We will end the year with disgust – Molly Young in NYT:

‘Once you are attuned to disgust, it is everywhere. On your morning commute, you may observe a tragic smear of roadkill on the highway or shudder at the sight of a rat browsing garbage on the subway tracks. At work, you glance with suspicion at the person who neglects to wash his filthy hands after a trip to the toilet. At home, you change your child’s diaper, unclog the shower drain, empty your cat’s litter box, pop a zit, throw out the fuzzy leftovers in the fridge. If you manage to complete a single day without experiencing any form of disgust, you are either a baby or in a coma.’

(…)

‘The most important disgust accounts following Darwin come from a pair of Hungarian men born two years apart, Aurel Kolnai (born in 1900) and Andras Angyal (1902). I haven’t found any evidence that they knew each other, but it seems improbable that Angyal, whose disgust paper came out in 1941, didn’t draw from his countryman’s paper, which appeared in 1929. Strangely enough, the Angyal paper contains no reference to Kolnai. One possibility is that Angyal failed to cite his sources. A second possibility is that he was truly unaware of the earlier paper, in which case you have to wonder whether there was something so abnormally disgusting about Central Europe of the early 20th century that two strangers born there were driven to lengthy investigations of a subject no one else took seriously.’

(…)

‘Rozin, who is now 85, was born in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn to Jewish parents who, though they hadn’t attended college themselves, were cultured and artistic and pleased to discover that their son was a brainiac. He tested into a public school for gifted children, left high school early and received a full scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he matriculated just after his 16th birthday. Upon graduating, he took a joint Ph.D. at Harvard in biology and psychology, completed a postdoc at the Harvard School of Public Health and in 1963 joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where his initial experiments centered on behavior in rats and goldfish. As he quickly worked his way up from assistant professor to associate professor to full professor, Rozin decided that he was tired of animal studies and wanted to focus on bigger game.
Around 1970, he turned his attention to the acquisition of reading. In Philadelphia — as in many American cities — there was a problem with kids’ learning to read. Eager to discover why, Rozin parked himself in elementary-school classes and observed something strange: A large number of children were unable to read by second grade, but those same children were always fluent in spoken English. They could name thousands of objects, and they could point to Rozin and ask, “Why is this strange man lurking in my classroom?” Compared with the vast dictionary of words filed neatly in their brains, mastering an alphabet of 26 letters would seem to be a piece of cake. Instead, it was a crisis. With a collaborator, Rozin devised an experimental curriculum that moved children through degrees of linguistic abstraction by teaching them Chinese logographs followed by a Japanese syllabary, and only then applying the same logic to English. Rozin says the system worked like a dream, but the school’s response was tepid.’

(…)

‘In 1986, Rozin and two colleagues published a landmark paper called “Operation of the Laws of Sympathetic Magic in Disgust and Other Domains,” which argued that the emotion was a more complicated phenomenon than Darwin or the Hungarians or even Rozin himself had ventured. The paper was based on a series of simple but illuminating experiments. In one, a participant was invited to sit at a table in a tidy lab room. The experimenter, seated next to the participant, unwrapped brand-new disposable cups and placed them in front of the subject. The experimenter then opened a new carton of juice and poured a bit into the two cups. The participant was asked to sip from each cup. So far, so good. Next, the experimenter produced a tray with a sterilized dead cockroach in a plastic cup. “Now I’m going to take this sterilized, dead cockroach, it’s perfectly safe, and drop it in this juice glass,” the experimenter told the participant. The roach was dropped into one cup of juice, stirred with a forceps and then removed. As a control, the experimenter did the same with a piece of plastic, dipping it into the other cup. Now the participants were asked which cup they’d rather sip from. The results were overwhelming (and, frankly, predictable): Almost nobody wanted the “roached” juice. A brief moment of contact with an offensive — but not technically harmful — object had ruined it.’

(…)

‘One of Rozin’s most intriguing theories is that disgust operates as a foreshadowing of our own deaths. Every encounter with moldy meat is a sneak preview of the fact that we will all, at some point, become moldy meat ourselves.’

(…)

‘One of Rozin’s greatest coinages is “benign masochism,” which describes any experience that is pleasurable not despite being unpleasant but because of its unpleasantness. Horror movies, roller coasters, deep tissue massage, bungee jumping, hot chili peppers, frigid showers and tragic novels all fit into the category. I can think of some additional edge cases, like acupuncture or the films of John Waters. Rozin pointed out, during dinner one night, that “many people like to look at their own [expletive] after they make it in the toilet. There is a fascination. All the humor. It’s probably related to benign masochism.” The idea is that these experiences offer a similar excitement, in that they cause fear or pain or repulsion without posing any real existential threat. Our ability to withstand “safe” menaces yields a gratifying sense of mastery. It’s a meta-experience: When you gobble a ghost pepper or cue up “The Exorcist,” you get to experience yourself experiencing something, and you extract enjoyment from your ability to forge a gap between what should feel bad but instead, through sheer will, feels fun.
As with disgust, benign masochism is a uniquely human experience. There’s no evidence that dolphins or coyotes or elephants indulge in it. The paper Rozin and a team wrote about it took me several days to comprehend and served as an example of the subject at hand: an immense irritant with only abstract and hard-won rewards. Chili peppers make you sweat; tragic novels make you cry; academic papers embalm you in a formaldehyde of words and then give you a splendid phrase to use for the rest of your life.’

(…)

‘The best bulwark against disgust — the only bulwark against so much of life’s wretchedness — is, in the end, denial.’

Read the article here.

Yes, indeed, but the influence of culture could be given more attention.

What’s disgusting and not is mostly a learning process. Toddlers enjoy playing with their excrements. Till they are being told that it’s dirty and disgusting.

Also, the connection between sex and disgust is mostly absent.

Lust is I would argue connected to disgust. It’s the attempt, the willingness to overcome disgust that is one of the catalysts for lust.

Benign masochism is everywhere. It’s the foundation of mankind and of humanism. And the question whether sterilized cockroaches are disgusting or not is merely a detail. Look for a culture where cockroaches are a delicacy – well, another example of benign masochism, at least from our perspective.