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This fanciful tale began circulating on the Internet in February 1997: Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1997] By November the original version had been embellished. In the latter racier, more detailed version, Jen and Jeremy make love five times in the dark before discovering each other's true identities in the cold light of the next morning. While still in the dark though, Jeremy takes a break from being a stoat long enough to inform Jen of his leaving a note for his wife confessing he is running off with another woman. It too ends with Their lives will never be the same, that point now being driven home more forcefully as the incest barrier has been breached. Discard any notions you might harbor that this badly-written, derivative tale recounts an actual incident. This story is a rather artless and overlong example of a common subtype of the sex with the wrong partner motif: the collegiate tale involving a parent-child or sibling-sibling sexual encounter, with the inadvertent incestuous pairing serving as punishment for the moral transgressions that brought both parties together in the first place. Some other examples of this genre of urban legend include the following: All four stories share common elements: a college setting, brother-sister or father-daughter pairings, contrived situations (especially the darkened room routine, which goes back at least as far as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure) that prevent identities from being revealed until the last moment, and a sense of moral disapprobation directed at both participants. (For yet another example of this type, see the Father of the Bribe legend. Those looking for more Dad finds out his daughter is a hooker tales, see our Close Relations page.) The woman is at fault for agreeing to bed someone she has just met, or for being so foolishly careless as to allow herself to get drunk at a fraternity party, or for engaging in prostitution. The male receives his just deserts for callously handing off a woman to a friend to use for sexual purposes, or for participating in a gang rape, or for employing the services of prostitutes. The warning contained in Jen's more modest tale is obvious: you don't know who's on the other end of that chat line, so don't do anything in cyberspace you wouldn't do in real life. Fiery, Ann. The Complete and Totally True Book of Urban Legends. Philadelphia: Running Press Books, 2001. ISBN 0-7624-107404 (pp. 36-41).
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