And Les, like most young boys can do, got his right back up again. It had gone half-soft inside my mouth as he lost the last of his come, but my fingers on his balls and my tongue on his prick brought it right back to life. By the time I felt my cunt starting to shake and shimmy around Henry's pumping cock, tightening with pure joy as I came for the first time, Les was hard as a rock and was holding the back of my head with one hand as he struggled to fuck me in the mouth; and by the time I'd gotten my rocks off for the second and then the third time, and Henry had cried out and shot so much come into me that it filled my cunt and then ran in warm streams down the insides of my thighs, the kid was going again. He came less this time and I had hardly any trouble swallowing it. Hardly any trouble at all.
It was late when I got home, and I knew I was going to catch it for certain. But it didn't make no difference. I had my mind made up by that time, and I was just sorry I hadn't thought of it sooner. It just took Henry's proddin' to make me see all the things that'd been at the back of my mind. Like the way he'd accuse me of bein' out fucking even when he knew I couldn't have been. And the way he used to make me pull up my dress while he strapped me, back before I stood up to him and put a stop to that. The excuses he'd found to beat on me and yell at me. They all added up.
It had been eating his Goddamned guts out 'cause he'd been dying to fuck me and wasn't man enough to try. And he'd made me go through hell because of it. But never again, I promised myself.
It was his turn to suffer a little. By the time I walked in the house I had it all figured out, and he didn't scare me a bit when he came angrily out of his chair by the fireplace and demanded, "What you think you're doing comin' home this hour of the night? Where in tarnation you been?"
Ma just got up and left the room, like she always did when she knowed he was going to give me a whipping. I watched her go, then said, "You really want to hear what I been doin', not where I been, don't you, Pa? Ain't that it?" He was pulling off his belt, like he thought I'd stand there and let him use it on me. "You'd rather I'd tell you about who I been fuckin', wouldn't you? Well, there was two of 'em, and I…"
"You keep a civil tongue in your mouth!" he shouted, and he looked like he couldn't believe I was standing up to him like I was.
I finished the sentence he'd interrupted."… and I sucked one of 'em's pecker. Would've sucked 'em both, but one fellow liked his straight. Ain't that about what you wanted to hear?"
"Little spawn of Satan," he sputtered. He just stood and stared at me, hating me with his eyes, wanting me with them, too. I almost laughed when I looked at the front of his britches. I walked right up to him and put my hand there.
"Ain't no use wastin' a good hard on, Pa, or just keepin' yourself horny by thinkin' 'bout it," I said. "Not when you and me could get together and knock some off just about any time we had a notion. We could get together down at the barn…" I saw the slap coming but didn't even try to duck.
It knocked me a little bit backward, and caused my ears to ring, but I didn't even reach up to rub at my burning cheek. It wasn't all that bad. It was like I'd took the strength out of him somehow. I just stared right at him and said, "Maybe I'd even go down on you, if you was to ask me real nice."
"Just a sinful little slut," he said, standing there like he was frozen to the spot. He was still standing there staring at me when I walked to the door of my room. He didn't say a word when I looked back and said, "I'll be waitin' down at the barn around four tomorrow… just in case you want to try a little of what everybody else has been a-gettin'." Then I went in my room and closed the door.
And — by God! — he had showed up. And I was holding his naked body between my legs, his face against my tits, waiting for the final piece to fall in place. If it did, he'd spend the rest of his life paying for the pussy I'd given him. But it had to work, I kept telling myself over and over, it just had to.
Then, just when I was starting to think maybe it wasn't and that I was going to have to try another time, I heard the creak of the barn door being pushed inward. Ma stepped through the door and stood there blinking as she tried to adjust her eyes to the changed light inside the barn.
"Pearl, what's all this foolishness of leaving me a note to come clear down to the…" She started to ask about the note she'd found when she came home, then stopped as she realized what she was seeing. Pa's eyes blinked open and he tried to sit up.
I held him with my legs until Ma couldn't possibly doubt what she was seeing, then I let him go. He scrambled to his feet.
"You filthy son of a bitch!" she screamed at him, and she barely noticed me as I walked past her and out the door. She was still yelling when I reached the house. I, knew it would be a lifetime before she stopped.
I changed into the best dress I owned, combed out my hair and straightened my makeup. Then I took two hundred dollars from Pa's savings in the flour bin, put it in my purse and checked the time. I had less than an hour before the bus was due to leave for Nashville.
"I walked out of the house and down the road that led to the world and I never once thought of looking back."
And so it was that revenge — not love or even desire — motivated Pearl to lure her father into the same incestuous situation which had led to her own punishment at his hands.
But even though Pearl was able to leave her home and family behind her, she was unable to escape the scarring memories. From Nashville she drifted through a succession of larger cities, paying her way as a prostitute. At the time she was interviewed, she was living with an experienced lesbian, also a prostitute, and felt sure she was unable to have a meaningful relationship with any man. She attributes this to her experiences with her father, and is probably correct in doing so.
It is just one example of the possible cost of sex between daughters and fathers.
Are the taboos against sexual intercourse between members of the same family — especially the taboo against coitus between parent and offspring, most certainly the strongest restriction of all — falling by the wayside? Is the liberal society which spawned organized mate-swapping and which has now clearly accepted the fact that sexual acts between consenting adults are not a matter of legalities now ready to relinquish its control over the intra-family mating of those who choose to do so? Are daughter and father marriages (assuming that the father is otherwise free) a possibility of the future?
