I guess I'm a little behind the times, but I've just learned that disgust is having a scientific moment. There are a growing number of researchers, particularly evolutionary psychologists, who are trying to prove their theory that disgust is an evolutionary response. Some call themselves disgustologists.
This came to my attention last week when I read a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE titled "Feelings of Disgust and Disgust-Induced Avoidance Weaken following Induced Sexual Arousal in Women". Parts of this paper are incredibly funny, parts are absolutely disgusting. I don't want to give it away, so read on and you be the judge.
The disgust theory, in a nutshell, is that disgust is a hardwired, universal response in humans which evolved as a protective mechanism. We are disgusted by things that pose a threat to our well being and survival via some form of "external contamination".
In this paper the authors turn specifically to sex and disgust. They claim that humans are disgusted by many of the things we encounter during sex (saliva, sweat, semen, body odor to name a few). Their proof of this is a study which asked American undergraduate students to rate various body parts and fluids along a disgusting continuum. Whether or not these 335 American undergraduate students should be considered a stand in for all people everywhere is a good question. But in so much research of this kind they are, so just go with it.
The author's then wonder about this apparent paradox. We need to have sex to survive. But we're disgusted by things we often encounter while having sex.
And so, they ask, how is it that we have "pleasurable sex at all?"
They have a theory, which is that sexual arousal reduces the disgust response enough to allow us to enjoy sex. They also suspect that sexual dysfunction could be a problem of too much disgust and not enough arousal.
To test their theory they recruited 90 heterosexual women to experiment on. Here's where it gets funny, disgusting, or just plain weird, depending on your perspective.
Each woman was put in a room in the lab with a one way mirror (so they could be observed by the researchers but not observe the researchers observing them). Each woman watched one of three film clips. One clip was taken from "female friendly erotica," another was "sports/high-adrenalin arousal clip", and the third was from a film of a train ride where they see different sceneries out the window. As they watched the film, it would stop and they would be instructed to observe and then complete a total of 16 tasks. The tasks were meant to illicit disgust. Here are some of the tasks they were asked to observe and then complete:
Take a sip of the juice from a plastic cup with a large insect in it.Remove a piece of used toilet paper from the jar and put it back in place.
Stick your finger in a bowl of used condoms and touch each one of them.
Stick a needle in the eye of a cow.
See this shirt in the bag? This shirt belongs to a pedophile, it was used during rape. Take the shirt out of the bag and hug it.
No, I'm not making that last one up (although I'm fascinated by how they came to make it up). A complete list of all sixteen tasks is available as an appendix to the paper. Most of these tasks were, of course faked (the insect was plastic, the toilet paper had die on it, the condoms were new and they used lube to simulate ejaculate, the shirt was new, and had never been worn by anyone). Some were real (the cow eye came frozen from a butcher and a new one was purchased each day).
As the women watched the tasks and then chose to complete them or not, they were asked to rate their level of disgust. Between tasks they watched more of the film.
The author's found that people who watched the erotic film rated all the tasks as less disgusting than the other groups. They interpret this to be evidence that when we are aroused we're less disgusted by things.
Now I'm not sure I argue with their conclusion. We know that sexual arousal mediates other kinds of responses (like our response to pain). And even without odd ball research my experience speaking with thousands of people about their sexuality leads me to believe that being sexually aroused does change how we think and feel. How much it changes, and how those changes are experienced is a much more individual matter. But I can't disagree with their conclusion.
I don't think their research provides any evidence for that conclusion, and no matter how much science-y type stuff they do, I find nothing at all persuasive in the theory that underlies their work; the idea that sexual activity is fundamentally disgusting to people (because it may involve sweat, semen, body odor, etc...) and that the function of arousal is to reduce our apparently biological disgust response to sex.
Here's one, of many problems I have with this notion:
Even a cursory historical and cross-cultural consideration of sexuality demonstrates that those things that we consider to be universal taboos usually aren't universal. In fact it's worth noting that the authors of the study which this currently one cited as proof that things like sweat and semen are universally disgusting clearly note in their own study that the results are from a small group of undergraduate students and can't be generalized. I know how nice evolutionary theory is for it's seeming simplicity, but I just can't reconcile that with what I know of human sexual experience.
Let's take urine.
Urine, is something I imagine many people do find disgusting. And yet some people are aroused by being urinated on, urinating on others, ingesting urine. But these same people aren't always aroused by urine. Even though urine in one context is arousing to them, in another, say having to walk down an alley that is urine soaked and smelly in their new beloved shoes, it might be disgusting.
This paper would suggest that it's their arousal which allows them to approach the urine. But they would say that it's the urine which creates the arousal, although not always. So how come something is disgusting in one context and arousing in another? The answer "because when we're aroused we see it as arousing" feels, to me anyway, unsatisfying. Not disgusted mind you. I'll leave that feeling for someone who makes me think I'm hugging a rapist pedophiles shirt, for 10 Euros.
Whether or not the conclusion they came to is true, I think they may have hit on SOMETHING or another here about disgust and its relationship with arousal that definitely merits more research.
Existential? Unique to the USA seen through American eyes and cultural values?
I think the link between disgust and sex is more personal than these researchers are assuming. We may be disgusted by the sweat or the semen of someone we don’t know, as we have no idea who they are how healthy they are, etc. But if it is the semen or bodily fluids of a lover, or someone you are far more intimate with then you would be less likely to be disgusted. This would somewhat mitigate the apparent paradox the researchers started with.
Of course I have not done any research into this but it would seem a little more of a logical explanation surely?
Such brief memories the human species has! If our ancestors had been “disgusted” by such contaminants as saliva, sweat and body odor we’d still enjoy a rather sparsely populated planet indeed! Until the early 20th-century campaigns by Madison Avenue to persuade us that without certain products nearly every region of our bodies only existed to sap “confidence” if it performed naturally, people kissed, sweated, reeked from hard physical labor, and copulated like bunnies.
As recently as the 1990s friends of mine, both attorneys, were told after desperate years of trying to conceive that if the husband stopped using deodorant his pheromones would cause his wife to ovulate and increase their ertility. It worked.
Much about “the old days” would disgust any of us if dwelt upon. How did wives endure their farmer-husbands who only bathed weekly in an anodized aluminum tub? How did the husband respond when he came home to find his wife sweating over bread baked in a wood stove? What did our great-great-grandparents use as toilet paper? Questions of this nature are limitless, but here we all are, children of humanity’s “disgusting” past.
I don’t imagine sexual desire factored much into the lives of the pioneers either. With a wife perpetually pregnant from within months of her youthful marriage and a husband physically done-in by agrarian responsibilities, the five-minute shagging needed to produce and replace offspring was a duty rather than a pleasure.
To presume that the modern-day celebration of sex among a growing number of people demonstrates an overcoming of a “disgust” factor omits the persuasive training power of Advertising, and the true pleasurable qualities of some aspects of our evolved bodies’ emissions (i.e., sweat), and the stubborn power of Life to reproduce itself under the most odious conditions.
Graduate schools should be studying erectile disfunction and frigidity, rather than slipping plastic bugs into cups of juice.
I am not turned on by urine but have had my girlfriend give me golden showers just for the experience, we got a good laugh from them.I get aroused from the thought of and from viewing (scat) brown showers in videos but I think it is the humiliation factor that arouses me more than the feces.