Two kinds of disgust: disgust at primary objects and projective disgust

Because my blog post on the role of disgust in the debate on same-sex marriage has generated some controversy, I thought an excerpt from Martha Nussbaum’s book, From Disgust to Humanity, would be helpful. She challenges the conventional view that disgust is only a visceral emotion that is not affected by social learning. Pay special attention to the distinction and relation between disgust at primary objects and projective disgust.

Disgust seems like a deep-seated bodily response to certain smells, sights, and feels, which has little to do with what we learn or how we interpret the world.

In the past twenty years, however, important experimental work by psychologist Paul Rozin and his colleagues has shown conclusively that disgust has a marked cognitive element. What people find disgusting depends crucially on the idea they have of the object. Thus disgust is not simply sensory distaste. Subjects who sniff the same odor from two vials, being told that one contains feces and the other contains cheese, are usually disgusted by the first but not by the second. Nor is disgust identical with the sense of danger. People will eat formerly poisonous mushrooms if they are convinced that the poison has been removed, but they won’t swallow a cockroach even if they are sure it has been sterilized; subjects even refuse to swallow a cockroach sealed in a plastic capsule that will emerge, undigested, in the subject’s feces.

Disgust, Rozin finds, concerns the borders of the body. Its central idea is that of contamination: the disgusted person feels defiled by the object, thinking that it has somehow entered the self. Further experiments show that behind this idea of personal contamination lies the idea that “you are what you eat”: if you take in something base or vile, you become like that yourself.

So what are people unwilling to be or become? The so-called primary objects of disgust are reminders of human animality and mortality: feces, other bodily fluids, corpses, and animals or insects who have related properties (slimy, smelly, oozy) . . . .

When people experience disgust, then, they are expressing an aversion to prominent aspects of what every human being is. They feel contaminated by what reminds them of these aspects, which people often prefer to conceal. Such aversions almost certainly have an evolutionary basis, but they still have to be confirmed by learning: children do not exhibit disgust until the ages of two or three years old, during the time of toilet training. This means that society has room to interpret and shape the emotion, directing it to some objects rather than others, as happens with anger and compassion.

In virtually all societies, disgust is standardly felt toward a group of primary objects: feces, blood, semen, urine, nasal discharges, menstrual discharges, corpses, decaying meat, and animal/insects that are oozy, slimy, or smelly . . . Disgust at primary objects is usually a useful heuristic, steering us away from the dangerous when there is no time for detailed inquiry.

Disgust is then extended from object to object in ways that could hardly bear rational scrutiny. This sort of extended disgust is what I call projective disgust . . . .

Projective disgust is shaped by social norms, as societies teach their members to identify alleged contaminants in their midst. All societies, it appears, identify as least some humans as disgusting. Very likely this is a stratagem adopted to cordon off the dominant group more securely from its own feared animality: if those quasi humans stand between me and the world of disgusting animality, then I am that much further from being mortal/decaying/smelly/oozy myself. Projective disgust rarely has any reliable connection with genuine danger. It feeds on fantasy, and engineers subordination. Although it does serve a deep-seated human need – the need to represent oneself as pure and others as dirty – this is a need whose relation to social fairness looks (and is) highly questionable.

Projective disgust (involving projection of disgust properties onto a group or individual) takes many forms, but it always involves linking the allegedly disgusting group or person somehow with the primary objects of disgust. Sometimes this is done by stressing the close practical connection of the group with the primary objects: untouchables in the Indian caste system were those who cleaned latrines and disposed of corpses; women seem to many men to be particularly closely linked with blood and other bodily fluids through their receptive sexuality, their role in birth, and menstruation, a common source of norms of “untouchability.”

Often, however, the extension works in more fantasy-laden ways, by imputing to people or groups properties similar to those that are found disgusting in the primary objects: bad smell, ooziness, rottenness, germiness, decay. Typically, these projections have no basis in reality. Jews are not really slimy, or similar to maggots, although German anti-Semities, and Hitler himself, said that they were. African-Americans do not smell worse than other human beings, although racists said that they did. And often, when there is an element of what I’ve called practical connection, projection imputes dirtiness or contamination where where is no reason to do so. . . Notice, then, that projective disgust involves a double fantasy: a fantasy of the dirtiness of the other and a fantasy of one’s own purity. Both sides of the projection involve false belief, and both conduce to a politics of hierarchy.

