can families recover from incest?
In that Joseph’s Fritzl’s prodigious sexual appetite allowed him to father fourteen children – one of whom died at birth – Patrice believes that it did give him an evolutionary advantage over men with less sexual desire, but while nature has no concern whatsoever with the morality of how a man’s children are conceived or raised – most anything goes in the animal kingdom – modern western society most definitely frowns upon incest, rape, cellar families and brutalized wives and within this social context whatever advantage he gained may be lost by the inability of these children to lead normal lives and pass on healthy genes. “Men gain evolutionary advantage these days by curbing their sexual appetite, promoting nurturing skills and investing in quality rather than quantity as far as offspring go,” says Patrice, “so men like Fritzl are dinosaurs – and that’s a good thing for the health and continuity of the human race.”
“I was once married to a similar man,” says Patrice, “and his prodigious sexual appetite was the cause of my leaving him because I saw it as a disease that ate away at him and everything that once was good between us.”
“If it had not been for my meticulous attention to birth control he, too, would have fathered fourteen children by me – most certainly not by our daughters whom I protected like a proverbial mother hen,” says Patrice. “And that incest is acceptable, or at least not spoken about, in certain societies is so destructive – not just from a moral perspective but from an evolutionary perspective, too.”
"However, in his tiny brain -- and that wasn’t the only thing tiny about him -- he truly believed that his strong sexual urges were an evolutionary advantage in that he didn't have to lock me up so no big hunk could take me away from him,” says Patrice. “Yeah, what big hunk would want to steal a pregnant woman or a woman with little kids hanging on to her skirts, no matter how much she looked like a living doll!"
“Because we now live in a society – not insular clans – the most successful men in the evolutionary stakes are those whose sexual behavior is in keeping with what is socially acceptable,” says Patrice, “and that means accepting the responsibilities of fatherhood, bringing into the world children whose genes and childhood circumstances are likely to confer social advantages.”
“The days of the caveman are well and truly over,” says Patrice, “but some men, it seems, are throwbacks to a time when a prodigious sexual appetite without thought or care for the consequences was the way things were.”
“Thanks to modern sanitation and medicine, we are living so much longer than our ancestors did,” says Patrice, “so a long life well-lived with moderate sexual desires is now more a mark of success than a short life badly-lived with voracious sexual desires.”
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