The Sexual Pseudoscience of Telegony: How a Discredited Theory of Heredity Returned to Control Female Agency

Telegony is a long-discredited concept of sexual heredity that has been making a surprising comeback in recent years—particularly within digital filter bubbles, right-wing esoteric milieus, and so-called energy coaching scenes. But what does this tongue-twisting term actually mean?

Classical philologists will recognize Telegony as the title of a lost Greek epic recounting the story of Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and the sorceress Circe.¹ This rare literary reference, however, has little to do with the way the term is used today. 

In scientific-historical terms, telegony refers to the former belief that a woman’s previous sexual partner—often assumed to be the first—could permanently influence her body and thereby affect the traits of children conceived later with different partners. One dictionary definition calls it “a former belief that a sire can influence the characteristics of the progeny of the female parent by subsequent mates.”²

Derived from the Greek tēle (distant) and goneia (procreation), telegony literally means “remote reproduction.” According to this notion, an earlier partner leaves a lasting biological imprint that shapes a woman’s health and the genetic makeup of future offspring—even when those children are fathered by someone else. 

This assumption has been decisively refuted for more than a century. Since the formulation of Mendel’s laws of inheritance, modern genetics has established beyond doubt that only the biological parents contribute to a child’s genetic constitution.³ Telegony has therefore long been classified as a pseudoscientific myth. 

Curiously, contemporary dictionaries still cite prominent media outlets—Time, Newsweek, and The Guardian—as sources that allegedly support or discuss telegony. A closer examination, however, reveals persistent misinterpretations. 

Both Time and Newsweek claim that Aristotle defended telegony.⁴ Not so. While Aristotle wrote extensively on biology and reproduction, his treatise, De generatione animalium, does not propose that former sexual partners influence future offspring. Instead, he advanced a speculative model in which male semen supplies form while the female body provides matter.⁵ This reflects a metaphysical conception of gender—associating masculinity with form and intellect, femininity with substance and passivity— rather than an empirical theory of heredity. 

Telegony’s modern revival is not a scientific rediscovery but a cultural repetition—a myth repackaged to meet contemporary anxieties about sexuality, identity, and control.

The remaining references stem from The Guardian and are often cited in sensational headlines.⁶ These articles report on field studies by Australian researchers suggesting that previous mates might influence offspring size.⁷ Crucially, however, the observed effect concerned houseflies only. What headlines obscure—but the articles themselves clarify—is that these findings have no relevance for mammals, let alone humans. 

From Discredited Biology to Political Myth 

Although Mendel’s laws relegated telegony to scientific error by the early twentieth century, ideas of genetic “imprinting” did not disappear entirely. They resurfaced in ideological form within National Socialist racial doctrine—though not under the explicit label of telegony. 

The Nuremberg Laws did not claim that a woman’s first sexual partner permanently affected her later offspring. Yet the underlying logic of “Aryan bloodlines” and the notion of racial defilement through sexual contact relied on structurally similar assumptions: that sexual encounters could transmit lasting biological or moral contamination.⁸ Political theorists have long noted that myths become politicized when they resonate with prevailing cultural anxieties— whether about heredity, purity, or social order. 

This recursive history did not end with the twentieth century. The contemporary revival of telegony occurs in milieus that generally reject any association with historical racism. Nevertheless, similar narrative patterns reappear—now reframed in spiritual, esoteric, or pseudotherapeutic language. 

In October 2025, these developments reached a broader public audience. At a Skeptic Awards ceremony in Vienna, a European provider of so-called “telegony erasure” services placed third in a public vote for the most unscientific claim of the year.⁹ The Berlin-based proponent advertised the ability to remove alleged energetic imprints of former sexual partners from a person’s DNA through nonmedical “energetic healing,” and claimed to have trained a network of practitioners across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. 

Publicly available material reveals striking similarities across these offerings. Multiple providers use nearly identical language, concepts, and website structures when promoting telegony deletion services, suggesting not isolated belief but a loosely organized commercial ecosystem. 

The idea that a woman is permanently “imprinted” by her first sexual partner functions as a mechanism of control, naturalizing female subordination.

The ideological references invoked by these providers are revealing. Alongside esoteric concepts, they cite the so-called Rita Laws and Slavic-Aryan Vedas as foundational sources.¹⁰ These texts are largely dismissed within Slavic studies as modern fabrications, likely originating in the twentieth century. Today, they are frequently employed within strands of Slavic neopaganism (Rodnoverie) to mythologize ethnonationalist ideas such as hereditary purity and ancestral obligation—claims devoid of medical or historical foundation.¹¹

In this context, the Anastasia movement also appears. Based on novels by Russian author Vladimir Megre, the movement centers on a fictional Siberian healer and promotes a social utopia grounded in “natural” living, ancestral land, and hereditary harmony.¹² Telegony-like ideas—particularly notions of female purity, bodily contamination, and transgenerational burden—play a central role.¹³ Sect-monitoring bodies in several European countries have classified parts of the movement as sectarian and, in some cases, as promoting antisemitic and ethnonationalist motifs. 

These environments often overlap with right-wing esotericism, purity cultures, and manosphere-related discourses. Blogs and forums within these spheres repeatedly—and incorrectly— reject Mendelian genetics, misattribute claims to Aristotle, and revive essentialist gender models in which women are framed as permanently passive and subordinate to male agency. What emerges is not a revival of science, but a repackaging of myth—adapted to digital platforms and marketed as personal transformation. 

The Demand Behind the Myth 

When a long-disproved concept resurfaces despite overwhelming refutation, a psychological belief question arises: Why do people adopt the myth rather than the evidence? The revival of telegony is driven by several overlapping dynamics. 

Within Anastasia-related narratives, telegony is embedded in a closed worldview that promotes rigid gender hierarchies.¹⁴ Men are portrayed as active lineage bearers, women as passive vessels and spiritual caretakers. Within this framework, the idea that a woman is permanently “imprinted” by her first sexual partner functions as a mechanism of control, naturalizing female subordination. 

Comparable patterns appear in manosphererelated online environments, where telegony is framed polemically as pseudobiological justification for moral judgments about women’s sexuality. In these filter bubbles, reductive gender stereotypes dominate.¹⁵

The wish to “remove” traces of former sexual partners may reflect dissatisfaction with experiences of medicine and intimacy.

By contrast, telegony’s resonance in alternative medicine and energy-healing scenes follows a different logic. Here, the appeal lies less in authoritarian gender ideology than in the promise of liberation from perceived constraints of conventional medicine. Audiences range from curious experimentalists to resolute opponents of scientific institutions.¹⁶

Across these contexts, however, a more general motive may be discerned. The wish to “remove” traces of former sexual partners may reflect dissatisfaction with experiences of medicine and intimacy. Many people long for healthcare that feels meaningful rather than bureaucratic, and for sexuality that carries symbolic weight beyond the purely physical.¹⁷

Against this backdrop, telegony can appear to offer something else: the promise that sexual encounters matter, that they leave traces, that intimacy has depth and consequence. This emotional appeal helps explain why myths such as telegony persist despite scientific refutation. 

Telegony’s modern revival is not a scientific rediscovery but a cultural repetition—a myth repackaged to meet contemporary anxieties about sexuality, identity, and control. Recognizing this pattern is essential to distinguishing legitimate meaning-making from the misuse of discredited science.