“abolish the family”=“abolish the incest taboo”

I don’t mean that’s what those who advocate it really want, but that in Oedipalized nuclear family societies with truncated kinship networks, “the family” is coterminous with the “forbidden degrees of kinship.”

This goes with a point I sometimes make that seems to annoy people: no one can explain to me why, from a secular liberal hedonist POV, there should still be an incest taboo. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be but that secular liberals have no basis for arguing there should.

They’re/we’re stuck falling back on an irrational (but indispensable) taboo of the sort that we like to pride ourselves for putting behind us. The popularity of incest porn seems like proof that it’s one of the last taboos (as is the fact people don’t like when one brings it up).