Inducing disgust
In Descarte’s Baby the psychologist Paul Bloom puts a mild evolutionary psychological spin on child development and ties it in thematically with the concept of Cartesian dualism as an innate trait of human cognition (I agree with him there, I have to remind myself that my body isn’t just a flesh puppet, it is me). There wasn’t much new in here, though it was a breezy read, except for the chapter which dealt with digust, and how people use the term. The definition from dictionary.com is:
1. To excite nausea or loathing in; sicken.
2. To offend the taste or moral sense of; repel.
Bloom makes a simple argument that the atomic core of disgust is the aversion to spoilage of meats, and fear of contagion. Rotten meat smells, it is often slimy and has a sickly pallor. Though we are primed to this aversion, it takes time to kick in. Feces fall under one of the main items that are universal objects of disgust, but infants are not repulsed by their own shit. Freud of course made this data point a central aspect of his pseudoscience, but Bloom offers that infants who are relatively immobile when they soil themselves and become exhausted by crying because of their innate revulsion at their state might not be at an advantage. Far better to allow digust to work its magic on someone who can affect change, the parent.
The literature seems to suggest that attitudes toward disgust are time released and tend to crystalize by 5-6 and initiate around 3, the age at which many children start to be averse to their own feces. Bloom hypothesizes that disgust is a default feature that inculcates in us an early aversion to most foods, in particular, meats, because though we are ominivores our digestive tracts are not totally promiscuous. Though we are primed toward pickiness, the particular range of meats we consume is culturally conditioned. Research indicates that the later you transition a child toward “adult” solid foods, the smaller their range of acceptable foods are. In other words, bombarding children with a wide range of foods tends to acculturate them to the items and blocks the disgust response. While a Muslim is disgusted by pork, an East Asian might relish it. The extrapolation of meat disgust toward feces or other biological products is easy, like spoiled meat they smell, are often slimy and are soft to the touch. A disgust response toward someone with low standards of hygiene is likely an extension of the smell factor.
But all the circumstances I am pointing to are more applicable to definition 1. What about 2? A term like disgust is malleable. Something is not just either disgusting or not, and context matters (sex with a fat man is disgusting, sex with a rich fat man is not so disgusting, at least on the check account balance). Disgust is more often used as a metaphor when verbalized, and the metaphor often carries with it an implication of inevitable instinctiveness, like the response toward a pile of feces. But Bloom makes the point that the use of disgust as a metaphor is usually never so clear cut, but rather part of a rhetorical campaign. From page 174:
…it is just not true that we react to cloning in the same way that we do to incest, corpse mutilation, and bestiality. Many people think that human cloning is a bad idea, even a terrible idea, but this is not the same as feeling revulsion. Perhaps you tok the kids to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in the popular movie The Sixty Day? (Arnold goes to clone the family pet, and then, through sinister machinations, he gets cloned!) I would be surprised if Columbia Pictures were to release a popular actions film around the them of bestiality….
Bloom’s point is there is a wisdom to repugnance, but outside of the most abstract and detached discussions acts and objects that elicit genuine innate revulsion are not those that you have to make a case for. At this point standard phenomena in the past that would have elicited revulsion are trotted out and shown to now be considered rather banal. Consider black males having sexual intercourse with white females. The standard past denigration of this involved the depicition of black males as beasts, ergo, this was tatamount to bestiality, an act which in the literal sense humans do seem to find offensive (there are the rather numerous legal codes which punish the animal as well as the human, I don’t know what that says). Yet today there is a flourishing sub-genre of pornography that deals in black-white sex (often with black males and white females). A portion of the population no doubt still considers this disgusting (that is, if they do not consider pornography as a whole disgusting), but certain social norms have changed. In contrast, the market for bestiality and feces related porn seems rather limited, but the fact that there is a market for such products does clue us in to two important facts: 1) human variation in disgust might still exist, or, 2) disgust can be deadened over time, and coupled with the tendency toward seeking novelty, this can result in very bizarre predilections (I put pregnancy porn and lactation porn into the same bizarro category).
Psychological traits, tendencies and paradigms are part and parcel of many “high brow” discussions because they are part of the intellectual zeitgeist, whether the ideas were transmitted via developmental psychology popularizations picked up in one’s feminist book club, or Pinker’s latest bestsellar peddled by Barnes & Noble. Something like disgust illustrates that even simple tightly defined traits can’t be easily sliced, diced and dichotomized, the way we use language tends to result in our deployment of the ideas as if they were hammers when what is really needed in any dialogue is a knife.
