that is such an italian thing to do
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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The Lucrezia Borgia clause
xD
The population of Iceland is so small, they have a special app to consult when two people meet, so they can figure out if they are too closely related.
Must make single bars awkward:
"Are you from the South? Because you're the only Tennessee!"
"Yeah, okay Buster, lemme stop you right there. How do you spell your last name?"
That app thing is apparently not true. Someone did make an app like that but it was never a big thing, some trash news just found out about it and made great headlines out of it
My story is better.
Also, almost no Icelanders have last names (in the sense of family names). Most have just a patronymic that translates as “son/daughter of (father’s name)” (i.e., Björk’s father was named Guðmundur), which is why references to Icelanders in the news refer to them by given name. As the Icelandic name pool is limited (there’s a naming committee which must approve all new names, and they’re somewhat conservative), the population register also includes people’s nicknames.
Doesn’t Iceland still follow the tradition of using the father's first name followed by "son" or "dottir" for their "last names"?
So, when a Jonson meets a Jonsdottir at a singles bar, they just know that they both have fathers named Jon (hopefully not the same one).
Eh if consenting adults want to fuck each other then who are we to care? I suppose the laws are to reduce the number of birth defects that the system has to help care for.
That is one case, which is the reason why it's usually culturally/genetically frowned upon. The other reason I guess is to prevent abuse in a parent/child relationship, where it's different because there's a power difference
Yeah. It is less "Oh no. This person I met at the bar and fell in love with is actually my cousin" and more "Oh, dad's been grooming sally since she was 6..."
Doesn't need any incest laws for that, when child abuse is already illegal, though.
Or do you think the predator in that scenario is gonna wait for her to reach legal age?
You DO realize that much of human culture and ceremony is about exactly that, right? Like... "debutante balls" and the like are literally "yo, my daughter is legal so who wants to fuck her?". That is also, largely, the basis for the concept of "grooming"
I once went to a convention that was double booked with a Jewish youth convention. It was pretty obvious the whole thing was for having Jewish kids hook up with each other. Also, lots of Youth IDF shirts if you wanted to know for sure what flavor of Judaism was there. I have nothing but respect for anti war Jews.
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Some forms of incest are fine and it's most cultural taboo that makes it a problem. Other types are extremely problematic and should be illegal no questions asked.
The problem then becomes how do you unknot the cultural problems from the legal ones and have anyone willing to actually talk about this in the first place.
Also you have to start getting into the weeds of how distant of a relative before its not incest anymore. Which from my limited knowledge countries seem to disagree on.
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Then you have the really weird combos like Jamaica that forbids same-sex couples (regardless of incest) but allows opposite-sex couples (also regardless of incest). So it's okay for John to fuck his sister but not his brother.
I think the best is Italy's, Venezuela's and Uriguay's "Illegal only if it provokes public scandal"
yeah, what does it even mean?! It's up to other people to judge
Public scandal is actually a somewhat well defined thing.
It has nothing to do with other people judging if it is or isn't.
Because for it to qualify as a public scandal your in the fucking news and EVERYONE knows. Not just "people" but a FUCK load of "people" and it's causing problems not just for you, but for everyone involved and even some people who are not.
It's become a literal public problem.
Look at Ireland or Germany 👀
Makes more sense if you're simply trying to avoid offspring from close relatives. John fucking his brother won't result in that after all.
I think it's more the case that the moral panic didn't think of that at the time the law was created. It's not like you need a law to allow you anything, laws only forbid.
I think you may be right of the initial law not including same-sex relatives, but when I checked Sweden (the third country together with Ireland and Germany to allow same-sex incest) the law that includes the part about incestuous sex has been updated in 2022 without changing the wording.
The swedish law only makes vaginal sex illegal btw, so in Sweden it's okay for John to fuck his sister too, but only in the ass?
No, oral is fine too. Better than the loophole.
Fucking in an uncomfortable place?
Like the back of a Volkswagen?
True!
Morality is what we make it be:
Unfortunately I guess its okay to murder me for thinking that way.
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I'm tempted to send this to the family group chat.
"Hey, Mom, wanna take a vacation back to China 😏"
That sounds so cursed lmao
About marriage between cousins: Historically, the christian church has forbidden marriage between even very distant cousins. Intended or not, this has dismantled the power of large family clans.
Over centuries this has a clear effect on psychology: more individualism, a higher willingness to trust strangers (cooperation between non-relatives) and more. Joseph Henrich (anthropologist) has a whole book about this called The WEIRDest People in the World .
When I got US Citizenship, my mom joked about that I should "marry my cousin¹ in China so she could get a green card" (this was like 2016)
¹she meant like her sister's daughter
I was like:
-
WTF mom, that's disgusting, pretty sure marrying a cousin is a crime. (well it is in the us)
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Also, it's marriage immigration fraud.
wtf is that "joke" lmfao, does she want me ending up in prison or something?
This isn't an "um actually," simply a weird american thing that I've experienced but, marriage to your first cousin is not illegal here. Prolly should be, and you aren't wrong about it being immigration fraud but still, if it was a real marriage, there wouldn't be anything illegal about it.
a weird american thing that I’ve experienced but, marriage to your first cousin is not illegal here
you've what now?
Lol, I guess a phrased that strangely. I'm not married to my cousin, but I have definitely been around some people who did.
Yeah, pretty sure we even had a President or two who married their first cousin. One of the Roosevelts, maybe?
Edit: not FDR (his wife was a much more distant cousin), but John Quincy Adams is an example.
It's actually illegal in most states.
Good. Shame on you Texas.
Only in most of the US. Some states are very libertine about first cousin marriage
Many Western European countries too, such as Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Spain!
Germany: no unless same gender. Which opens uncomfortable doors in combination with being able to change your legal gender.
Iran forcing you to transition to have sex with your assigned sex, meets germany forcing you to transition to have sex with your brother.
Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas...
Illegal (mostly) in the "land of the free." Fascinating.
You know the saying “behind every sign there’s a story”? It may apply to laws as well.
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