Bering in Mind: Oedipus Complex 2.0: Like it or not, parents shape their children’s sexual preferences

It's an old trope that women grow up anticipating and fearing the point when they will become exactly like their mothers. But do heterosexual women grow up fearing that they will one day marry a man exactly like their father? Jesse Berring writes fascinatingly about the truths of how early experiences shape later sexuality, and comes to the shocking conclusion that incest-avoidant habits are socially ingrained, not biologically, and that the same set of experiences that lead us to find our siblings sexually disgusting lead us to seek out people of a similar genetic phenotype to ourselves; hence those blond-on-blond families we sometimes encounter. It's not always true, of course, and most interesting of all, there is virtually no way to predict whether you'll seek out somebody just like you, or look for someone as different as can be.

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