I have a pet hypothesis that, on average, those into step porn are more likely not have grown up with a sibling of the gender they fancy. I reckon those of us who did are more likely to repelled by anything alluding to incest.
People who grew up with ACTUAL hot step siblings notwithstanding.
I’m pretty sure most consumers of porn are just interested in watching people fuck. The wraparound story isn’t that important. And it certainly isn’t data for some amateur Psych study.
I mean pizza delivery guys used to be a popular “story”, But I don’t think people were secretly trying to recover from their Oedipus trauma with the help of the Noid.
Don’t care about the story??? My man…you’re missing out on the greatest epic tale ever told. It was about those lemon stealing whores!
People definitely wanted to fuck the noid.
wantedwantMy bad, yeah the noid is still prime fuckable material.
Hmm.
There’s an psychological effect that people who grow up alongside someone generally aren’t attracted to them to the extent that they might be to someone else.
Can’t remember the name of the phenomenon.
kagis
The Westermarck effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect
The Westermarck effect, also known as reverse sexual imprinting, is a psychological hypothesis that states that people tend not to be attracted to peers with whom they lived like siblings before the age of six. This hypothesis was first proposed by Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck in his book The History of Human Marriage (1891) as one explanation for the incest taboo.[1]
The Westermarck effect has gained some empirical support.[2] Proponents point to evidence from the Israeli kibbutz system, from the Chinese Shim-pua marriage customs, and from closely related families.
In the case of the Israeli kibbutzim (collective farms), children were reared somewhat communally in peer groups, based on age, not biological relations. A study of the marriage patterns of these children later in life revealed that out of the nearly 3,000 marriages that occurred across the kibbutz system, only 14 were between children from the same peer group. Of those 14, none had been reared together during the first six years of life. This result suggests that the Westermarck effect operates from birth to at least the age of six.[3]
In Shim-pua marriages, a girl would be adopted into a family as the future wife of a son, often an infant at that time. These marriages often failed, as would be expected according to the Westermarck hypothesis.[4]
Studies show that cousin-marriage in Lebanon has a lower success rate if the cousins were raised in sibling-like conditions, first-cousin unions being more successful in Pakistan if there was a substantial age difference, as well as reduced marital appeal for cousins who grew up sleeping in the same room in Morocco. Evidence also indicates that siblings separated for extended periods of time since childhood were more likely to report having engaged in sexual activity with one another.[5]
You’d expect the Westermark effect to decrease attraction for someone that a person grew up alongside, but not to decrease appeal of other people who are siblings having sex.
I’m not aware of any formal study as to the effect, but I’d assume that some of the appeal of what people consider kinks derives directly from the fact that something is, in fact, taboo. Like, let’s say that we had no incest taboo in present-day society – and that hasn’t been a universal – then I’m not sure that “incest porn” or the like would be a thing.
kagis
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-where-incest-is-legal
Twenty-two countries around the world have not criminalized incest. Portuguese law, for example, does not criminalize incest. Additionally, no laws prohibit consenting relatives from having sexual relations in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Incest is also legal in Argentina, Brazil, India, the Ivory Coast, Japan, Latvia, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey.
In Spain, Netherlands, and Russia, consensual incest is fully legal. However, siblings may not marry, nor may half-siblings or a step-parent and a stepchild. In Serbia, Lithuania, and Slovenia, incest between an adult and a minor is illegal, but the law does not prohibit minors or adults from engaging in incest with partners in the same age category. Israel outlaws incest among minors but declares it legal if both persons are over 21 years old. Perhaps the most unique laws on incest come from Ireland and Germany, where the language forbidding incest specifically addresses male-female pairings—which means incest remains legal for same-sex couples.
Of course, legal prohibitions aren’t exactly the same thing as having a cultural incest taboo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest_taboo
I’d guess that to test that, one could probably run a study, come up with some kind of quantitative measure of how intensely “taboo” incest is in a given society, and try to see whether there is correlation with frequency of incest pornography.
EDIT: Hmm. You know, that makes me think that if a correlation between cultural taboo and popularity of a kink exists, maybe you could use the effect in reverse as a metric for hard-to-measure cultural taboos.
Like, okay. In 2024, there are no legal prohibitions on miscegenation. Like, if someone of Race A and someone of Race B want to have a kid, the law isn’t going to stop them. But there’s definitely some level of cultural taboo floating around out there. I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be hard to get someone to fess up to their views on that.
But…you can get aggregate data on frequency at which people are consuming interracial pornography. If you figure that the kink derives from the cultural taboo, then a sociologist has got themelves a pretty interesting metric right there on racial views.
That certainly was a lot of words.
I don’t like step sibling porn but it’s a lot of the content. I type in “blonde big tits” or whatever and what comes out is “blonde big tit step sister gets railed” or whatever. I’d click if it was girlfriend or wife instead of step sister the same.
