original thread title, I must have skipped it last night. And yeah, mean is what we usually call average, median is the one that has to be a whole number (and mode, but that's meaningless here).

[zoobernut]

And? dude, it's fucking sick and new to me.

"Fucking sick" is based on a social normalization. They are not harming the children, the relations are consensual and pleasurable for them. I personally wouldn't, and while I think there is a lot of potential for abuse, I don't believe it is inherently abusive. We as a society need to stop being so afraid of childhood sexuality...They have it, they enjoy it, they pursue it...A lifetime of guilt about it isn't healthy for anyone.

While I agree with most people that the article sounds improbable and stupid.

In response to the above quote, I would agree with this under certain circumstances however with respect to incest I think there is a level of aversion to it beyond society because of the understanding that incest is actually harmful to the health of humans as a species. Incest can cause serious genetic diseases and malformations.

[Lynsy]

While I agree with most people that the article sounds improbable and stupid.

In response to the above quote, I would agree with this under certain circumstances however with respect to incest I think there is a level of aversion to it beyond society because of the understanding that incest is actually harmful to the health of humans as a species. Incest can cause serious genetic diseases and malformations.

The aversion to it generally starts around puberty, typically intra-familial relations are not considered "icky" until the potential for reproduction arises.

The italicized part is a whole lot of studies on man-boy relationship (transgenerational homosexuality) because its the most commonly studied area of early sexuality and easiest to find data on. Skip it if you want, the short version is: it has been part of more societies than not and is far more often considered positive than not.

I maintain that there is a greater potential for abuse in transgenerational relationships, but not that they are inherently abusive. Americans view any relationship with a power differential as negative (boss/employee, adult/child, cop/prisoner, etc) even when consensual and viewed as positive and beneficial by both involved parties.

As far as the person who says I play Final Fantasy because I was sexually exploited as a child, I'm not even entirely sure what to say to that. I'm not sure if you want me to deny it or go "omg, you're right FFXI is my crutch for coping with years of childhood sexual trauma" or what. Yes, I was sexually exploited as a child. I had both harsh, cruel and unwanted sexual exploitation that was in tandem physical and emotional abuse...and experience that was overall neutral-positive. The latter had no long term scarring effect on my psyche, the only ill effects I have from that are socialized guilt about being a sexual being (my parents are southern baptists, not big fans of it) and nothing to do with feeling exploited, used or unable to cope with society in general.



In a study conducted by Sandfort (1983) on a sample of 25 Dutch boys aged 10 to 16 involved in ongoing sexual relationships with men. Sandfort reported that the boys experienced their relationships, including the sexual aspects, predominantly in positive terms, that evidence of exploitation or misuse was absent, and that the boys tended to see the pedophile as a teacher, as someone they could talk to easily and with whom they could discuss their problems.

Davenport (1965) reported that East Bay Islander boys aged 7 to 11 who had sexual relations with married men would then "discuss their homosexual activities freely and without shame in the presence of their parents and friends" (p. 200). Omani boys aged 12 or 13, after discovering their homosexual interests, actively sought sex with men as prostitutes (i.e., xaniths); this pursuit reflected sexual interest rather than economic need (Wikan, 1982). Williams (1996) reported that the Native American men he interviewed who had boyhood sexual relations with significantly older males typically reflected on these experiences with fond memories, regardless of their current sexual orientation. Such findings, had they been discussed in relation to Sandfort's study, could have substantially informed any speculations offered. Additionally, the ancient Greek form of man-boy sex discussed by Masters et al. and Gebhard (1985), with its functions of pedagogy and guidance, could have informed Sandfort's report that the boys saw their pedophile as a teacher and as one with whom they could discuss their problems.

In a review of 59 studies based on college samples, Rind et al. found that boys' sexual experiences with significantly older individuals, many of whom were males, were 37% positive, 29% neutral, and 33% negative. Moreover, male students, who as boys were willing partners in these relations, were psychologically as well adjusted as male students who had no such experiences. On the other hand, male students who were unwilling in these relations with these experiences regardless of level of willingness were somewhat less well adjusted than controls. The other two reviews, one of which focused on nationally representative samples (Rind & Tromovitch, 1997), reported comparable reactions and psychological correlates.

The data indicate that transgenerational homosexuality (i.e., man-boy sex) has been the most common form of same-sex relationship in which adult males cross-culturally and historically have been involved (Herdt, 1995).

Numerous societies, past and present, have accepted, even institutionalized, sexual relations between boys and older males. Adam (1985) described two major categories of transgenerational homosexuality: the ancient model and the Melanesian model. In the former, often referred to as pederasty, the relationship generally occurs between an adult male and an adolescent boy; the relationship often, but not always, takes on the social function of an "erotic apprenticeship," in which the older male mentors the boy and helps him develop into an adult. The relationship ends when the boy reaches maturity. For example, in ancient Greece pederastic relations lasted from the time the boy was 12 until he was about 17 or 18 (Cantarella, 1992; Percy, 1996), and in early modern Japan these relations went from the time the boy was 11 to about 19 (Saikaku, 1990; Schalow, 1989). In Europe, in addition to ancient Greece, socially sanctioned pederastic relations occurred among certain ancient Germanic and Celtic tribes, and appear to have been common among the early Indo-Europeans (Bremmer, 1980; Greenberg, 1988). Highly romanticized pederastic relations were deeply rooted in Albania under Ottoman rule, and continued to the beginning of this century (Bremmer, 1980; Greenberg, 1988; Trumbach, 1977). Evidence suggests that pederasty was prevalent among the pre-Roman Etruscans (Greenberg, 1988), and it was accepted as normal and widely practiced later in ancient Rome (Cantarella, 1992). Boswell (1980) provided evidence that pederastic relations were tolerated in Europe until the 13th century. Although repressed after that time, pederastic relations remained the dominant form of homosexuality in Europe until the industrial revolution (Greenberg, 1988; Saslow, 1989; Trumbach, 1989).

[Maguspk]

lol@trying to justify the man-boy relationship by saying the boys were ok with it.

[Fusional]

Sounds like a bullshit report to me, the way it's written. Need more sources.

+1

[Lynsy]

lol@trying to justify the man-boy relationship by saying the boys were ok with it.

Maybe something that has been present in every social system, and accepted in more social systems than not has something to it?

More societies have, historically, accepted some form of man-boy relationship than have had monogamous marriages.

Interestingly, I'm still not a big fan of transgenerational relationships because the potential for abuse is so high, all I've really said is that they aren't nearly as bad as some people want to make them seem and that, in the end, most of the issue with them for people experiencing them comes from socialized guilt or threats/demands for secrecy because of social unacceptance, rather than the act itself being traumatizing.

I don't really think it is "right" but I also think that it is nowhere near as wrong as our anti-authoritative society would like to make it seem.

[Tyche]

Wow, how can you not see that italicized part as a problem. 12-13 year old boys actively seeking prostitution...in today's society??? They'd be dead by 40 from HIV.