You can’t really help who you’re attracted to, but what if the person you’re the most attracted to ever happens to be a blood relative? Like your father? Such was the case for an 18-year-old woman who dropped some real talk about her now two-year relationship with daddio in a recent interview. BUCKLE UP, somebody’s getting their deepest assumptions challenged!
First things first: You’ve no doubt heard of genetic sexual attraction, if not by name or abbreviation—GSA—then by concept. It’s when two people who are related to each other experience strong sexual attraction—kissin’ cousins!—but it’s especially common when estranged relatives meet as adults, either in adoption or sperm donor scenarios, or when absent parents or siblings find each other later in life and become flooded with a witches brew of mixed-up longing.
It’s also said to happen in 50 percent of such reunions, which is fairly bewildering. Some people theorize that it’s possible because, in addition to the many reasons you might be drawn to someone genetically similar to you—they look like you, act like you, talk like you, share some of your interests and DNA—that because you didn’t grow up together, you missed out on normal bonding, and also the so-called Westermarck Effect, a reverse sexual imprinting where familiarity breeds a kind of necessary repulsion that’s thought to desensitize you to sexual attraction for your siblings and parents on purpose. Nature’s defense against inbreeding.
Barbara Gonyo, who coined the term GSA and noted its emergence alongside relaxed adoption laws in the 70s and 80s that gave adoptees easier access to their birth parents and siblings, experienced the phenomenon herself with her son Mitch. From a 2003 piece in The Guardian by Alix Kirsta on the subject:
Gonyo’s reputation as the world’s leading GSA “expert” came about largely as a result of her own experience of strong sexual attraction, when, in 1979 and aged 42, she was reunited with her adult son 26 years after she had given him up for adoption. Now a 65-year-old grandmother, she admits, like Lytton (whom she has been counselling by email since he contacted her via the Truth Seekers website), that what saved her marriage and allowed her eventually to build a healthy relationship with her birth son Mitch was that she did not have sex with him, due to his unresponsiveness.
An energetic, cheery and straight-talking woman, Gonyo estimates that it took her a dozen years to overcome the desire to sleep with Mitch. “Believe me, the state of arousal, which grew as I got to know him, was as erotic as anything I felt for my husband. I wanted to get naked with Mitch, feel his flesh against mine. The first time I hugged him, it beat any feeling I’ve experienced in my life. If he had felt the same way, I don’t know if I could have stopped myself. But Mitch was very afraid of my feelings, and wouldn’t ever talk about any of this, or how he felt.”
Later, when Mitch got married, Gonyo was able to set aside her frantic efforts flirting with him and trying to “win him over” like someone she wanted to date or marry. But again, it took her 12 years to do so. She believes:
…romantic love and erotic arousal may be the delayed by-product of “missed bonding” that would have normally taken place between a mother and her newborn infant, or between siblings had they not been separated by adoption. “Many such people, as adults, need to go through that early missed closeness. It may become sexual, or it may not.”
Sufferers in Kirsta’s piece—and in some instances suffering is absolutely the apt term—report being obsessively consumed by the sibling or parent, utterly besotted, infected with a need for them, as if by a virus. It sounds pretty hellish—these don’t sound like people who normally experiment in a world of fetish and taboo, and reunions without such feelings are fraught enough as it is—and it’s been known to wreck marriages and destroy the relationships themselves, especially when it’s one-sided, but even when it’s mutually felt. In one particularly sad anecdote in The Guardian piece, a son describes having sex with his mother for years, until she cut it off. He told this story to Gonyo:
“He simply said, ‘I slept with my mother. I was 21 when I found her. We were very much in love. After several years, it stopped.’ His mother had ended the relationship because it was too painful for her; she felt guilty and was afraid of being discovered. That was more than 10 years ago, and he said he’d not only lost his lover but what was even more important: his mother. He said he had never regretted having sex with his mother, only that losing her was a high price to pay.”
If you’re feeling horrifically repulsed, as most of the responses to stories like this appear to be, know that often the sufferers themselves are filled with shame and disgust at their own feelings, which is part of why it’s so difficult for so many of them to talk about (some of them even become suicidal). Incest is a known taboo, and is illegal in every state in some form or another (between an adult and a child, it’s rightly considered child sexual abuse), though some states, like New Jersey, have no laws against it for adults. It’s also a popular porn/erotica/GoT subject.
But consenting adults? Even still. Kirsta writes:
Because of the revulsion aroused by incest, and the stigma attached to anyone who admits experiencing GSA – let alone those who embark on sexual relations with a parent or sibling – the condition remains obscured by myth, tainted by smutty innuendo, under-reported by sufferers and, worse, virtually ignored in academic circles. Although, occasionally, a story involving GSA is given predictably lurid tabloid coverage, ignorance prevails. Why GSA occurs only in some reunions, whether certain people are more predisposed to GSA than others, or whether it manifests itself differently between parents and children or siblings, is simply unknown. Above all, GSA raises serious questions about what factors influence sexual attraction: are the origins of GSA social, environmental or biological?
Consider all that as you read the story (which may or may not be entirely accurate) of an 18-year-old woman in the Great Lakes region who has been dating her dad, 39, for two years, after having gone 12 years without seeing him. In an interview at New York mag’s The Science of Us blog, Alexa Tsoulis-Reay takes us through the details.
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