While these questions may at first sound absurd when one considers the attitude of the average person toward the subject of incest, they gain a certain degree of plausibility when one reads a history of incest before attempting to answer them.
Wayland Young, M.P., a member of the House of Lords, who has been quoted previously in this book, has compiled a fascinating study of the varying attitudes toward incest throughout the history of the world. It is from this study that I now quote.
Among the Incas and certain other pre-literate societies, and at times in Ancient Egypt, incest was permitted or even encouraged among royalty, and in many bellicose tribes intercourse between family members was (and still is) encouraged before battle, in the belief that it makes the soldiers braver.
But at other times and in other places, the taboo has been exceptionally strong, as Young points out: In the tenth and eleventh centuries in Europe, marriage was prohibited by canon law between anything up to sixth cousins; in other words, as far as, and perhaps sometimes farther than, the family records could reach.
It was only in 1918 that Roman Catholic canon law got around to allowing third cousins to marry, and it still does not allow first cousins to do so. It has always been easy to get dispensation from these provisions, but they were, and are there.
The penalty for incest has been death at various times and places, and is still prison, though in most civilized countries now, the forces of law and order are as quick to send an offender to a psychiatrist as to exact the full rigor.
Brother-sister incest was, oddly enough, not a criminal offense in England between 1660 and 1908, but was only an offense at the Canon Law.
Thus it can be seen that the taboo against incest has been a changing thing, the seriousness of the offense and the severity of the punishment being subject to the whims of those who at a given moment in history are charged with enforcement of the moral code.
While acceptance of sexual intercourse between a father and his daughter is most likely beyond what our society is capable of writing into its moral code at any time in the foreseeable future, it is certain that we are now in one of those periods in time when the punishment meted out to those who commit incest is less severe than it has been in the past.
But the revulsion felt by the average person toward those who are discovered in incest remains strong. Why is this so?
Each of us has heard tales of the dire results of inbreeding. Writers refer to the Habsburgs, and tell of villages where incest prevails and nobody is quite sane. Or the villagers are deformed, and perhaps most children die at birth. We all recall tales of gloomy castles with crazy hermits screaming in the night. These are the things we mentally connect with the word "incest".
Others before us have made similar connections. The Zulus, for instance, believed that the spirits of their ancestors would turn the offspring born of incest into demonic monsters. The Mojave Indians held to the belief that incest foretold the extinction of the tribe, like mass suicide. The Tikopians of Polynesia believed incestuous marriages would be barren, that the offspring must surely die; the ancestors would kill them, they believed, because the other ancestors would laugh.
Genetic evidence regarding birth defects directly resulting from incest is extremely complicated, and still uncertain. The theoretical genetics of consanguinity (inbreeding) can be set out clearly enough, however. Put quite simply, it is this: We are all bred from the same ancestors; if this were not so, the population of the world a thousand years ago would have had to be a thousand times what it is now in order to give us enough ancestors.
We therefore quite often marry relatives without being aware of it. The likelihood of our meeting up with a destructive recessive gene which matches our own increases in a straight line from our most distant cousin to our own brother or sister, mother or father. But it is a slight increase only.
What has a much greater effect on the genetic structure, and increases or decreases the chance of deformation or retardation accordingly, is the amount of inbreeding that has taken place among earlier generations of the family.
If cousin marriage, or incest between brother and sister, father and daughter, or any of the other variations possible has been fairly common among our ancestors, we run no great risk of having less than normal offspring by our cousin, or sister, or daughter than by anyone else.
But if we live in a society where the restrictions against incest have long been strong, as they have been in America, England and most of Europe, where even marriage between cousins is frowned upon, if not illegal, then our chances of having substandard children as the result of incestuous pregnancy will be greatly increased.
That, at least, is the theory. Current research does indeed seem to show it reflected in reality. But none of this can have been visible to our ancestors, against the background of disease and death which prevailed when we were learning our present sexual customs; thus the strong taboo against incest must have another origin than this. The origin itself may also explain the varying strength of the taboo at different times and in different places.
Man is the only animal who recognizes his own kin once they are grown. At the point in his story when we learned to do this, and the concepts of sister, mother, daughter, father and son were formed, we began to distinguish, and endogamy and exogamy began. When two things are different, you treat them differently.
Since a marriage within the family added less strength or wealth or skill than a marriage which brought a new member into the unit, it was soon seen that incest should be discouraged, if only for reasons of survival. Among most groups it was. Among other tribes and groups, those whose survival was not so dependent on the strength of the family unit, the taboo was less strong. This probably accounts for the differences in the taboo among the cultures of today.
Feeling against incest has fluctuated throughout history, and it may be that we are now entering a period when enforcement against the taboo is on the wane. It would be wrong to conclude, however, that incest will be accepted by our culture. For, while the threat of genetic complications may have been exaggerated — and the commission of incest may be more common than previously thought — society will continue to exclude any act which fails to recognize the foundation upon which society itself is built: the family unit.
And the taboo against incest will be violated by those who choose to do so, just as it has been violated throughout history — by brothers and sisters, by mothers and sons by daughters and fathers.
Brecher, Edward M., The Sex Researchers. New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1971.
Freeman, Lucy, The Cry for Love. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. New York:. Avon Books, 1971.
Kinsey, Alfred C., et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. New York: Signet, 1971.
Sexual Freedom League, The Southern California. Region Newsletter. Los Angeles. October 15, 1968.