I wonder though, and Im being serious here, if that, for lack of a better word, romantic take on step-family incest causes problems. And not the obvious one of popping a boner whenever your stepmom does the laundry, but the idea men and women can't have intimate, loving relationships without sex.
I think that's absolutely right.
However, I think we also need to bear in mind that the context is porn. In porn, everyone is expected to start fucking at a moment's notice, so it might just be that the idea of two unrelated teenagers sleeping in the same bed without having a preestablished interest in mashing their crotches together is difficult to swallow in the context of porn. Again though, I increasingly think most thinks marketed as quasi-incest fantasies are just using it for SEO and marketing purposes. If a scene involves characters sleeping in the same bed, it's fairly easy to just slap on a title like "I fucked my step-sister during a sleepover", as opposed to "I had totally normal and uneventful sex with my girlfriend and we sleep together because we're adults who share a house".
I also think part of the fantasy in these cases is often that the man isn't explicitly topping. Sometimes he absolutely is, like that weird rapey genre of family members getting "stuck" in obviously escapable situations, but generally it seems to be a fantasy of being with someone who is more experienced and able to lead the sexual encounter and overcome any nervousness or hesitancy on the part of the POV character. In that case, I think the quasi-incest serves to explain that hesitancy. Since men tend to imagine themselves as horny 24/7, it might be harder for audiences to swallow a male character who exhibits reluctance at being propositioned or touched by an unrelated hot girl than by a family member.
All in all though, yeah, it does seem kind of weird and potentially unhealthy to me. There definitely is an overlapping genre of straight porn about opposite sex friends having sex for the first time, but it seems to be a lot smaller and less specific. Again, I wonder if that has to do with the expectations of porn as a genre, and the audience's difficulty accepting that two attractive people in porn didn't immediately have sex as soon as they met.
To what extent that translates into real life I don't know, but a lot of men in particular do seem to struggle with maintaining platonic cross-sex friendships. That probably includes me to be honest, although not for the same reasons.
That a plutonic loving friendship, even among people who share a mother/son relationship, or sister/brother, or father/daughter, can't exist because if they're both attractive, they need to fuck. That sex is the natural and inevitable next step in having an intimate relationship with someone, regardless of the already established familial ties.
In terms of my personal experience, this is really bound up with ADHD. I've realized that I seem to struggle to distinguish between emotional and physical intimacy and it's something I've been trying to work through with myself. That said, I do think there's nothing inherently wrong with having sex with your friends, and I don't regret most of the times it's happened. I think the rigid expectation that romantic and platonic love be separate (and that romantic love is superior to platonic love) kind of just results in a lot of crappy friendships.
The gays are often much better at this, I think. There seems to be a more common understanding in gay culture of the fact that you can passionately, actively love your friends rather than merely appreciating their presence. It's why I've never really identified with the concept of being "polyamorous" even though I sometimes use it to describe myself, because most poly people I know still seem to exhibit this idea that romantic love is special and set aside, and I don't think it is. It's okay to go back and forth, it's okay to have sex just for fun or to alleviate boredom or to feel a bit better about yourself. There are unhealthy extremes to all these things, but they're not as difficult to avoid as our culture likes to pretend.
Same thing with incest porn. An incel lets his stepsister borrow his car to go to the mall with friends. Well...we all know how she's SUPPOSED to pay him back. And rather than letting her borrow the car out of the kindness of his heart or just asking her to pick him up McDonalds on the way home, he's now angry because she broke what he thought was the implied contract of sex for car.
I think of this kind of thing as "capitalism porn" and yeah, I find it really weird.
It reminds me of the scene in
Use of Weapons where the drone unblocks all the porn channels and the sanitized image of this alien society falls away to reveal the absolute sadism underneath. There's a psychosexual dimension to politics and economics that becomes really, really gross when a society is as deeply hierarchical and exploitative as ours.
Speaking of boredom and compulsion, I did not mean for this post to get so long..
