People trying really hard to act like Japanese attitudes towards incest are exactly the same as the West's. Japan isn't into incest because it's exciting to violate a taboo, they're into it because it's not that taboo - which is why it appears in mainstream stuff and not just porn.
Japan never had a Charles II, and it didn't have any of the stuff that led up to him. It didn't really have an expectation that nobles were supposed to be morally pure. It didn't have a religion that saw sex and morality as deeply intertwined. If someone had Charles II as an heir, they'd just adopt a retainer and have him continue the line instead, because the blood wasn't what was important.
All of the above are part of why we Westerners see incest as taboo and depraved. It reminds us of a legacy of awful nobles who everyone hates, who claimed to be morally and genetically superior but were neither. There are reasons why incest is bad, especially under current conditions where it's often the result of grooming, and doing it generation after generation is how you get Charleses II. But occasional cousin-fucking isn't something that's so inherently abhorrent that every culture in the world considers it taboo and would only do it for the sake of violating said taboo. Sometimes people are just into their cousins, it happens, especially when society is ambivalent about it.
Is it better for the norm to be condemning it and having sickos be into it because it's condemned, or to be more relaxed about it, despite the (at least potentially) fucked-up aspects of it? Idk. I feel like I'm gonna get dunked on for this take but like, idk, I once had a Japanese woman casually tell me about her "brother complex" and when I reacted with :kombucha-disgust: she just seemed confused. So I'm just saying, these equivalences everyone's drawing don't seem to actually track.
People trying really hard to act like Japanese attitudes towards incest are exactly the same as the West's. Japan isn't into incest because it's exciting to violate a taboo, they're into it because it's not that taboo - which is why it appears in mainstream stuff and not just porn.
Japan never had a Charles II, and it didn't have any of the stuff that led up to him. It didn't really have an expectation that nobles were supposed to be morally pure. It didn't have a religion that saw sex and morality as deeply intertwined. If someone had Charles II as an heir, they'd just adopt a retainer and have him continue the line instead, because the blood wasn't what was important.
All of the above are part of why we Westerners see incest as taboo and depraved. It reminds us of a legacy of awful nobles who everyone hates, who claimed to be morally and genetically superior but were neither. There are reasons why incest is bad, especially under current conditions where it's often the result of grooming, and doing it generation after generation is how you get Charleses II. But occasional cousin-fucking isn't something that's so inherently abhorrent that every culture in the world considers it taboo and would only do it for the sake of violating said taboo. Sometimes people are just into their cousins, it happens, especially when society is ambivalent about it.
Is it better for the norm to be condemning it and having sickos be into it because it's condemned, or to be more relaxed about it, despite the (at least potentially) fucked-up aspects of it? Idk. I feel like I'm gonna get dunked on for this take but like, idk, I once had a Japanese woman casually tell me about her "brother complex" and when I reacted with :kombucha-disgust: she just seemed confused. So I'm just saying, these equivalences everyone's drawing don't seem to actually track.