NEW YORK — Vice today published an article “Why Is Incest Porn So Popular?” querying several leading adult sources in order to attempt an explanation.
Vice reporter Gareth May acknowledges that simulated incest porn is not a new phenomenon — pointing to the 1980 classic “Taboo,” which was rife with faux daddy/daughter and mother/son scenarios — focusing instead on the recent (seeming) increase in its popularity.
A Gamelink.com report, cited in the article, revealed a 178-percent average increase in the consumption of "family role-play porn" between October 2014 and January 2015.
Adult industry sociologist and author Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals provided several non-mutually-exclusive explanations for the phenomenon.
"Intimacy between step-relations is very taboo in contemporary U.S. culture, and yet many people live in step-blended families," Tibbals told Vice. "There's something about stimuli for such a highly taboo topic simultaneously being so commonplace that may resonate with some people. In terms of why now, certainly technology, accessibility, and the availability of the content itself all play a part."
May offers several other eclectic, extreme, often conflicting viewpoints. Author Philip Noble, who penned “Incest: The Last Taboo” for Penthouse in 1977, felt that incest was prevalent and often positive. Psychologist Sharna Olfman writes in her 2008 book, “The Sexualization of Childhood,” that porn scenarios sexualizing children, even if they just involve role play or young-looking performers, directly erode our moral compass and invite deviant desires.
In a two paragraph wrap-up, May completely eschews a synthesis of the information he has collected and adopts an a-analytical pre-fab “it just can’t be right” perspective without explaining how he has arrived at such a conclusion.
Responding to Girlfriends Films founder Dan O’Connell’s statement that porn producers are wont to push the envelope and that almost all unsupervised kids can easily watch porn, May writes, “That might be true. But what about the implications of those kids then going on to crave something more outrageous than the last thing they saw? Isn't that kind of one-upmanship precisely what the porn industry is feeding? How can it be right that they'll somehow end up viewing fictional scenarios between mothers and sons?”
At the end of the day, the complicated question, perhaps unsurprisingly, spawned more questions and no real answers.
