Scots Taffer on 16/1/2008 at 08:34

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So, there's absolutely no possibility that if incest were legal the instances of child abuse would increase? Just putting it out there. Interesting that it receives such a backlash, seeing as you've no way of verifying the opposite.



The "you lunatic" wasn't intended as a genuine insult. If you want to be insulted then you can take it from the fact that I genuinely find your manner, viewpoint and debating style to be insulting in general. If you'll notice, I don't respond as aggressively toward anyone else in this thread as you because your very manner is confrontational and your initial salvo in this thread was just mindbogglingly put across - even if you were trying to say what mopgoblin eventually produced.



For a man who purports to be a vegetarian to be espousing bestiality... well, I guess I just don't have a fucking clue how you can really equate any of this in your mind. Hence my genuine confusion and perhaps, yes, horror at the ideas you favour.

And I asked a genuine question, if we are advocating sex with creatures that can't offer consent on a recognisable human level than what the fuck else is having sex with children except another social taboo unfairly put upon a sexual practice that will sooner or later be recognised by our enlightened peers to not be any deal at all. You can call it a strawman, I call it logical progression.

Edit: And really, to all the devil's advocates out there who are discussing this like a neutral dead topic perhaps inject your viewpoints with a little more passion, if you honestly are debating these concepts (bestiality and incest) in a positive enforceful light even abstractly, can you genuinely say that you'd be comfortable if these things were a reality?
I must say that the very idea of a society where some forty year old guy is fucking his pooch makes me want to expire (borrowing that choice phrase from a friend), and that if you think family reunions are awkward now, wait until everyone's fucked everyone else, then see how Christmas and New Year back at the parents goes.

Chimpy Chompy on 16/1/2008 at 10:25

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mopgoblin: are you saying that links between gender and sex are entirely socially constructed, with no biological\evolutionary aspects? Or have I misunderstood?

DinkyDogg on 16/1/2008 at 11:04

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Scots, since when do we require an animals consent to do anything? The "animals can't consent" argument is ridiculous considering the amount of serious abuse that goes on in the meat industry that is permitted by law. You're just using it as a thin cover for "It should be illegal because I think it's gross." If society as a whole actually gave a shit about animal abuse, maybe you'd be on to something here, but since we don't require their consent to doing a hell of a lot worse than fucking them, why should we require it for sex?

As for the "If animals can't consent, and children can't consent, then the next step is fucking children" doesn't make a bit of sense. WE FUCKING EAT ANIMALS. I don't see many people eating children, who also can't consent. As for the incest -> child abuse, we're talking about consenting adults. The law assumes that children can't consent, so any child abuse would still be illegal.

Look at France. It's a civilized country, no? From Wikipedia:


Last I checked, they haven't self-destructed because adult siblings might be sleeping with each other. Do you know of any harm to France as a result of not having incest laws?

mopgoblin on 16/1/2008 at 11:29

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In a way it's about both; the ideas of acceptance and tolerance are perhaps more consistent with anarchism than with any of the variants of liberalism that have materialised so far. While notions of freedom and tolerance are involved in classical, modern, and neoclassical liberalism, these ideologies are also largely responsible for the emergence of the modern state, and the various authorities that come with it. Furthermore, they're all characterised by strong notions of individualism - although this too would seem to support tolerance and freedom, it's very much focused on protection from states and other entities who would seek blatant forms of coercive power, potentially overlooking many other subtle (and therefore dangerous) forms of power (economic, social, cultural...).


As with most types of interaction, it stops when harm is caused. I reckon harm is defined solely by the subject of the action, so I'd say harm and lack of consent are equivalent with respect to any deliberate action - without consent, you'd be causing harm, and a person consenting to an act is deciding that the act will not harm them. An informed person can consent to <em>anything</em>, with the possible exception of removal of their ability to withhold consent to future actions.


I don't know that it's that simple. We could define capacity to consent as requiring an entity to have reached some fraction of their maximum capacity for reason (although defining <em>that</em> could also be tricky), or consider initiative when determining whether consent is valid in certain circumstances, or consider the types of power relationship that each party is aware of.


I wouldn't expect a significant increase if the abusive forms remained illegal, assuming those laws recognise the less obvious abuses of power.


For the most part, yeah. After all, I can handle living in a society where most people eat meat, and avoiding all events at which they do so isn't really viable. Avoiding events at which people fuck animals or close relatives would be much easier, so in that respect it'd be less of an issue than some of the things that already happen legally. And with sex it's usually pretty easy to be confident your partner is an unrelated human, so I wouldn't have to worry about accidentally violating my own principles. When buying food products, however, I have to watch out for things like gelatin (as a word or represented by a number) in ingredient lists.

mopgoblin on 16/1/2008 at 12:54

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It's a bit tricky to express, as there are at least three concepts involved (gender as identity, gender as a social category, gender roles linked to those social categories). I'm not sure about links between gender and sex being <em>entirely</em> socially constructed, but in practice the categories and roles might as well be. One could perhaps argue that "natural" genders (with or without associated roles) existed until the time humans began to exert deliberate control over culture, but even if you accept that argument, the view back is obscured by all of the cultural distortions that happened since then. Looking at various cultures that exist today, recognisable masculine and feminine genders seem pretty much universal, but the associated roles can vary quite a bit, and there are sometimes other genders besides those two.

Regardless of what cultural variations we can observe, I'd also say it's <em>preferable</em> to treat gender and gender roles as (undesirable) social constructs, as people <em>will</em> have gender identities that fall outside whatever genders are recognised as valid for their sex, or goals that aren't compatible with their available gender roles. For an example of the latter, the first wave of feminism was all about women trying to get better access to the public sphere; such access wasn't compatible with the feminine gender role at the time.

It's not always easy to be sure of the origins of an individual's gender identity, as both biological and social factors seem to be involved. Given that medicine and society currently have a tendency to think "how can we fix this?", rather than "is this actually a bad thing?" when they come across anything that appears unusual, I'm not sure we're ready to know the details, either.

Essentially, gender identities arise through a combination of biological factors and social factors. Societies notice the correlation with sex, and construct genders as categories based on distinctions they perceive as significant (and/or useful to those in power). Roles are assigned to these categories, again based on social perceptions and various interests. It seems gender roles have less resistance to change than gender itself, perhaps because the gender categories tend to be more directly important to identity than the details of the gender role.