A critique of Universality of Incest (as well as some aspects of The Origins of War in Child Abuse)

 

DeMause begins his essay “The Universality of Incest” by citing the findings of Freud and other early psychoanalysts as well as those  of non-scholars whose stated objective was to normalize pedophilia by showing how common it has always been.

In the first instance, DeMause repeatedly stresses how Freud, by interviewing his patients, came to believe that incestuous child sex-abuse was(henceforth referred to as CSA) “more common than previously thought”. He frames his statements so that one is intentionally encouraged to forget that what is being discussed are the experiences of psychologically ill persons, where victims of CSA are extremely likely to be overrepresented, choosing instead to describe individual memories, among them those of Freud himself in lurid, emotionally painful detail. Though he says nothing strictly untruthful, the intention to create a strong emotional response to warp our perception of future facts is undeniable. The chorus of “There is more, much more of this than you think!” is thunderous. The fine print of “among sufferers of psychological illness interviewed by early psychoanalysts, at a time when seeking medical attention for psychological illness was even more stigmatized than today” is almost totally quashed, unless one choses consciously to cling to it.

Later in the essay – when it suits his aims – he will forcefully remind us of this fact, in order to justify extrapolating CSA rates even higher than his cherry-picked sources would otherwise allow.
He proceeds to use Edwardes and Masters as sources uncritically, especially their book “The Cradle of Erotica” without mentioning any reason why their work should be trusted.
Such dishonesty is the rule, rather than the exception in DeMause’s writing, as will soon become apparent.
His take on WWII is a prime example here. His thesis is that better parenting produced a more libertine and therefore more economically successful generation, making the whole of Germany wealthier and stronger, but that this caused older generations to feel that the People(with which they psychologically identified themselves) had sinned against the Motherland (Which they identified with Killer Mommy) so they felt a need to repent for the sins of the younger generation. There was no economic disturbance or genuine worsening of conditions economic, moral or political etc. In fact the abused older generations, who composed the majority population, were guilty about how good they had it and wanted to expiate their sins with war-suffering.
This completely ignores the fact that prosperity very evidently not universal in Germany, and that the people who were most obsessed with dying for the motherland were in fact suffering economically. It's widely accepted among historians that the so called golden 20s were a decent time for most of the population, the industrial working class, who won union rights, higher wages etc. while the middle classes, who made up the overwhelming majority of Hitler's supporters, suffered greatly. DeMause also blatantly ignores the fact that Hitler and his entourage grew wildly wealthy by plundering the public treasury. Hardly the behavior of guilt-ridden boys punishing themselves mercilessly to earn Killer Mommy's love. He has nothing to say about the many descriptions of the Nazi Raubwirtschaft, which was bound to collapse if it didn't get plunder to sustain itself. Nope, no economic necessity, just a desire to kill and die to appease Mommy.

Likewise, he mentions that one must use the information given by pedophilia advocates and characters such as Allen Edwardes and R.E.L. Masters with “extreme caution”, because they seek to normalize pedophilia by exaggerating its prevalence but then proceeds to uncritically accept their claims that sexual contact between adults and children is, and historically has been, extremely widespread, since, unlike other researchers, they have no reason to minimize sexual contact between adults and children. That they have every reason to exaggerate it is not considered “bias” because it supports the author’s point.

And as anyone who has even dabbled in this repulsive morass of hyper-masculine orientalist phantasy[1] can attest, it is not a work of scholarly nature; The pair make no researches of their own, but again uncritically accept lascivious and unsubstantiated previous accounts from other non-scholars. So it is with a particularly lurid claim that no Indian girl older than 10 is a virgin due to repeated sex with family members, which comes from “The Cradle of Erotica” and is in this publication attributed to a certain “Doctor Jacobus”[2] who was not any kind of social scientist, but a military surgeon.

The earlier mentioned selective use of statistics – acknowledging only those studies reporting the highest rates of CSA as legitimate – is justified by many assumptions the author attempts to pass off as “common sense”, but which he does not substantiate. Brief anonymous questionnaires routinely show the lowest rates of abuse. Therefore, they must be wholly illegitimate, because people are extremely hesitant to divulge their traumas to perfect strangers, whereas one-on-one interviews lasting anywhere from 1 to 8 hours are more honest, seeing as the interviewees can supposedly slowly come to trust their interviewer. The high percentage of non-responders to an interview study by Diana Russel(the one she used for her book “The Hidden Trauma”) is assumed to mean that those who refused the interview were in fact the most abused.

