Incest Loopholes best suited for stories?

There's the perennial classic "oops, I slipped and landed right on your dick". Also, "oh no, I didn't know it was you". And who could forget "evil perverted thugs are making us do it"?
 
The most basic is "not actually blood-related" - the adult child was swapped at birth, adopted, or is a stepchild; or there isn't any formal relationship like a young woman seducing her mother's boyfriend and calling him "daddy."

There are twists on that - the counter-trope is when you think you're not related but it turns out you were brother and sister separated at birth, or the whole Oedipus scenario where you unknowingly marry your own mother, or it turns out you were cousins all the time.

There was a mother/daughter porn duo a few years ago that, on the advice of a lawyer, figured out they could have sex at the same time, and even with the same person as long as they were not directly having sex with each other. That's a very fine line and a fucked up family situation, but it's kind of no different than a son jerking off into his mother's panties before she puts them on, or something like that. Could easily imagine a scenario where a webcam model has her beta brother jerk off on her sex toys before she sucks or fucks them. Not quite incest, but pretty damn close.

A relatively popular one these days involves surrogacy - the wife can't conceive, in vitro fertilization costs too much, so husband gets with a family member (sister-in-law, mother-in-law, etc.) to carry the pregnancy. Has a bit of a cheating/cuckquean vibe sometimes.

A fairly ignored one is "cousin but sufficiently distant that the law doesn't consider it incest" - some states allow first cousins to marry, some don't. So, "technically incest" but most people aren't too squicked out about it. Although it can get weird if you have, say, a history of twins and double marriages in the family. So if a set of identical twin brothers marry identical twin sisters, then have kids of their own, and those first cousins marry...well, the family tree isn't branching very far, is it?

Another parent/child relationship which doesn't see a lot of play involves surrogacy. A surrogate could carry a child for another couple, that child grows up into an adult and enters a sexual relationship with the woman that carried them. Technically legal, because nobody's blood-related, but sort of squicky to many.

If you add a sci fi twist it gets more interesting. There was a film called Womb where a woman's lover died, she had him cloned and carried the clone to term, raised him, and then when he was of age they had sex and she was essentially impregnated by her dead lover. You could do a lot of sci fi variants on that, where a genetically engineered fetus is sufficiently different from a nominal parent - or you could go darker. Imagine a world where they can keep people alive indefinitely, but the can't avoid senility or dementia? The family might lobotomize grandma and turn her into a surrogate mache, like the axlotl tanks in Dune, the same woman birthing generations of her family's children.

Other options hinge around legality: if you're the President of the United States, for example, and you decide to fuck your adult daughter, who can stop you? Sure, the media will have an uproar and there might be an impeachment, but while you're in office you're basically untouchable. A more classic example is if you have sole executive power in some tyrannical system (Imperial Rome, banana republic, etc.) so you can make it legal for you to marry both of your sisters Game of Thrones-style.

Alternately, legality only applies where there's a functional legal system. International waters? Outer space? Some distant chunk of Antarctica? Unclaimed island in the Pacific? You're probably free to fuck whoever you want. Also, if it's before the invention of the legal system (sent back in time to the Stone Age, you're great-great-great-great grandpa is smokin' hot) or after the system has collapsed (Mad Max style), the only limit to your degeneracy is yourself. Might also work in a limited context in a time of war when traditional legal systems have broken down or are in abeyance.

And, of course, there's the special circumstance. If an adult son and his dad go to prison together, end up in the same cell - they're in prison. What are they going to do if they catch Junior giving the old man head? Tack on a few more years?

There are a couple legal fictions out there too - like the idea that two people who are blood-related can't get married unless she's pregnant. That's kind of inspired by real laws that involve things like age of consent to marry, but not, as far as I'm aware, actually a thing outside pornography.
 