I think that acquired repugnance is as real as any. Many years ago I got flu after eating a certain kind of custard. To this day I find the idea of eating it disgusting in a very real sense.
I think that acquired repugnance is as real as any. Many years ago I got flu after eating a certain kind of custard.
i find this amusing, because the author used exactly this example (it wasn’t a custard, some other food) to illustrate associative repugnance.
Okay, how about bugs? I am not particularly disgusted by bugs, but I don’t doubt the disgust reactions I frequently see in other people. This must be culturally acquired, rather than associatively (with any real discomfort). In fact, it seems to me that bugs which have the worst associations (mosquitos, bees) tend to be the least disgusting.
bugs are pretty cultural. most people don’t eat bugs because they aren’t an efficient way to getting protein, too small. once you don’t eat something, the hypothesis is that there is a disgust response because you’ve never eaten it (this tends to apply for meats, less so for plants). some cultures do eat insects though. remember, they ate locusts in the bible.
I definitely have a disgust response to eating bugs, even kosher ones. But some people are disgusted by looking at them.
Getting back to your first point, I think that claims of disgust are generally real, and usually adaptive. The fact that it can be culturally transmitted seems to me like a good way to facilitate cultural evolution.
Re bugs. It may be a cultural prejudice to think these are verboten. Large cockroaches and water bugs are game in southeast Asian cuisine. The Thai sister-in-law of one of my co-workers prepared a dish containing water bug essense or some such nightmarish ingredient. My American co-worker said it tasted strange but she was not particularly freaked. I would have been.
Apparently some substance found under the wings of large water-cockroaches is a coveted condiment in the humid southeast Asian area. That’s why when it comes down to southeast vs. south asian cuisine, I’ll take south Asian. With their vegetarian traditions, they don’t intentionally put creatures into the dish.
Lest you think I jest, here is a dainty link to set before … well, not me that’s for sure.http://www.food-insects.com/edible%20species.htm
Something odd. I never had trouble with eggplant when I was young. But recently I’ve developed a strong aversion. The taste and texture of eggplant immediately causes me to gag. Don’t know why.
mc, I don’t think that there’s such a thing as “water-cockroaches”. People often call roaches “water bugs”, but roaches and water bugs are entirely different things.
Couple of things:
1. Perhaps “wisdom of regugnance” arguments get muddy (or are poorly argued from the get-go) because people conflate what I suspect are distinct emotions. Do all the types of unease we describe with the word “disgust” have the same source? (Obviously they do for some people in some cases – e.g., gays are icky! – but they sure don’t all feel the same to me.)
2. Disgust and niche-porn: uh, for some of that stuff, isn’t the turn-on because of the existence of disgust, not a lack of it?
I’ve never gotten around to reading it but this is the definitive book on the subject:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/MILANA_R.html
“most people don’t eat bugs because they aren’t an efficient way to getting protein, too small.”
not according to this chart:
http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html
100 gms of grasshopper has almost the same amount of protein as 100 gms of beef (and considerably more iron). of course the average grasshopper weighs about 3 gms but i’m sure foraging up 30 odd grasshoppers isn’t very hard when it’s their season, and would only take a few minutes.
isn’t the turn-on because of the existence of disgust, not a lack of it?
dude’s usually watch chicks shitting, not other dudes (which would be even more disgusting).
100 gms of grasshopper has almost the same amount of protein as 100 gms of beef (and considerably more iron). of course the average grasshopper weighs about 3 gms but i’m sure foraging up 30 odd grasshoppers isn’t very hard when it’s their season, and would only take a few minutes.
sure, but the reason that people would/could eat locusts is they are abundant and collecting them isn’t too hard when they swarm. normally insect collection eats up a lot of calories in foraging, detection and collection.
“insect collection eats up a lot of calories in foraging, detection and collection.”
it might but maybe not enough to make it impractical, especially if the foragers weren’t picky or lived in the tropics or wherever bugs like it. i know the aborigines and some africans regularly eat grubs (not to mention south-east asians). has anyone studied to see if this is more efficient than other food sources – or do these people not *have* many other food sources (as might be the case with the aborigines) and thus east the bugs as a last resort?
i realize that there’s a cannibalistic ambiguity in the above post. please ignore it.
i know the aborigines and some africans regularly eat grubs
well, my impression is that aborigines are opportunists about insects. for example, their relish of honey pot ants is understandable, but it’s not like they can farm them. the key i think is that in many sedentary agricultural populations so much time is pumped into the fields that there can only be minor supplementation of their diet with hunting or gathering, and in this case, it makes to aim for consolidated protein sources, like deer or antelope.
http://www.jsonline.com/entree/cooking/jul03/158524.asp
It sounds delicious,though I won’t have the courage to taste it.
http://www.siriusmindbody.com/generic14.html
Here is the recipe of David Gordon. Gordon says he now cooks bugs regularly at his Seattle home, and at demonstrations around the world. He says insects are high in protein, vitamins and minerals.
