Tag: disgust

Ladies and their disgusting sexual loopholes

Gentlemen, if you’ve ever worried about s%#tting the bed that you share with a lady — maybe after a certain chilli peppers bet at the Wings Warehouse? — we have one suggestion: do it during sex.

A recent study published in PLoS One found that sexually aroused women were less disgusted while performing gross tasks than women who went in dry. The tasks included ones of a sexual nature (reaching into a bowl of used condoms) and of a non-sexual nature (handling a piece of feces smeared toilet paper). Don’t worry, though: none of the gross things were real. The condoms were merely opened, not used for sex, and the feces was chocolate filtered through a precocious labrador retriever puppy.

Afterwards, the women were asked to rate their disgust from 0 to 100. Sexually aroused women were considerably less disgusted than their dry peers performing sexually gross tasks, but only minorly less disgusted performing non-sexually gross ones. So, returning to the bed soiling example in the opening paragraph: fellas, you gotta make it a passionate dump. Women may think sex is gross, but they’re OK with gross if the mood is right.

This experiment also explains why men perform some of the most disgusting jobs in the world (i.e., garbage collection, flavored condom testing, gynecology, etc.): we’re always sexually aroused. Always.

Morality is only dirt deep

Rotten meat is yucky. Boils are repugnant. Gangrene needs to stay in the medieval time. Still, why we feel this way might go deeper than just because of evolution: that disgust might have created our morality.

Valerie Curtis, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, argues that disgust evolved for the much same reasons that fear did. Disgust keeps us away from threats that can’t be seen, in the same simplified way that fear can keep us alive. Curtis tells us that the theory that the capacity for disgust was at the foundations of our modern conception of morality:

“If I go around leaving poo in your front lawn or spitting in your cups or making nasty smells in public transport or if I go to church in my pajamas, I’m threatening you with my bodily fluids. These are manners, but they’re also the precursor of moral behavior. That’s at least one of the ways that morality could have evolved in society: simple rules about not getting other people sick with your emanations. If you sit people in a room with bad smells, they punish more severely. Your sense of disgust for people’s bad behavior is tied together with your organic system.”

So, what can we take away from this research? A scientist saying “poo” is hilarious.