Depends on whether you're looking for an actual legal argument in favour of the incestuous relationship, or just a handwave to avoid the characters needing to hide their relationship in public. One realistic idea is to set the story in a very small town (3 digit population) where the entire police force is one or two people, and for some reason (they're involved in the relationship, they have a fetish, they're being blackmailed, etc.) they don't have anything against incest.
 
insertnamehere said:
Depends on whether you're looking for an actual legal argument in favour of the incestuous relationship, or just a handwave to avoid the characters needing to hide their relationship in public. One realistic idea is to set the story in a very small town (3 digit population) where the entire police force is one or two people, and for some reason (they're involved in the relationship, they have a fetish, they're being blackmailed, etc.) they don't have anything against incest.
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With a pop that small, the stats are pretty good that they could trace a common ancestor within a handful of generations.
 
I thought up another one: time travel. You go back in time in, say, a Cessna 350 and have sex with your grandfather long before you're born.
 
There's also theoretically a limit in lineal descent. Like, most folks would consider a 100-year-old man and his 18-year-old great-great-great granddaughter to be incest, but from a blood relations standpoint it might be legal. Greatniece/greatuncle and the like are also possibilities for gaining "blood distance."
 
I am slightly amused at the loopholes. Either write incest porn for real, or don't but using "loop holes" is just silly.


And I get that some story might actually call for step-sibling pairing but by now we have porn films where there is a foursome of step-dad, step-mom, step-son and step-daughter and this is just a clear case of lazy loophole abuse.
 
I know porn and erotica are sometimes about pushing the limit or entertaining taboo fantasies one wouldn't seek or play out in real life, but I think I'm in the minority when I say I don't mind the step-relation or "by marriage" types of stories (and maybe this is porn's fault), if done well.

I know some people see it as a cop-out or loophole, but I feel like it's less about the "incest" aspect of it and more about the social taboo b/c the characters are supposed to see each other as family and off-limits, but in reality aren't. I feel it's similar to how Interracial stories can be viewed as taboo or exoticizing of a people group based on societal beliefs, prejudice, or misconceptions (past or present, depending on where you live).

Does this mean I'd fight for these types of stories staying in the Incest category versus a generic taboo or other category? No, but I think there's a place for the step-relation or "by marriage" type stories where it's more about the "our family or town wouldn't really understand" or there's a long-term relationship there that feels very familial versus the "Oh no, we can't! You're my step-[person]. It's so wrong!" types of setups often seen in porn.
 
That is a good point.


I'm just amused when there are cases that are 100% loophole abuse because someone thinks that slapping "step-" before incest is just the easy way to make a film more acceptable.
 
JWtts said:
I know porn and erotica are sometimes about pushing the limit or entertaining taboo fantasies one wouldn't seek or play out in real life, but I think I'm in the minority when I say I don't mind the step-relation or "by marriage" types of stories (and maybe this is porn's fault), if done well.

I know some people see it as a cop-out or loophole, but I feel like it's less about the "incest" aspect of it and more about the social taboo b/c the characters are supposed to see each other as family and off-limits, but in reality aren't. [...]

Does this mean I'd fight for these types of stories staying in the Incest category versus a generic taboo or other category? No, but I think there's a place for the step-relation or "by marriage" type stories where it's more about the "our family or town wouldn't really understand" or there's a long-term relationship there that feels very familial versus the "Oh no, we can't! You're my step-[person]. It's so wrong!" types of setups often seen in porn.
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If you're writing an incest story you have to invest in the taboo, or you shouldn't bother with it at all. When a story has its protagonist coming onto a family member and that family member instantly goes "oh wow yes I've always thought you were super-hot too let's fuck literally immediately!!", I feel like that's missing the whole point of including a deep taboo like incest in your story.

I have a well-publicized dislike of isekai-type "literal Mary Sue gets transported to another world where <insert author's taboo fetish here> is totally normal, thus erasing the tabooness and making the story utterly bland" stories, and this is just another form of it. You should never ever minimize your taboos; you should indulge in them. Never write clinically or matter-of-factly: emphasize the taboo of your incest plot, the filthiness of your watersports scenes, the throat noise of your face fucks, the helplessness inflicted by your bondage! Submerge yourself and your reader in the thoughts, emotions, experiences, and sensations that your characters are having. Make it visceral, even a little exaggerated, and your sex scenes will be far, far better for it.

