Should Incest Between Consenting Adult Siblings Be Legalized? Experts Sound Off

The Huffington Post  | By Curtis M. Wong

Posted: 10/09/2014 2:02 pm EDT Updated: 39 minutes ago

Responding to aGerman ethics panel's suggestion of de-criminalizing sex between adult siblings, a group of psychologists and experts joined HuffPost Live this week to discuss whether or not it was appropriate for criminal laws to ban sexual taboos such as incestuous relationships.
"I suppose I take an unpopular view that it's actually moral progress," Jesse Bering, who is the author of Perv: The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us, told HuffPost Live's Josh Zepps. "There are certain caveats that we need to include with our analysis of whether incest is wrong or right, but for me, the biggest point is a matter of harm."
After Zepps pointed to Elijah and Milo Peters, two Czech-born brothers who have performed in gay adult scenes with each other, Bering noted, "The fact that they're violating this... taboo notion of your brother or your sister being completely off-limits from a sexual perspective, I think, attracts... a large contingency of the viewing public."
He added, "It's a carnival-esque affair, but it's actual sexual arousing to us because it probably taps into something, whether we want to admit it or not, deeply unconscious about the possible patterns of attraction to... our relatives."