Fanny and Edmund Got Married
Oct. 14th, 2012 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I'm curious about attitudes to first-cousin marriage.
First, to get the medical side out of the way, I can see good genetic reasons for not marrying one's first cousin, reasons which may indeed be powerful enough to justify measures banning or restricting the practice. I don't feel qualified to judge that, and for the present purpose I'm not interested in it either. It's clearly less than optimal, like having parents over fifty, but whether it's a sufficiently bad idea to pass laws about it I just don't know.
What I'm interested in here is the visceral ickiness some people clearly feel at the idea of first-cousin marriage - the feeling that it breaks some powerful incest taboo, perhaps just a notch down from marrying one's sibling, child or parent.
I wasn't brought up to feel like that at all, and I'm curious as to why not - or, conversely, why other people do. Since these things are cultural, where are the cultural dividing lines, in terms of geography, generation, or belief systems? My impression is that the taboo feeling is stronger in the States, but I also think that in the UK it's stronger with the younger generation than with my own or older. There are also ethnic groups within the UK where first-cousin marriage is common, notably within the Pakistani community where I believe it runs at over 50%, and of course that has meant that the subject has inevitably become embroiled in rows about race, religion, etc. Has that altered the broader terms of the debate?
In short - as I see it, when I was growing up first-cousin marriage was considered unusual but in no way taboo, at least in my little bit of the world. I think it was even seen as romantic. Now, the feeling that it's taboo is much more widespread.
How does this tally with your experience of your own and other people's opinions? Have things changed?
First, to get the medical side out of the way, I can see good genetic reasons for not marrying one's first cousin, reasons which may indeed be powerful enough to justify measures banning or restricting the practice. I don't feel qualified to judge that, and for the present purpose I'm not interested in it either. It's clearly less than optimal, like having parents over fifty, but whether it's a sufficiently bad idea to pass laws about it I just don't know.
What I'm interested in here is the visceral ickiness some people clearly feel at the idea of first-cousin marriage - the feeling that it breaks some powerful incest taboo, perhaps just a notch down from marrying one's sibling, child or parent.
I wasn't brought up to feel like that at all, and I'm curious as to why not - or, conversely, why other people do. Since these things are cultural, where are the cultural dividing lines, in terms of geography, generation, or belief systems? My impression is that the taboo feeling is stronger in the States, but I also think that in the UK it's stronger with the younger generation than with my own or older. There are also ethnic groups within the UK where first-cousin marriage is common, notably within the Pakistani community where I believe it runs at over 50%, and of course that has meant that the subject has inevitably become embroiled in rows about race, religion, etc. Has that altered the broader terms of the debate?
In short - as I see it, when I was growing up first-cousin marriage was considered unusual but in no way taboo, at least in my little bit of the world. I think it was even seen as romantic. Now, the feeling that it's taboo is much more widespread.
How does this tally with your experience of your own and other people's opinions? Have things changed?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-14 09:06 pm (UTC)I don't think cousin marriage registers as either genetically or socially close enough to trip any squick triggers with me, although if one grew up in a family with a large group of cousins around the same age, I can see it impinging on incest taboos the same way as the famous effect with communally raised children on kibbutzim (they related to one another as functional siblings, not potential sexual partners). On the other hand, one of my romantic partners is my third cousin's wife—whom I refer to as my cousin—so I may not be a good test subject.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-14 09:40 pm (UTC)The first person I ever had a crush on was a first cousin, now I think of it. But since think of it was all I did at the time, there were no ill effects.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-14 09:55 pm (UTC)I think it happens in my milieu reasonably rarely, so it's not icky. I think the chances of serious birth defects go up to 3% from 1%, which is a lot but not much. I know married first cousins - it seemed slightly kinky but nothing beyond that.
I think in communities where a lot of cousin marriage is going on, the genetic issues become much more profound, since the first cousin offspring of first cousins would now be much more inbred. First cousins are the descendants of three out of four possible sets of grandparents. So they're 75% as genetically diverse as completely allogamous offspring. But first cousins who are both offspring of first cousins now descend from three out of four possible sets of great grandparents. So they're only 3/8ths (37.5%, half of 75%, of course) as genetically diverse as allogamous offspring. My sister and I have eight great grandparents. Offspring of first cousins who are themselves offspring of first cousins are therefore likely to be genetically closer than siblings are.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-14 10:01 pm (UTC)Thank you!
Then of course there are situations like those of my mother and her cousin, who share all four grandparents but no parents, their fathers being brothers and their mothers sisters. For them to have married would have been illegal, but only because they are both female - which would, ironically, have rendered the medical objection moot.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-15 12:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-10-15 09:18 pm (UTC)If we were starting from scratch, and trying to frame laws to minimize inherited and congenital health conditions, we'd probably be thinking about restricting (for example) older parents, as well as closely related ones.
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Date: 2012-10-16 01:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2012-10-15 08:59 am (UTC)Re catholicism, I don't think my in-laws, who were Catholic, needed a dispensation, but I could be wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-15 12:52 pm (UTC)The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that I grew up in a culture that doesn't see anything odd about first cousin relationships. I remember when I was a child expressing the idea that I might marry one of mine, and my mother's response was that she thought he'd once said that too, leaving me with the idea that it was normal, rather than "don't be silly". (Neither of us showed any interest in the idea once we grew up!)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-15 01:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-16 04:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-16 06:39 am (UTC)