In many such households, the child may even share a room with one or more adults. If not, there still exists the lack of privacy which exposes the child to an awareness of the sexual differences that exist among other members of the household; glimpses of the parents in a state of nudity, or near nudity, are inevitable. So is an early understanding by the child that the parents sleep together.
While this early exposure to those children of the opposite sex, and to adults, may be healthy in many respects, it certainly tends to lower the sexual barriers that exist between male and female children reared in households where greater privacy is afforded.
Children raised in rural areas are inclined to see sexual matters as a more natural function of the body than are their counterparts who live in the city. They are exposed to sex from an early age onward. They know how cattle and horses breed; they often see them doing so. They know how the young are born.
Wayland Young, in a dissertation on the genetic dangers involved in incest, observed that:
The best cattle and the best racehorses are produced by continuous incest over tens of generations. "Best" in a cow or racehorse, however, is most reliable: a stock which will stay fat or swift, and will not risk its owner's profits by suddenly changing its shape or weight. Stockbreeding consists of using incest as a fixative. Might not this serve to weaken the fear of genetic damage due to incest among those humans who know of it?
It seems a logical conclusion, though the fear of genetic damage is less likely to be a factor among the young. Most would not even understand the term. It is more probable that exposure to the inbreeding of livestock leaves the child with a vague sense that sexual intercourse is no less acceptable between members of the same family than it would be between any other couple.
The rural child has less social contacts, in most cases, than the child of the city, and the contact with members of the immediate family increases in direct proportion; so does the opportunity for sexual contact.
Finally, though it is by no means true in all cases, the less-educated are far less likely to explain sexual matters to their children than parents with a higher level of education. Sex is just there for many of these people, and the child will learn about it in due time. It is a measure of the strength of the taboo, against incest, however, that few of the parents who do recognize the need for open discussion and explanation of sexual matters would dream of warning their children against incest.
Incest is simply not mentioned in our society. But it exists, and this refusal to admit its existence seems especially disturbing when considered alongside the following statement by Wayland Young: It is clear that brother-sister incest happens mainly in families where no one has got around to telling the children they shouldn't do it.
If one can imagine a situation where no one tells the children anything at all about what they should and shouldn't do, and where, the school does not either, it is easy to imagine that there would be little against incest.
It would be hard to find a more accurate description of the home-situation that led to Pearl's incest with her older brother.
As she has mentioned, Pearl was never allowed to forget that day she was discovered in incestuous intercourse. Her father constantly berated her for it. He falsely accused her of sexual promiscuity with boys her own age. And he had driven from their home the only member of the family toward whom she had felt any affection... her brother Clay.
Pearl had once felt no emotion for her father; now she both hated and despised him, and his actions convinced her that he felt the same toward her. She began to change.
When her mother and father harangued her before a neighboring couple for the "sin" she had committed, her interlude with Clay became a matter of common knowledge; and so, of course, did the reason for his departure. This made her an object of scorn and ridicule among girls her own age, a sexual target for boys, and was the greatest reason behind the sudden charge in her character.
The sexual promiscuity of which she had been accused soon became fact.
Sensing that her father was far more concerned with the "shame" she had brought upon the family than he was with her welfare, Pearl used her sexual looseness as a weapon with which she could strike back at him for the constant beatings she suffered at his hands. She saw that the destruction of her own reputation hurt him far worse than it did her (in her own eyes, at least), and she used it against him.
While it may be that Pearl was convinced of the "sinfulness" of the act she had committed, and was subconsciously punishing herself by degrading herself sexually and encouraging further punishment from her father, it is also true that she soon recognized the frustrated sexual desires hidden behind the sadistic actions of her father.
"The biological significance of it (sadism) seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing," Freud once wrote. Although Pearl would have been the last to think of it in such terms, she did see that her father was struggling, at times, with his own sexual desires.
When Pearl realized that her father wanted her just as badly as Clay had wanted her, but was terrified at the thought of acting on his desires, she lost all fear of him. She began to torment him by openly flaunting her sexuality, by taunting him with the open revelation of sexual escapades, some real, some imagined.
Though this infuriated her father, the beatings were made bearable by the knowledge that he was suffering the pain of his frustration. Besides, the beatings came anyway, submissive though she might be.
Then came the day when Pearl realized she was capable of inflicting the ultimate in pain, shame and humiliation on the father she hated; she needed only to entangle him in the same web of incest which had caused him to treat her so cruelly.
In the conclusion of this case, Pearl tells how she came to realize this and how it was accomplished.
Pa was half slumbering there on the straw beside me, sleepin' it off like a lot of older fellows do after they've had themselves a little. Takes them a while to get it back up. I lifted his soft pecker with my hand, let it fall back between his legs. He opened his eyes, looking at me with a mean glare.
"Can't you get no lead in your pencil, Pa?" I asked, getting up on my knees beside him and bending over so that my big knockers hung down through the wide opening at the front of my unbuttoned dress. I looked mockingly down at his limp peter. "Thought you was a real stud. Thought you could ride a girl raw-assed. Looks to me like you ain't nothin' but a one-shot pistol," I laughed.
"I doubt the man was ever born could give you enough," he said hatefully. "But just you wait..."
"Ain't no sense in waitin," I said, knowing I had to keep him here a good while longer. I had to keep him here until everything fell into place. "I reckon maybe you could get it up if I sucked you off a little. You reckon so?" I said.
"So you're that, too," he said, like he was talking about a murderer or something. But I felt his pecker swelling a little as he spat, "A filthy cocksucker! You've gotten that low!"
"Ain't nothin' filthy about it... unless maybe it's your pecker," I threw right back at him. I noticed he wasn't exactly fightin' to get away. "You gonna tell me Ma don't never suck it a little..."
"Keep her name out of your filthy mouth!" he snapped, and I just smiled real easy at him as I bent low over his pecker and said, "I ain't no filthier'n you, Pa. Remember? Me, you and Clay, we're all in the same boat. Or should I say family? And this..." I kissed his pecker, "... this is just a little fun among kinfolk."