In addition to having a lot of fetishists, Tumblr appears to also have some people in actual consanguinamorous relationships. Some of their blogs are NSFW, and others are relatively SFW, like the sister blog to this very blog you're reading. Here's a text entry at a Tumblr, "Mommy With A Crush," which is a generally NSFW blog. This text entry, however, should be reblogged and sent all over. "Mommy With A Crush" is about a mother in a relationship with her son, and in this entry she responds to an anonymous (of course) hater who sent a message to berate her and say he hopes her blog is fake...
Up until about 2 years ago, I would have been right there with you. I grew up in a very religious, conservative home. And, to a somewhat lesser degree, that is the home that my husband and I have established for our family because he had a similar background to mine. In that kind of environment, my reaction would have been the same as yours: outrage and disgust.Feelings of disgust are understandable. If someone has a strong Westermack Effect in their life, they're going to feel disgust about the thought of having sex with their own close relatives. The problem comes when they insist everyone else has to feel the same way about their own close relatives. Not everyone does, and the disgust of persons A, B, and even C should not interfere in the love lives of person Y and Z.
But then, almost two years ago, I suddenly had to start dealing with feelings that I discovered inside myself that flew in the face of my beliefs. I did not ask to have those feelings, nor were they secret desires I’d hidden for a long time. They were simply a development of what I already felt toward my son in a direction I never expected them to go. And yes, they terrified me and disgusted me too. And, like you, I was very judgemental and negative toward myself for having those feelings.More people find themselves in this situation than most people think.
But, unlike you, I didn’t get to just thumb my nose at the person with those feelings and turn away feeling superior; as the person with those feelings, I had to live with them, and with myself. I couldn’t just walk away from them, and they didn’t just go away on their own, no matter how much I tried to deny them, will them away, or pray them away. I battled with my thoughts and feelings, day in and day out, for months. The war I waged on myself sent me into a pit of depression. (Not something I generally have to deal with, and my prayers and blessings to those of you who struggle with it regularly or constantly.)It's a shame how people beat themselves up over feelings that are actually natural and not so rare.
When I had finally exhausted all my resources aimed at making it go away, I was left with no option but to figure out how to deal with it. So instead of trying to fight it, I started trying to understand it. And now that I think I understand the source of the “abnormal” feelings, they’re a lot less scary and disgusting.
The biggest hurdle I had to overcome was my tendency to fetishize the (at that time “desired”, now “realized”) relationship. Like so many of the asks and messages I receive, the content of these asks indicate that you (the writer) have not read back through my blog to try to understand me or my relationship with my son at all; you’re simply reacting to your assumptions about it based on (at best) a handful of posts and reblogs. And I can pretty well guarantee that you’re fetishizing the incestuous nature of it as much as all the enthusiastic fans of incest-related blogs; you’re just doing so in a negative way. By “fetishizing” it, I mean (in the simplest terms, which will suffice for this rant) that you’re reducing it to simply the sex, and especially the “taboo” nature of it.People are going to have their fetishes, and that's fine. The problem comes in when they get off on the love lives of people and they still want to deny those people their rights.
But let’s talk about taboos for a moment. There are so many things that have historically been “taboo”, but have lost their stigma as our modern society swings away from being as “sex-negative” as it has been for quite some time. Taboos are strictly societal structures, meant to discourage behaviors frowned upon by societal leaders, particularly religious leaders. Taboos are not a real thing in the “natural” world; returning to our specific topic, my understanding is that “incestuous” intercourse is pretty common among many species, and it only becomes an issue when there’s no introduction of new DNA after several generations. Even then, the issues arise from the propagation of recessive genes that are given an opportunity to express themselves because they’re not overridden by dominant genes, leading to increased possibility of malformation.For more, see here.
So a “taboo” is little more than a moral indictment. If you then want to say instead that you find my relationship with my son to be morally reprehensible, then you are well within your right to hold whatever moral belief you choose and to form your opinions based on it. But let’s not pretend that it’s based on some universal “natural law” that makes it a Bad Thing.It's found in other animals, and it has always been part of human sexuality and relationships.
Now let’s turn to the accusation of abuse. Let me be clear, I do not - in any way - condone the abuse of anyone. If you had taken the time to really read through my blog, I would hope you would see that abuse is the very thing I hoped to avoid with my son. Being his mother, and thereby having authority over him, I was very clear about my intentions to not push him into anything, or to even lead him down a path that was not of his own choosing. Before engaging in any kind of sexual activities with him, I was very clear about what was happening, what it meant, and what the potential negative outcomes were. He has not gone into this uninformed or under any duress. We both hold the power to stop it at any time we grow uncomfortable with it or wish it to end. I don’t talk about it here, because it’s both unsexy and difficult to put into words, but I do regularly watch for behaviors or other indicators that this is having a negative influence on his growing independence and continued social development.He couldn't ask for a better mother.
You may wonder why I keep putting “abnormal” in quotes. I do it because the mother-son relationship we have is not what is considered to be The Norm. But I receive 1-2 messages or asks every day claiming to come from a member of a current or former mother-son relationship (granted, many of them are of questionable validity), and 3-4 asks or messages (at least!) from sons expressing their current or past desire for their mother. Add in the fact that my blog as of right now has 24,499 followers (WOW!), and I think it’s safe to say that the involvement in or desire for a relationship between a parent and a child is dramatically higher than the perceived notion of it being an outlier group would suggest. My son just happens to be one of the untold number who is lucky enough that his mother was open to engaging in such a relationship.Yes, he's very lucky. And yes, a lot of people want a relationship like this, even if they'd never admit it. What gets published on our blogs is but a small fraction of what is going on out there. Most people who are, or have been involved, or what to be, never contact us (fullmarriageequality at protonmail dot com) and many who do contact us do not want anything published on our blogs.
I hope you’re still reading this, anonymous person who feels they have the right to stand in judgement of me, my life, and my feelings. Because this is the point I most want to drive home with you and everyone else: no one gets to tell me whether I do or don’t love my son. You don’t know me, you don’t know my son, you don’t know my husband, you don’t know our lives. You only know what little I choose to share here. You don’t get to dictate what my feelings for my son are, or what they mean. Your judgement has no place and no value when it comes to the bond I have with my child.The hater is clueless.
You want to disagree with me, to condemn my actions? OK, you’re more than welcome to.
But you are not the one who struggled against overwhelming odds to even conceive my child, and then even greater odds of actually bringing him into this world as a healthy baby boy. You didn’t stay up all night, every night, with him for more than a month just to reassure yourself constantly that he was still breathing, and only sleeping when his father was there to stand watch for you. You didn’t fret about his every sniffle, bruise, and scrape, until you had years’ worth of evidence to suggest he was going to survive the next one. You didn’t break down and cry every day of his first week of school because you had to admit that, for even just a few hours, you couldn’t personally guarantee that he was safe. You haven’t spent the entirety of my son’s life overcoming the fear in your heart of possibly losing the son you fought so hard to even have in favor of doing what your head knows is in the best interest of him and his development. So you don’t get to - no, you don’t have the right to - even suggest that I don’t love my son!That hater was flattened.This is a woman who loves her son more, not less. They should be free to be together without hiding, to love each other with whatever affections to which they mutually agree, no matter who is disgusted. It's a polyamorous and consaguinamorous relationship that happens more than people think.
Do you have experience with a close relative, whether blood, adopted, or step? Are you considering it? You're always welcome to comment below (you can do so anonymously) or send an email at fullmarriageequality at protonmail dot com.
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