There are some creators on PornHub and the like that seem to be doing SEO with their titles. One of their videos will refer to the woman as “step sister” the next video will use “roommate” another will use “cheating wife”. None of the videos have any dialogue so I think the channel is just trying to show up in as many search results as possible.
I was looking for a way to say this. thanks.
“Well, I came here for big blonde tits, but you gave me step-sister porn…ah well. It’s pornhub. That’s 100% of the videos. When in Rome…”
We’ll see if this is going to be controversial or not but isn’t the entire “step” -part of it there only to give people plausible deniability about incest accusations? It’s incest these people are turned on by. To my knowledge having sex with your step-anything isn’t incest because you two aren’t related.
Either way, I think that most people who like watching mom-son, brother-sister, dad-daughter etc. porn usually aren’t sexually drawn towards their own family. They just like the idea of sex between family members in general but not their own.
It’s not REALLY incest that turns them on usually. It’s the deep taboo of the potential act itself. Thus plenty of people are turned on by the thought when it involves others, and plenty more are turned off when it comes to their own family. Similar can be said for a lot of sexually charged taboo subjects.
But isn’t their fake incest porn anyway? I know it at least used to exist, so I don’t think it’s illegal to make that, so clearly that means that there isn’t a big market for it.
My theory has always been that it’s a way to trick peoples minds that the actors are younger, because that very much is a thing.
I don’t know anyone who is attracted to their siblings, even if they are conventionally very attractive.
If my memory serves, in the early days of free online porn the step-prefix wasn’t generally used. I can dimly remember the time it started appearing all over and I always suspected it was because implying it was actual incest was a bit too taboo so they modified the titles into step-porn so that it’s not as provocative. Maybe advertisers had something to do with it, who knows. Or maybe it’s because they realized that people find it easier to fantasize about step-siblings rather than biological ones.
You make some good points, there could be a lot of factors… hell it could be that it took a while for the divorce and remarry rate to kick up and before that step siblings simply weren’t as common. There should probably be a good lag too between those numbers and when it started to become a cultural thing.
I would be interested in some deep research at this point.
Not step sibling incest porn of you skip to the part where they stop talking
I was an only child and a latchkey kid, and am not just into sibling incest but full on incest. But yes, distilled, my fetish is for a functional, unneglected and much less solitary childhood. (Not turning into a pariah as soon as I started developing sexual interests in puberty might have also been nice.)
I suppose I also have the V. C. Andrews fetish which is taboo relationships that are formed as a cope due to extreme family dysfunctionality, since part of my fetish is the sex gets out of hand and when discovered, the drama explodes messily.
Curiously, my family on my mother’s side are hot, and my cousin was propositioned by Playboy in the 1980s as possible centerfold material. (She was also a high-school swim-team champion.) And yet, full Westermarck effect (reverse sexual imprinting) was active. I just couldn’t think about them in that way.
Yeah, stepsister. She’s a raging junkie cunt though, so no attraction from me.
I’ve actually heard that she got sober and is doing much better, but fuck her I’m no contact forever. And I mean metaphorically fuck her.
You should do a poll, if you get enough comment responses to be statistically significant it would be a pain to sort through them. A poll would also make people more likely to respond, as it’s less effort.
PornHub should do a poll before the content is watchable 🤔
Stick to Serbian, Slav productions. They’re a goldmine of porn.
I’ve always suspected that there’s some coincidence whereby a lot of people have suddenly started watching some step-sibling porn simply because it’s among the first videos they see and not because they’re into step-siblings, then whoever decides what genre of porn gets made has noticed and assumed it’s suddenly more popular for a reason, so it gets made more often, then there’s a feedback effect.
Edit: that said, I don’t know what kind of porn anyone I know watches, if any, but I’m sort of vaguley aware of this step-sibling meme.
I did. But I never fantasised about actual incest, and certainly not with my family members. But fantasy incest in porn? Defo works for me.
I think lots of people are very capable of finding stuff hot as a fantasy while having zero interest in the reality. In fact, that’s part of the appeal. If I’m just watching hot people have sex, it just kinda makes me sad I’m not having sex with them. But if I’m watching a kinky scene or something that is taboo because of the relationship of the characters involved, then I can find it hot without being disappointed it isn’t real.
(and while I think there’s something to your theory, the popularity of stepmom porn suggests it’s not that simple, as most people who watch that probably had a mom)
Dan? I didn’t know you used Lemmy.
That was… something. And I’d bet that Dan is on lemmy.
I just like that it’s taboo, but not outright abuse. I’d love to find another subgenre that had a decent amount of available content. Suggestions?
No, but I am turned on by the idea of a smoking hot woman I am living with showing up randomly in my bed demanding consequence-free sex.