Seeming superficially credible at first, this thesis quickly falls apart under scrutiny. At the very least, an equally “commonsensical” conclusion can be reached from the same data: Participation in studies of any kind is tedious unpaid work potential subjects tend to avoid if at all possible. Persons who are deeply traumatized by incest and who wish to confide anonymously will probably be more likely to respond to any study being done on the prevalence of incest. If a desire for confiding is proportional to the severity of the trauma – and these assumptions are not more irrational than those made by DeMause – we can expect that those most traumatized will be most likely to submit themselves to arduous studies, such as long interviews, while those who have had no personal incest trauma will view participation in such studies as a waste of time to be avoided, with the duration and onerousness of the study increasing said aversion.

What is more, since DeMause published his article in 1991, other studies of the same face-to-face interview type, with much larger sample-sizes show a drastically lower rate of CSA A prime example would be “Prevalence and Correlates of Child Sexual Abuse: A National Study”[3] from 2013, which shows a rate of 10% CSA in total. Incestuous abuse is, naturally, only a part of such cases, even though the researchers didn’t measure the proportion.

True, 20 years have elapsed between the two texts, however DeMause’s theory of parenting posits that changes in parenting happen extremely slowly unless significant action is taken by governments, which, as he laments, has not been done in the US, the country which both of these texts refer to.

Much could be said about the notoriously poor replicability of all social science papers (and science papers in general) in the last several decades, which, despite being known for decades at moment of writing, shows no signs of abating, but even more important is the fact that many, many studies have been conducted since the publishing of his essay, which show rates of CSA are much lower than DeMause claimed. According to a seminal meta-analysis from 2009[4] the prevalence of child sex abuse worldwide is 7.9% of men (7.4% without outliers) and 19.7% of women (19.2% without outliers). If we assume every single one of these instances is in fact a case of incest, we can conclude that DeMause exaggerates rates of incest by factors of three or four.

It bears repeating and clarifying how he reaches his numbers:

1.      He picks only 2 studies that show the highest prevalence of CSA

2.      He gives a purely “common sense” reason why this is appropriate.

3.      He assumes that, because instances of child abuse most often reported to police are those committed against children of five years old, the majority of molested five-year-olds forget their abuse and don’t report it. He then cites one study about the use of hypnosis to recover suppressed childhood memories – not some overwhelming scholarly consensus on the subject – as a reason to justify inflating his already extremely cherry-picked numbers by 50%. The admission that his “statistical correction” relies on one study is hidden in a footnote leaving the reader – implicitly, and with some plausible deniability – to assume this is standard practice based on universally accepted knowledge.

4.      He presents these as the absolute minimum for Europe and Anglo-America, nonchalantly claiming that the rest of the world must be overwhelmingly worse, since they have only recently escaped “infanticidal parenting” For this last claim, he cites his own papers, in his own private journal.

To be sure, even the numbers agreed upon by modern scholars are appalling, and Africa and the Middle East are indeed much worse than the European and Anglo-American cultural spheres, but it bears repeating that the figures provided by DeMause as the minimum for the least abusive areas are double that of the most abusive areas given by more recent and better informed scholarship.

DeMause’s careless and profoundly dishonest use of both primary and secondary sources is most apparent in the way he presents Katherine Mayo as “a reliable source”. He gives no reasons as to why we should consider her reliable, what her methodology and primary sources are. He certainly does not tell us that she was an avowed Anglo-Saxon supremacist, segregationist and colonialism advocate, who wrote “Mother India” with the specific intention of discrediting the Indian independence movement. Nor does he inform us – save for a very generalized and grudging footnote – that many responses to her claims were published soon after “Mother India”. It goes without saying that he nowhere attempts to defend Mayo’s claims against those of her detractors, nor to compare their sources, reasoning or methodology.

Mayo’s agenda needn’t discredit every claim made in her book, but the way in which DeMause simply declares her credibility, and gives us no other information, means we must treat any claims attributed to her by DeMause with the utmost skepticism. He also liberally cites other publications by Masters, but in a way that conspicuously hides his name behind respectable, expert sounding euphemisms. Citing a shocking, monstrous quote by Masters and Edwardes towards the beginning of his essay on how it is good to be a rapist, if one is thusly sexually satisfied, he now wishes to use Masters and Edwardes as reputable academic sources. Some sanitation is therefore in order! A “physician” is also called to the witness stand. A footnote informs us that he is none other than the French military surgeon Dr. Jacobus (nom de plume) from “The Cradle of Erotica”, which we remember as having been written by Masters and Edwardes. DeMause admits grudgingly to not having been able to locate the book which this good doctor supposedly wrote, and which Masters and Edwardes cite, chronicling his first-hand account of ubiquitous Sino-Indian pederasty, incest and duck-fuckery.

