Tuesday 29 July 2003

Pic of the day: "What are you turning red about?" Screenshot from the anime Onegai Twins.

Twincest

The first time I saw the word "twincest" was a couple years ago, in an IRC channel. It was used in a joking, light-hearted way. I found it amusing that my friends had invented a new, yet immediately understandable word for something so unlikely to actually exist.

OK, so I am naive. It took the Japanese animated series Onegai Twins to bring the concept back to my memory. In this series, a young programmer lives with two girls who both believe him to be their twin brother ... but to the best of their knowledge he only had one twin sister. So there is a 50% chance at least that one of them is not his sister, and this leads them one by one to be plagued by inappropriate thoughts. Twincestuous thoughts, in case they should turn out to actually be twins.

Looking up on Google.com, I found 1390 entries for the word "twincest". I only looked briefly at the first pages, but evidently there is some kind of specialized fetish in some people. I don't think I am going to study this very deeply, but let me say I was surprised. Yet not as surprised as when I started writing and my spelling checker did not flag the word "twincest".

***

This may surprise you, even upset some of you: I believe incest has got an undeserved bad reputation. Not that it's not a sin, but those are plentiful. Most sins are far more accepted, even those that actually hurt people (like demanding interest when lending to the poor, to take an exceedingly popular sin). The aversion to incest is intense, emotional, visceral. And it is largely founded on ignorance.

Today , the word "incest" has more or less become a synonym for child rape, much like pedophilia. It conjures up images of perverse (step)fathers forcing themselves on helpless little girls, or grandfathers sodomizing little boys. The reason is clear enough: Only these instances become known (and not nearly all of them either). Incest between consenting adults is unlikely to ever reach the ears of anyone else, since both sides have far more to lose than win from revealing it.

Twincest is by definition a relationship between equals, at least as far as age is concerned. Even if the twins are not identical, they are likely to have the same status during all of their formative years, and similar physical strength. The chance of coercion, even if you disregard any emotional bonds, is less than in almost any other relationship between two humans.

I still think it is less common than bearded ladies, but mostly because they already have another type of relationship that is fully developed and which fills all available emotional space. But if I suddenly discovered now that I had a twin sister, I would probably think she was hot. After all, I think I am ...^_^

(Needless to say, I don't have a twin sister. I was born at home and my family would definitely have noticed! But perhaps a female me from a parallel universe ... now that would be yummy ... and ethically less dubious, I am sure. I really ought to write a novel over that premise, except I am sure it has been done before. I just haven't found any of them, but then again I cannot think of any search engine that would help me find such a book if it existed.)