the current Austrian incest imprisonment story is so icky and gross ... after noting that this is not the first occurence in Austria, I started Googling to see if there was a pattern and while reading up on the research, I stumbled onto a couple of rather curious articles ... well they certainly made me reach for the barf bag ... but what it does seem to reveal is that ... for all the dark secret taboos out there, there are always others across the world practising the same things - and with the internet, these ppl are contacting each other and hence feeling validated or "normalised" in this process ... hmm from a Social intellectual perspective - I thought hmm this seems to be an interesting new shift .. an accellerated shift in the taboo norrmalisation process

having travelled in Egypt, Rome and Greece and being rather surprised by the ancient practices   - I also started to think about cultural practices, taboos and what we view as normal in our 21st century Christian Protestant world view

the thought of Incest for eg. makes us very nauseous ... but was common in Egypt and in fact mentioned rather nonchalantly in the Old testament.  As was Paedo/gay polygamy in Ancient Greece ... all this seemed to go away for about 2000 years ... but I wonder whether with the speed of Internet communication, if these rather "out-dated and recently outlawed" practices will make a come back, a gradual return to "normal cultural practice" ... currently we've already seen a return of Porn as mainstream, after nude portrayal disappeared post-Victorian age ... hmmm

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here are the articles that raised my eyebrows

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/ Article/0,4273,4331603,00.html

Forbidden love
Can sex between close relatives ever be acceptable? Johann Hari on the queasy issue of 'consensual' incest
Johann Hari
Guardian - Wednesday January 9, 2002

It was a Friday night a few months ago. Rob was standing on my doorstep, ashen and trembling. He still couldn't speak even as he sipped at a mug of tea after my flatmate and I had ushered him into our front room. We could not guess what had happened, but a feeling of dread was fast forming in our minds; we could only assume that something terrible must have happened to Rob's fiancee, Karen. Gradually, his powers of speech returned and the story emerged. Something had happened, but that something was terrible to Rob himself, not Karen.

Now, you have to understand that Rob and Karen were the most balanced, wholesome couple I knew. They had recently moved out of their flat while it was being redecorated, each returning to their respective family homes for a couple of weeks. That Friday, she had left her keys at his place by accident. He was passing by her parents' place later that night, so he stopped off and rang the doorbell.

No answer. So he let himself in to leave the keys, with a note, on the kitchen table for her mum and dad to return to her. Only, the house wasn't empty - he heard some movement in the front room. In an instant, he blundered in on Karen - the woman he was due to marry - having sex. With her dad.

Not her stepfather. Not her adopted father. Her actual, biological dad. She was 22 years old. There was clearly no coercion taking place.

Three weeks passed. Rob had called off the wedding - obviously - and was trying to put his life back together. One morning, he got a call from Karen, asking if they could meet up to divide their mutual belongings, the accumulation of over three years' cohabitation. He agreed.

Predictably, when they met, an argument began. "I don't know why you think it's so odd!" she screamed. "I know lots of people who do this." That stopped Rob in his tracks. "Who?"

(click link to read the full article)

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http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/30/ reviews/970330.cheever.html

Innocence Betrayed By SUSAN CHEEVER  
he past is a dangerous place. One look backward can turn you into salt, or cause the loss of the woman you love. For a writer, memory is treacherous and precious at the same time. Every now and then, though, a writer looks back with such bold clarity that it's as if we were living right along with the story. The work reverberates with similarities to our own experience, and with differences from our own experience, so that in the end it gives us a new way of looking at the world. Kathryn Harrison's memoir, ''The Kiss,'' is a book like this. ''A voice over the public-address system announces the final boarding call,'' Ms. Harrison writes of her father's departure after a weeklong visit when she was 20 years old -- the first time she had seen him in 10 years. ''As I pull away, feeling the resistance of his hand behind my head, how tightly he holds me to him, the kiss changes. It is no longer a chaste, closed-lipped kiss. My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn. He picks up his camera case, and, smiling brightly, he joins the end of the line of passengers disappearing into the airplane.'' This is the kiss in the title of Ms. Harrison's powerful, disturbing new book, the story of an affair she had with her father when she was a college student with a slender body and long, long blond hair and he was a stocky, handsome middle-aged preacher. ''In years to come,'' she writes, ''I'll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain.'' But this story is not about her body or brain, it is about her soul, the soul of a young girl and the terrible injury inflicted by the man who should have been its protector. Writing in affectless prose that reflects the shutdown in her feelings, Ms. Harrison describes with submerged fury and sadness what it means to be a daughter and how it feels to be a young girl yearning for a love that probably doesn't exist even in a perfect family. ''It's too late for you,'' her father says near the end of the book, after they have slept together in a string of tacky motels and he has finally persuaded her to move into a bedroom off the kitchen in the house he shares with his new wife and children in the small town where he is a respected church leader. ''You've done what you've done, and you've done it with me. And now you'll never be able to have anyone else, because you won't be able to keep our secret.''
http://www.amazon.com/Kiss-Kathryn- Harrison/dp/0380731479

(click above link for full article)