A quote is perhaps in order:

“One observer stuns up traditional Indian sexual stimulation during childhood as follows: “The little Hindu girls are deflowered by the little boys with whom they play, and repeat together the erotic lessons which their parents have unwittingly taught them on account of the general promiscuity of family life throughout India. In all the little girls of less than ten years of age the complete hymen is wanting.. Incest is often the rule rather than the exception.”(103)

Who is this “one observer”? Again, the source is none other than “The Cradle of Erotica”! Thus we again see DeMause’s need to increase the perceived diversity and legitimacy of his sources by obfuscating how heavily he relies on one particular duo of dubious authors.

His treatment of primary sources is, if anything, even more blatantly dishonest. He cites “an Indian proverb” proclaiming the universal ubiquity of underage girls being systematically raped without any source, using it merely for the shock-value.

He takes ancient Hellenic writers and assumes that the way they describe parenting among their own social classes is the best case scenario, and that the poor must have been at least as ruthless to their children as the rich, when the opposite is probably true.

If we look at it honestly, the elites of most of history - who left us our written sources, especially before the printing press - were by, modern standards, human traffickers and war criminals at worst, and racketeering thugs at best, and we do not expect such people to be good parents, let alone always the best parents society has to offer. The more natural assumption is the opposite of his: That these instances of neglectful and cruel, abusive parenting were the nadir of their respective societies, matched only occasionally by the lower classes, when these were pressured by sheer desperation.

The Greeks for instance viewed the selling of children into slavery as a horror and a tragedy, that only "those filthy barbarians over there" took lightly.

If child rape was the norm - even in elite social circles - why would later chroniclers demonize Tiberius by alleging that he molested toddlers? DeMause is aware of this allegation made against Tiberius, but he claims it is factual, completely forgetting that the intention of the author was to demonize Tiberius.

He insists on the loooong debunked lies about the supposed enthusiastic, grassroots desire for war in Europe before WWI. Michael Nyberg absolutely annihilates these ideas in his lectures, and he backs them up with many, many primary sources.

That's just the honest mistakes. He also seems to outright lie sometimes, though probably as a result of lying to himself:

He insists repeatedly that Huitzilopochtli is a female deity, when he very clearly isn't. He cites Hitler as leading Germany into war to finally earn the love of his Killer Mommy, when it was his mother who pampered him and his father who brutalized him, so - according to DeMause's theory - it would have made sense for him to speak of dying for the Fatherland, as indeed most Germans did. But he kept calling Germany "Motherland" anyway.

His logical fallacies are many and blatant: If a State invades a weaker State, they are punishing their bad selves to earn Mommy's love. If they invade a stronger State, they are committing suicide to earn Mommy's love. It's unfalsifiable.

His complete obsession with seeing societies as unitary psychological organisms as opposed to agglomerations of social classes with often conflicting interests(*cough*classstruggle*cough) leaves him totally blind to the fact that not everyone in this society is part of some psycho-organism, whose unity only dissolves when better parenting reaches a part of a new generation.

He uses R.J. Rummel, again an extremely irreputable source, for his death-counts. He uncritically accepts the mostly discredited experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo, and then attempts to twist them even more into fitting with his theories.

Furthermore, his idea that hunter-gatherers are by far the worst parents in history is simply absurd from a Darwinian point of view. Why would human beings develop a psyche that requires enormous love and attention in infancy to reach their full potential - and therefore their full evolutionary fitness - if they also evolved to be monstrously neglectful and abusive of their infants?

Our incredibly complex minds are a massive energetic and cultural expense for our mothers, forcing us to be born very early relative to other primates/mammals which endangers our survival and therefore our evolutionary fitness.

If systematic and horrific abuse will almost certainly rob us of the fitness-increasing potentials we can achieve using our minds, why would we have evolved to have them?

I'll leave my readers with two case studies of his dishonestly with his sources:

In accordance with this general thesis, Chinese mothers shouldn't have been remotely capable of caring about their children until recently. This isn't some off-hand remark, it's a cornerstone of his ideology. Allegedly, until recent times, mothers never looked their children in the eye, making empathy for these children neurologically and physically impossible.

Yet in one of his own footnotes - describing the very real horror of foot-binding - he gives us the following anecdote:

 “My toes were pointed, my instep bent down,/And though I cried out to Heaven and Earth,/ Mother ignored me as if she were deaf./My nights were spent in pain,/My early mornings in tears;/I spoke to Mother by my bed;/How you worry when I’m ill,/How frightened if I fall!/Now the agony from my feet has penetrated the marrow of my bones,/And I am plunged into despair, but you,/You don’t care a bit about me.”(emphasis mine)

This woman is a horrible mother, but her appalling treatment of her daughter is not due to a biological impossibility of empathy, but due to cultural norms. She is more than capable of caring for her daughter ordinarily, which is why the poor girl is so flabbergasted in the first place.

