Ruth Institute Blog

By Dr. Keith Ablow

In an interview published Monday, Hollywood director Nick Cassavetes, whose new movie Yellow tells the story of a fictional love affair between an adult sister and brother, claimed that incest is just the latest frontier in people throwing off the shackles of rigid, cultural convention and following their hearts.

According to Cassavetes’ interview with The Wrap, “I have no experience with incest  .  .  .  .  We had heard a few stories where brothers and sisters were completely, absolutely in love with one another.  You know what?  This whole movie is about judgment, and lack of it, and doing what you want.  Who gives a shit if people judge you?  I’m not saying this is an absolute but in a way, if you’re not having kids — who gives a damn?  Love who you want.  Isn’t that what we say?  Gay marriage — love who you want?  If it’s your brother or sister it’s super-weird, but if you look at it, you’re not hurting anybody except every single person who freaks out because you’re in love with one another.”

With this declaration, Cassavetes misses an inherent reality about human beings and joins the ranks of those whose ignorance of psychological truth (that’s right, truth, not flabby, toxic relativism and malignant narcissism) imperils our children under the guise of freeing them.

Here’s the truth:  When sisters and brothers have sex with one another they are not expressing genuine romantic love; they are expressing long-forged, pathologically fractured boundaries that existed in their family of origin.  They are manifesting roots deep in soil that was fouled at some point.  They are enacting a drama that is really about having grown up in a household or in households that unleashed inappropriate, toxic sexual impulses—always, in my experience, because one or both of the siblings was exposed to child sexual abuse or was suffering with a severe mental illness.

Sorry, Nick, that’s just how it is:  Normal, healthy brothers and sisters don’t have sex as kids, adolescents or when they grow up.  Sick ones do.  And when you make the statement that it is just fine for consenting sisters and brothers to have sex, you presumably also believe (based on the comments quoted above) that fathers can have sex with their “consenting” adult daughters.

Right?

And, you believe it is fine that mothers bed their consenting adult sons.

Right?