Societies have many ways of stigmatizing vulnerable minorities. Disgust is not the only mechanism of stigmatization. It is, however, a powerful and central one, and when it is removed (when, for example, aversion to physical contact with a racial minority is no longer present), other modes of hierarchy tend to depart along with it.

It is not surprising that sexuality is an area of life in which disgust often plays a role. Sex involves the exchange of bodily fluids, and it marks us as bodily beings rather than angelic transcendent beings. So sex is a site of anxiety for anyone who is ambivalent about having an animal and mortal nature, and that includes many if not most people. Primary-object disgust therefore plays a significant role in sexual relations, as the bodily substances people encounter in sex (semen, sweat, feces, menstrual blood) are very often found disgusting and seen as contaminants. Therefore, it is not surprising that projective disgust also plays a prominent role in the sexual domain. In almost all societies, people identify a group of sexual actors as disgusting or pathological, contrasting them with “normal” or “pure” sexual actors (prominently including the people themselves and their own group). This stigmatization takes many different forms. Misogyny is an aspect of it in most cultures, as males distance themselves from the discomfort they feel by associating bodily fluids with the woman who receives them, and not, at the same time, with their own bodies . . . .

There is no doubt that the body of the gay man has been a central locus of disgust-anxiety – above all, for other men. Female homosexuals may be objects of fear, or moral indignation, or generalized anxiety; but they have less often been objects of disgust. Similarly, heterosexual females may have felt negative emotions toward the male homosexual – fear, moral indignation, anxiety – but again, they have more rarely felt emotions of disgust . . .

What inspires disgust is typically the male thought of the male homosexual, imagined as anally penetrable. The idea of semen and feces mixing together inside the body of a male is one of the most disgusting ideas imaginable – to males, for whom the idea of nonpenetrability is a sacred boundary against stickiness, ooze, and death. (The idea of contamination-by-penetration is probably one central idea, but the more general idea is that of the male body as defiled by the contamination of bodily fluids: and proximity to a contaminated body is itself contaminating.) The presence of a homosexual male in the neighborhood inspires the thought that one might lose one’s own clean safeness, one might become the receptacle for those animal products. Thus disgust is ultimately disgust at one’s own imagined penetrability and ooziness, and this is why the male homosexual is both regarded with disgust and viewed with fear as a predator who might make everyone else disgusting. The very look of such a male is itself contaminating – as we see in the extraordinary debates about showers in the military. The gaze of a homosexual male is seen as contaminating because it says, “You can be penetrated.” And this means that you can be made of feces and semen and blood, not clean plastic flesh. Thus it is not surprising that (to males) the thought of homosexual sex is even more disgusting than the thought of reproductive sex, despite the strong connection of the latter with mortality and the cycle of the generations. For in heterosexual sex the male imagines that not he but a lesser being (the woman, seen as animal) receives the pollution of bodily fluids; in imagining homosexual sex he is forced to imagine that he himself might be so polluted. This inspires a stronger need for boundary drawing . . . .

I contend that projective disgust plays no proper role in arguing for legal regulation, because of the emotion’s normative irrationality and its connection to stigma and hierarchy.

We cannot conclude that a policy is wrong simply because it is backed by a rhetoric of disgust: for there may be other better reasons in its favor. Disgust, however, often prevents us from looking for those good reasons, creating the misleading impression that the policy has already been well defended. Turning to it to legitimize policies that can be defended in other ways is therefore dangerous, because this encourages us to stop short in our search for rationally defensible categories. And the emotion itself encourages us to accept hierarchies and boundaries that are not defensible within a political tradition based on equal respect.

Even those who believe that disgust still provides a sufficient reason for rendering certain practices illegal, however, should agree with a weaker thesis: namely, that disgust provides no good reason for limiting liberties or compromising equalities that are constitutionally protected (pp. 13-21).