Honestly, anyone who wants evidence that people in antiquity were not at all uncapable of loving their children and even having healthy, mutually respectful relationships with their spouses need only read Hector's parting with Andromache in the Illiad. Andromache begins:

Thy dauntless Heart (which I foresee too late,)
Too daring Man, will urge thee to thy Fate:
Nor dost thou pity, with a Parent’s mind,	50
This helpless Orphan whom thou leav’st behind;
Nor me, th’ unhappy Partner of thy Bed;
Who must in Triumph by the Greeks be led:
They seek thy Life; and, in unequal Fight,
With many will oppress thy single Might:	55
Better it were for miserable me
To die, before the Fate which I foresee.
For ah what comfort can the World bequeath
To Hector’s Widow, after Hector’s death?

 Hector refuses to save himself from the dangers of war, at the expense of other Trojans and tells his wife just how much he dreads the horrors that await her:

Not these, nor all their Fates which I foresee,
Are half of that concern I have for thee.
I see, I see thee, in that fatal Hour,
Subjected to the Victor’s cruel Pow’r;	125
Led hence a Slave to some insulting Sword,
Forlorn and trembling at a Foreign Lord;
A spectacle in Argos, at the Loom,
Gracing with Trojan Fights a Grecian Room;
Or from deep Wells, the living Stream to take,	130
And on thy weary Shoulders bring it back.
While, groaning under this laborious Life,
They insolently call thee Hector’s Wife;
Upbraid thy Bondage with thy Husband’s name;
And from my Glory propagate thy Shame.	135
This when they say, thy Sorrows will encrease
With anxious thoughts of former Happiness;
That he is dead who cou’d thy wrongs redress.
But I, opprest with Iron Sleep before,
Shall hear thy unavailing Cries no more. He said,	140
Then, holding forth his Arms, he took his Boy,
(The Pledge of Love, and other hope of Troy;
The fearful Infant turn’d his Head away,
And on his Nurse’s Neck reclining lay,
His unknown Father shunning with affright,	145
And looking back on so uncouth a sight;
Daunted to see a Face with Steel o’re-spread,
And his high Plume, that nodded o’re his Head.
His Sire and Mother smil’d with silent Joy;
And Hector hasten’d to relieve his Boy;	150
Dismiss’d his burnish’d Helm, that shone afar,
(The Pride of Warriours, and the Pomp of War:)
Th’ Illustrious Babe, thus reconcil’d, he took:
Hugg’d in his Arms, and kiss’d, and thus he spoke.

The other main example of DeMause's own sources refuting his thesis is the case of the Baiga people of India:

 

In some endogamous Indian groups, such as the Baiga, actual incestuous marriage is practiced between men and their daughters, between women and their sons, between siblings, and even between grandparents and their grandchildren. “My impression is that most of them have little or no innate repulsion towards incest,” Says Elwin, their ethnographer, the viability of their society disproving by itself all theories about the impossibility of incestuous marriage.

This is technically true to his source, but the quote is truncated, and as we shall see, very misleading as to the whole picture painted by Elwin of larger Baiga society. The rest of the quote, as well as many anecdotes Elwin goes on to describe, make it clear that there are real social punishments for incest, which are collectively enforced by the community, as well as showing that the community has a decent grasp of sexual consent and the moral depravity of raping anyone, but children in particular:

If you read a bit more of this book, which is available for free on the internet, you will find that the Baiga are generally permissive of brother-sister incest on a day-to-day basis, but it's still considered wrong.

These are the people who DeMause accuses of having a "fully incestuous lifestyle"

[1] On pages 12-15 of the same edition of the book quoted in the following footnote, a certain (unsourced) Colonel Dickson(sic!) proceeds to praise the “healthy phallicism” of the Arabs, its alleged power to attract female converts to Islam through acts of copulation and to explain through this supposed virility why “animal-like Negroes” so consistently prefer Islam over Christianity. A claim Africa’s hundreds of millions of deeply devout Christians would strongly disagree with, supported by its roughly equal number of devout Muslims. Our beloved French physician proceeds to recount the alleged fondness Chinese men have for sexually molesting ducks, matched only by their pederasty. Page 16.

[2] The Cradle of Erotica 1966 Matrix Facsimile Book Reprinted by special arrangement with Julian Press N.Y.
Library of Congress Catalogue-card number 62–21126 Footnote of Page 15.

[3] Pérez-Fuentes G, Olfson M, Villegas L, Morcillo C, Wang S, Blanco C. Prevalence and correlates of child sexual abuse: a national study. Compr Psychiatry. 2013;54(1):16-27. doi:10.1016/j.comppsych.2012.05.010

[4] Noemí Pereda, Georgina Guilera, Maria Forns, Juana Gómez-Benito,

The prevalence of child sexual abuse in community and student samples: A meta-analysis,

Clinical Psychology Review,

Volume 29, Issue 4,

2009,

Pages 328-338,

ISSN 0272-7358,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.02.007.

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735809000245)