What's some --more-- juicy gossip that you can't share irl but can share with nosy strangers on mumsnet?

The stories were just about where they met to have sex and what he liked him to do. Shocking! Mostly shocking as he was still with his wife and hadn't come out yet. His preference was 'Bears'.

I suspect most people's opposition to this was due to bigotry and prejudice against brown people - I rarely hear the same issues levelled at similarly closely related family members in more rural environs.

Can you give us a clue what sort of stories? Without identifying the sportsman, of course.

A gay friend of mine had a sexual relationship with a 'now out' gay sportsman back in the Noughties. The stories he used to tell us 😧😮😱

The woman at school who is just nasty (and who’s daughter is exactly the same, which is quite a feat for a primary school aged child) has absolutely no clue her husband has tried it on with some of the other mum’s in the same class. Neither does she know he has had affairs. She doesn’t know we have mutual contacts outside of the playground who have told us. I would love to tell her, I wouldn’t though. But when she is being smug I always think of that.

I remember reading a book about the Inuit community in Greenland whose population size has gone up and down quite a lot. While there were no formal rules (and I'm not claiming this holds for all populations) one of the striking things was that taboos against 'close relative procreation' actually increased as the population became smaller.

Of course that's concerning. But I would imagine it's partly to do with multiple cousin procreation within a relatively small community (in comparison to whole population) so that genes are more likely to be mixed within a smaller gene pool.

For example, if one of my sister's children also married a cousin, or if my sister's grandson then married a cousin. The gene pool remains small.

Like I've also said, it's the male line that is problematic genetically, & people also don't get genetic testing enough. My sister was the female line & also got testing.

@Puffalicious there has been a large study in Bradford, due to the increased instance of birth defects, particularly in the Pakistani community due to the high number of marriages between cousins, as it is causing such a high number of defects and deaths. There was a very moving documentary a few years ago following a few families and the difficulties they face. It was very sad.
The figure is around 6% for risk of birth defects in children of first cousins, which doesn’t seem high, but it is double the risk for non related couples. I’m not someone crying ‘it’s awful’ btw, I just really remember the programme because so many children had such profound disabilities, and the strain on the local services trying to cope was causing delays in hospital appointments, and a total lack of help and support for the families who desperately needed it.

@TryingToFigureLifeOut news cars ‘just a few months old’ don’t need MOTs. I can’t believe they would need repairs either, they would still be under warranty. Your dad was having you on.

Wow

If a man had a son with his own mother then that child is both his son and his half brother (they both share one parent)? Maybe...

Yes I made a whole post a month or so ago after finding out he is now married with a child on social media - 159 comments and likes ‘beautiful family’ etc - no karma whatsoever.

I went to local services / rape crisis but decided ultimately not to prosecute as we are both professionals in the same career - I had gone through enough

How did that work?

Does that mean he had sex with his own mother ?

I supported a man with learning difficulties who's father was his half brother. Nothing surprises me now after working in this sector for over twenty years

Stealthing can be prosecuted.

A guy I was dating for a few weeks took the condom off during sex ‘stealthed’ me and got me pregnant - I had a termination, he was keen for it and pushed me in that direction. I was a mess. He was awful to me. Unbenown to me he had a girlfriend the whole time in the next city. he is now the professional, family man on social media - married and holding his children up like trophies. I have toyed with telling her but he was so awful to me I find it hard to believe he can be not abusive to her and she knows on some level.

Yes you can. AB x OO = AO or BO

Mine is that a close friend of mine cheated on her partner for years with a married man. She ended it eventually, he still doesn’t know. The wife found out and she stayed.

I don’t know about anyone else but I judge myself so incredibly harshly sometimes and it’s nice to have a reminder that at least I’m not cheating on anyone or breaking anyone’s heart or getting involved with married men!

I remember in 90s then bf flatmate got with his cousin . . .. gross but apparently they had never met previously (flatmate dad had died suddenly when he was young and he had nothing to do with his dad side of family for ages . . . long back story) but he moved to same city for uni that his cousins he had never met lived . . . and yeah. Totally gross. But then the female cousin was in a university tutorial of mine (had same rare distinctive double barreled name and I knew her first name) I couldn't look at her for whole term - luckily she had no idea who I was.

I knoooow they're rabbits but they're personified, they wear clothes and eat current buns from the bakers.

It was normal enough for Miss Potter to put it in a children's book and not expect it to be questioned. If it was weird in 1909 then she would not have been popular for making Edwardian parents have to explain such things.

In Jane Austens
Persuasion one of the musgrove sisters marries her first cousin. Think it’s the mothers who are sisters.
In Pride & Prejudice Lady Catherine hopes that her nephew Darcy will marry her daughter Anne.
Fanny in Mansfield Park is in love with and marries her cousin Edmund.
So must have been common or not unheard of in Austen’s times.

They're rabbits though!!

Also there are cousins and there are cousins. It's truer to say that in the past English people lived in more settled communities and married within them. If your extended family lived in the area you'd be in touch with quite distant relatives in a way that wouldn't be as common now. I'm sure first cousin marriages happened more often, but I don't think they were ever that common and they were very close to the consanguinity laws.

Just for the people talking about cousin marriages. I remember thinking it was quite normal as a child because I used to read Beatrix Potter and I remember this line:

When Benjamin Bunny grew up, he married his Cousin Flopsy. They had a large family, and they were very improvident and cheerful.

That was written in 1909. I know they're rabbits, but it was still normal - even wholesome - enough to be written about in a children's book and I can't imagine that changed for a good few years. I would be willing to bet it was still quite common up until about 1950s

It's still legal today but I doubt many outside of Asian communities would admit to it 🤣

FANY First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Volunteers who were not trained nurses