INCEST: PART THREE

Subtle and pervasive: Not all incest includes sexual assault

Incest functions as a spell of unreality. A structure of nothingness. A completely normal and unremarkable family life in which something unnameable is ominously and terrifyingly wrong. You know in the summer when you can see the heat making the air go squiggly? Imagine those squiggles as an indication that in the seeming nothingness, there is something there. Incest is like that. Subtle, pervasive, unthinkable, unnameable. But present, felt.

As a teenager I came up with this metaphor: Imagine you are in a house full of bugs. There are bugs crawling all over all the walls and all the furniture and in your food and even on the fork you are lifting to your mouth. And you feel disgusted, you feel like something is really wrong. But your whole family is acting completely normal, laughing and eating and talking as bugs crawl over their faces and into their mouths. When you tell them you think there are bugs in your food your family says it’s just pepper and not to worry about it.

There is no way to talk about incest without feeling that you are lying. This is because incest lives in the realm of unreality and everything in the realm of unreality cannot be thought or said or named. When you spreak of things that happen in the realm of unreality it will always feel like a lie and be treated like a lie. You are breaking the fundamental rule. You are not allowed to talk about what goes on in the realm of unreality because it isn’t real.

Incest is not an act; incest is a dynamic. Incest can occur when no physical sexual assault has taken place. Incest can be expressed as sexual propriety over the children and this can look a lot of ways. Incest be expressed as a total lack of boundaries and differentiation and this can look a lot of ways. Incest can be expressed through developmental neglect and preventing the children from gaining necessary skills to differentiate from the family, and this can look a lot of ways. Incest can include touch, control, enmeshment, “games”, “jokes”, looks, and yes, simply energetic vibes. A child can tell when an adult in their life is exhibiting sexual interest in them, even if it’s extremely subtle, and even if the child has no way to think this thought to themself.

Incest functions through denial and dissociation. Our extreme cultural taboo against incest works to uphold incest. Incest is so bad and so disgusting that it definitely cannot be happening here. To accuse someone of incest is to accuse them of something unthinkable. It’s unthinkable so it is not real. Dorothée Dussy’s Le berceau des dominations: Anthropologie de l’inceste explains that perpetrators of incest always think that incest is something other than what they are doing. Incest is always something specific (rape, molestation), and what the perpetrator of incest is doing never “counts.” This denial and dissociation occurs no matter how severe and obviously incestuous what the perpetrtor is doing is. It could always be “worse” and somehow, it always lies just outside of what could really be considered incest.