I shudder at the thought to eat that. I doubt that this man will sell his book about cooking of bugs :) but nobody knows… different people, different tastes.
Charles Darwin, in his classic book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, took perhaps the earliest scientific look at disgust. Recalling a colorful incident from an expedition to South America, Darwin wrote: “In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his fingers some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac., and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.”
By putting his finger on the meat, the Indian helped Darwin put his finger on three key aspects of disgust: first, that it can be elicited by quite different things–in this case, food and people; second, it is an emotion shared by radically diverse cultures; and third, what different cultures consider gross can vary tremendously. Darwin then inventoried the physiological reactions to disgusting things. At one end of the scale is a frown, often accompanied by hand gestures or body language aimed at pushing away or shielding against the repulsive object. In more pronounced cases, a person’s mouth may drop open, and he’s likely to spit, purse his lips or blow air out between them, and make an “ach” or “ugh” sound. Episodes of “extreme disgust,” Darwin observed, tend to produce facial contortions identical to those observed before vomiting–mouth wide open, nose wrinkled, upper lip retracted and lower lip protruded–and some actually do double over and retch.
The key problem, as Freud and others later observed, is that humans don’t really exhibit aversions towards most of what we consider disgusting–including our own excrement–until we are taught to. Even worse, those famous feral “wild children” plucked from the forests were often almost totally lacking a “nominal” capacity for disgust. Finally, our closest primate cousins, such as chimpanzees, fail to exhibit disgust of any kind, and many mammals routinely ingest feces to replenish the beneficial bacteria that they, like we, carry in their digestive tracts.
On closer examination, then, disgust appears to be a cultural acquisition: people are taught what is disgusting, when to be disgusted, and, if all goes right, how to avoid being disgusting themselves. Indeed, “disgust marks the boundaries of culture and boundaries of the self,” University of Michigan law professor William Ian Miller noted in his recent book, The Anatomy of Disgust.
jaime wrote, “I don’t think that there’s such a thing as “water-cockroaches”. People often call roaches “water bugs”, but roaches and water bugs are entirely different things.”
That’s what I thought jaime. There was a PBS show on the markets of Hong Kong and there was a barrell of these things waiting for sale. I think the narrator called them “water cockroaches” but I am not sure. It’s all a haze I was so disgusted.
My mother used to tell me not to be afraid of water bugs because they were “clean.” I really did not care a twit about their hygiene, they just totally made me wonder about the beneficence of a god who would create them, and made me aware of my limitations concerning the principle of universal love.
An entymologist brought his thesis one day, and I queried him on the subject of wb vs. cr. He said there was no difference between water bugs and cockroaches, that one was just water dwelling.
There are a lot of different species of these things, so one person’s wb is another’s cr.
And that’s about all I can stand to write on this subject.
“An entymologist brought his thesis one day, and I queried him on the subject of wb vs. cr. He said there was no difference between water bugs and cockroaches, that one was just water dwelling.”
Sorry to dwell an a topic that disgusts you, but “water bugs”, when it doesn’t incorrectly refer to roaches, usually refers to certain carnivorous hemipterans. Roaches are blattodeans- an entirely different order. Lots of hemipterans have special adaptation for living in water. Water bugs have a little breathing tube that enables them to breathe while under the water surface. I really don’t think that any species of roach is able to breathe while underwater. I could be wrong, but if I am, they’re certainly such an oddity outside of the tropics that I really doubt that the term “water-bug” could really refer to them.
I’ve heard people refer to roaches as “water-bugs” before, and a lot of them seem to think that roaches can survive for long periods of time underwater. Some even believe that roaches are able to travel through the plumbing. This is all untrue.
“Sorry to dwell an a topic that disgusts you, but “water bugs”, when it doesn’t incorrectly refer to roaches, usually refers to certain carnivorous hemipterans”
Oh, that’s ok. We all need a little fear factor experience now & then, and bugs are just trying to get through life too.
Well, you have supplied my vocabulary with several new words, and you know the anatomy, so okey-dokey.
Thanks for the info.