Incest and insects

Andrea is running away to the desert this week, so you'll have to soldier on without her. To make it up to you, here's a favorite column of yesteryear. Hope you still like it.

DEAR ANDREA: There's nothing wrong with having a crush on your third cousin, is there? I'm not some idiot redneck who considers incest normal or anything like that. I've tried to get her out of my mind and concentrate on other women but to no avail. It seems that every other girl pales in comparison. She's also a great friend and has a great personality. Should I try and forget about her sexually and start thinking about other women?

Love, Cuz

Dear Cuz:

Great, now I'm going to have to hear from the Idiot Redneck Anti-Defamation League, as if the National Rifle Association, the female-ejaculate-isn't-pee people, and the Furious Furries weren't noisy enough already. Thanks a lot.

There's nothing wrong with having a crush, period, and compared with some people's obscure objects of desire, a third cousin barely registers as weird. That doesn't mean you shouldn't start thinking about other women, though. Especially since you failed to mention whether your cousin ever said she wanted to get it on with you.

Some sort of adolescent groping between cousins of like age is nearly inevitable, if only out of convenience. What else are you supposed to do while the grown-ups nod off after holiday meals – wash the dishes? I don't think so. It's also (nearly) inevitable that one outgrows these things. On the odd chance you don't, I may as well mention that third-cousin marriage is perfectly legal, if wildly unpopular with said cousins' parents. There has also been some recent research demonstrating that marriages between cousins do not produce the slack-jawed, banjo-strumming monsters of popular imagination. Still, in the best of all possible worlds, you two would get to do it, get it out of your respective systems, and then both go find somebody else.

Love, Andrea

Dear Andrea:

The prohibition against incest with someone socially defined as a close family member seems to have little to do with the presumed genetic ills of the offspring. Forming within-group relationships is far more likely to cause friction between folks who are supposed to work and live closely with one another. The biological family in Western culture is only one sort of group in the world within which incest is prohibited.

Love, Stuffy

Dear Stuff:

True enough. The prohibition is, as I keep saying, nearly universal. I can think of no consistent historical exceptions except those for the members of various royal families, and we can all see how well those turned out. Mammals generally practice some form of exogamy – and would neither evolve nor survive if they didn't. Some kinds of insects mate with their siblings, but some kinds of insects eat their mothers, dismember their mates, and enslave other creatures, burrow through their eyeballs, and lay eggs in their brain, so we're not going to look to our arthropod friends for a moral example.

I think that the taboo has much to do with a deep biological urge toward genetic diversity and that our preference for the "other" is so deeply ingrained that we may as well just call it instinct and be done with it. I've heard of studies of children raised on kibbutzim, where everyone used to grow up as one huge family. As the (former) children were not actually related, there was nothing at all to prevent their pairing off, but they just didn't feel like it. I'm not saying the little kibbutzniks never fooled around; they probably did. But they didn't fall in love, and they didn't get married. Given a choice between the kid they'd known since snotty-nosed toddlerhood and the exotic stranger from the farm down the road, they tended to hit that road and keep running till they met someone they'd never met before.

The same goes for our more familiar nuclear units, although there are inevitable exceptions, and most of them seem to write me letters. I do not believe, however, that most people would start humping their closest relatives in the unlikely event that the social penalties were suddenly waived. It is not our way. Blood may be thicker than water, but it's also stickier.