So in that light, I think step/in-law incest totally fits in the incest category... as long as you do emphasize the taboo aspect. After all, even though your sister-in-law and step-father aren't blood-related to you, having sex with them is still heavily frowned upon. So have them struggle with their attraction. Have them hide it from a world that won't understand their love and/or lust. Have them fail at one or both, and deal with the consequences (but sexily, at least in part). As long as it deals with all the things that blood-incest deals with, it absolutely counts as incest, in my opinion.


raziel83 said:
I am slightly amused at the loopholes. Either write incest porn for real, or don't but using "loop holes" is just silly.
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Isn't silliness the whole point of the thread? :P

...I say, seconds after writing a whole essay on the merits of (step-)incest.


raziel83 said:
I'm just amused when there are cases that are 100% loophole abuse because someone thinks that slapping "step-" before incest is just the easy way to make a film more acceptable.
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"Incest" plots are also just incredibly cheap to do. Put a guy and a girl on a couch. He calls her 'sis' exactly once, then fishes out his magnum dong. Le gasp, step-bro wat u doin. Boom, plot done, on to the sex.
 
Well I loved reading this thread even though I'm 2 weeks late to the show. Fuck it though. I'm really enjoying you guys.
Zeebop said:
the only limit to your degeneracy is yourself.
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New goal, make an Abraham Lincoln quote meme out of this and see if I can convince anyone it's real. Why do you think Mary Todd Lincoln had so many mental health problems bro!!

Zeebop said:
Might also work in a limited context in a time of war when traditional legal systems have broken down or are in abeyance.
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It's an inaccurate thought in this context since no abeyance thresholds are really met when England maintained relative stability of governance during the war (admittedly probably not heavily weighted toward incest statute enforcement) but my verbatim interior reaction to reading this was:

Wow. How many brotherfuckers were forged in the Blitz!

JWtts said:
I know some people see it as a cop-out or loophole, but I feel like it's less about the "incest" aspect of it and more about the social taboo b/c the characters are supposed to see each other as family and off-limits, but in reality aren't.
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I really agree. The effective stake for the characters hinges way less on the technicalities of what constitutes incest, since it matters much more what happens if or when people find out. Like say someone's mom has a step brother who's functionally their uncle. The technicality of him not being a blood relative is not going to be what drives Mom's reaction if she finds out they had sex. There's a violation of social acceptability there and I really respect it when stories make an effort to honor that. I can still enjoy stories that prefer to ignore this and get straight to the fucking, but I really love being put through the paces if the characters settle into or worry about their activities with a more realistic range of emotional approaches.

TheLowKing said:
Never write clinically or matter-of-factly: emphasize the taboo of your incest plot, the filthiness of your watersports scenes, the throat noise of your face fucks, the helplessness inflicted by your bondage! Submerge yourself and your reader in the thoughts, emotions, experiences, and sensations that your characters are having. Make it visceral, even a little exaggerated, and your sex scenes will be far, far better for it.
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I think this is some of the best and best-explained sex writing advice I've seen, said the woman whose authority on the matter is she just made a tiny fingernail scratch on the iceberg of a sex writing forum she's brand new to.

But seriously I think it has an incredibly elevating impact if writers let characters dwell a bit in that space where they know they should not, must not, do the thing that they are inevitably compelled to do because story.

TheLowKing said:
As long as it deals with all the things that blood-incest deals with, it absolutely counts as incest, in my opinion.
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100% agree. Really TLK I read your whole post thinking yeah fuck yeah this person gets it. hahah! I enjoyed what you had to say on the subject.

TheLowKing said:
"Incest" plots are also just incredibly cheap to do. Put a guy and a girl on a couch. He calls her 'sis' exactly once, then fishes out his magnum dong. Le gasp, step-bro wat u doin. Boom, plot done, on to the sex.
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It's fucking stupid but usually as soon as I read some shit about a guy's world-sundering 14 inch member I cannot seem to help but picture: cookie presses and caulk (LOLOL) guns.
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