This is the last of a two-part post that forms an appeal to feminists; anti-sexual violence and anti-incest activists; social justice activists; anti-sexists; sexual violence prevention advocates; and all who are simply fed up with our culture’s indifference to sexual violence against girls and women, and with the patriarchal system that permits it. 

In the first part of this blog post, I wrote about patriarchy’s millennia-old medicalization of women’s anger. You can read the first part here.

Over the millennia, the medicalization, the in-validization of the anger of women toward men who have committed incest and other forms of sexual violence against them, has seen few challenges. Why? Let me suggest a few possible answers:

1. The medical model offers a socially acceptable way to ignore women’s anger at the inegalitarian, anti-feministic patriarchal system that permits and perpetuates sexual violence and the subordination of girls and women through the use of sexual violence.
2. It is much safer for the patriarchal order to encourage and allow unhappy and suffering women to express their grievances and discontent through idioms of illness, then to have them agitate for political, legal, and economic rights.
3. The medical model deflects attention away from the tens of millions of perpetrators.
4. By shifting attention away from the perpetrators and the misogynistic and sexist social and political context in which incest occurs, the medical model makes the work of remediating incest the daughter’s responsibility.

I want to be clear here. When we talk about incest, we’re not talking about a few fathers who are sexually obsessed with their daughters; we are not talking about sexual deviants, although there are a few of both in the world. We are talking about the license granted so-called normal fathers in so-called traditional families to sexually exploit, abuse, and control their daughters. 

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In our present culture, “treatment” and “cure” are very persuasive words. Liberals find them cozy and reassuring. Reactionaries, especially of the masculinist variety, love them, particularly when the treatment proposed, the illness identified, focuses on girls and women as the “sick” ones. Treatment and cure are good things; they suggest that something is being done, while simultaneously signaling that nothing needs to change, except the “sick” women and children. 

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Incest is part of patriarchy’s armamentarium of communicative tactics deployed to keep girls and women shut up and subordinated. It is a form of the war on women that is now, by and large, being ignored by almost everyone except an occasional pro-abortionist who reminds us that incarcerating a nine-year-old girl for being impregnated by her father might not be the best way to handle the situation. While I applaud feminists’ current concern with Trump’s blitzkrieg of anti-female actions, if we continue to ignore incest, we do so at our own peril. Let me explain.

Although prevalence rates are hard to ascertain, conservative data suggest that at least one in six girls are incestuously violated by their fathers or father surrogates each year. Some say one in three or four. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg; less than 10% of incest crimes are ever reported. 

We know that incest is committed against all genders. However, it is overwhelmingly a heterosexist crime; it is a crime committed against a girl because of her gender. As I note in my forthcoming book, She’s Such a Liar: Incest, Knowledge & Power, from a very early age, incest trains a girl to be complicit with her own subordination. It brings to life all the miserable qualities associated with femininity including obedience, silence, passivity, loyalty, fear, docility, and deference. Philosophically speaking, incest gives a girl an existential stake in the injustices that subjugate her. It is her induction into the heterosexist sexual order; it initiates her life as sexual subject, as a being that exists for men. 

Put differently, incest is that process through which girls “internalize,” that is, make as their own, a masculinist image of their sexuality as their identity as women. A girl who experiences incest “becomes a woman” not so much through a process of physical maturation, but rather through an experience of eroticized dominance that intertwines her physical, emotional, and social status in shame and degradation.

What I’m pointing to here is that incest is the primal scene where patriarchal culture’s work is done; it’s the way gender is inscribed on a girl’s body; for tens of millions of girls in America, it is the way male dominance and female subordination are first established and enforced. Hardly a private sordid family drama, incest is a practice that produces, reproduces, and naturalizes one of culture’s founding presuppositions, that of gendered subjectivity and heterosexuality. What is at stake here, then, when we consider the prevalence of incest—and its suppression—is the maintenance of the whole structure of unequal social relations and asymmetric power dynamics and prejudicial ideologies that support and maintain patriarchal culture, the entire nexus of presuppositions about gender normativity and gender difference that structures heteropatriarchal culture. 

Given the multifarious cultural pressures and influences that contribute to men’s subordination of women, this may seem excessively stated. But the long and continued suppression of incest strongly suggests that incest has been and continues to be a far more powerful influence on the social construction of heterosexuality than previously thought. 

As Louise Armstrong wrote nearly 50 years ago, incest is the “cradle of sexual politics.” And that understanding makes incest worth the attention of every feminist, anti-incest and anti-sexual violence activist, every social justice activist, anti-sexist, sexual violence prevention advocate, and every Jackson Katz fan interested in upending the system that promotes and secures women’s subordination through sexual violence.

You can read more about the politics of incest and its millennia-old suppression, in my forthcoming book, She’s Such a Liar: Incest, Knowledge & Power.