The American public was outraged by Aimee Sword, the 36-year-old Michigan woman who almost broke the Internet recently when her name topped Google’s list of most-searched-for terms, after news surfaced that she’d been sentenced to 30 years in prison for tracking down on Facebook and then sleeping with the biological son she’d given up for adoption when he was days old. The now 16-year-old boy was, incidentally, 14 at the time of the “affair”. Not that it would have been any less perverse if he was, say, 24. Still, people were beside themselves, choked up by righteous indignation. The act was simply unnatural. Nauseating. Sick. Blech! One can tolerate just about any other known kind of sin, but heaven forbid, not that. Dr Gerald Shiener, chief of Consultation and Liaison Psychiatry at Sinai Grace Hospital in Detroit, reportedly said in a Fox News interview that this was by far the most heinous crime in his career, which included a serial killer that slashed people’s throats.

Really? It always perplexes me, this human capacity for random hyperbole. Like a former co-worker’s passionate avowal, one day as I gawped in disbelief, that he’d rather his child be a murderer than a homosexual.

We in these parts know that incest occurs more frequently than people care to admit, especially in rural Jamaica, between fathers and daughters. (Grandfathers and granddaughters, and uncles and nieces, too, I’m told.) But what people seem to be reacting to in the Sword case is the fact that it occurred between a mother and her son. Fathers and daughters doing it is bad, sure. But somehow it’s even more appalling when the incest occurs between a mother and her son. Isn’t there supposed to be some genetic mental wiring against this sort of thing occurring in a mother, a woman?

(By the way, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex was meant to explain the origin of the childhood neurosis of a male child’s unconscious (and repressed) desire for the exclusive love and possession of his mother. I don’t know that Freud contemplated what it meant when the shoe was on the other foot. However, a modern-day term, genetic sexual attraction, or GSA, has been attributed to Sword’s actions: which is to say, attraction between close biological relatives who first meet as adults. I don’t know that I buy the GSA defence – for my own sanity, I have to believe mental illness is the force at work here.)

Understand this: I’m not condoning incest. What’s curious to me, though, is the blatant double standard at work. Not too long ago, the actress Mackenzie Phillips revealed in a memoir that she and her father, John Phillips, the leader of the folk music group The Mamas and The Papas, had had a sexual relationship over a period of 10 years. Mackenzie’s allegations — which is really what they are since John is dead and unable to defend himself — were nevertheless not met with the kind of public revulsion Sword’s story was. With Mackenzie’s revelation, there was, dare I say, a kind of tawdry titillation surrounding her talk-show appearances: Did he do it? Oh dear, 10 years sounds like she consented. My, my, what drugs must they have been doing together? John was a beloved figure, so there was even some rationalising: he did drugs, so, you know… Matter of fact, as is so often the case with rape victims, there was even a little undercurrent of blame being scuttled her way. Indeed, she herself referred to the so-called relationship as “consensual” until, according to her, other incest victims informed her that she was in fact the child, which nullified that label.

But Aimee Sword, well, that’s a completely different ball of wax, isn’t it? Everything, from Chinese water torture to pulling out each of her fingernails, has been recommended for her punishment. On the blogs, people are calling for her blood.

It’s extreme, the public’s reaction, and identical to their reaction when a female high school teacher, say, is discovered to have been engaged in an improper sexual relationship with a male student. It’s the end of the world, apparently. Indeed, over the past few years, beginning with the infamous Mary-Kay Letourneau, who was jailed for having sex with a 12-year-old student in 1997, these so-called scandals involving female teachers have surfaced with irksome regularity in the States. What, are we to assume that all male teachers are pillars of morality? Please. The truth is, when male teachers abuse their authority and have sex with their female students, it isn’t necessarily perceived as predatory behaviour. It’s a little off-colour, yes, but it’s a man being a man. When a female teacher is caught out there, however, it’s a scandal. And the scandal stems from the fact that female sexuality and desire, if it rivals a man’s in all its intensity or even just plain wrongheadedness, is somehow seen as lewd, and so women are punished for daring to act like men.

Aimee Sword’s story is tragic. I suspect she had a mental imbalance, although I’m no head-shrinker, and she’ll spend the rest of her life with the title of sex offender hanging over her like a foul mist, that’s for sure.

“When she saw this boy, something just touched off in her,” Sword’s attorney explained about his client, who is married with five other children, “and it wasn’t a mother-son relationship, it was a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. Aimee’s searching for a reason why this happened. She can’t understand it.”

Seriously, what’s the right sentencing for a woman who feels this way about her own offspring? And why should it be more severe than the punishment meted out to a man who does the same thing with his own daughter? Aimee Sword is searching for a reason why she did what she did? We should be, too, instead of itching to burn her at the stake.