Episode 38 - Disgust
Transcript
Ellie: 0:00
Before we get started, we want to give you a brief content warning about today's episode. We discuss homophobia, transphobia and racism.
David: 0:14
Hi, I'm David Pena-Guzman.
Ellie: 0:16
And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,
David: 0:19
the podcast where two friends,
Ellie: 0:21
who are also professors,
David: 0:23
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
Ellie: 0:26
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, this episode is super exciting because it is our first ever episode topic that came from a listener. So I want to shout out our Overthink listener, Rachel Diamond, who emailed us with an idea for an episode on disgust.
David: 0:54
Yes. Thank you.
Ellie: 0:56
It's interesting that Rachel thought of this episode idea, because in her book Ugly Feelings, theorist Sianne Ngai says that those of us who work in academia don't really tend to talk about disgust. We're so focused on the politics of desire in contemporary critical theory, but disgust we just want to leave aside.
David: 1:15
Yeah, I suppose for her, this would be an ugly feeling that needs more attention in intellectual circles. So Ellie, let's talk about this ugly little feeling of disgust. I want to know what you find disgusting, if anything, I don't know. Maybe you're like, no, I, I do not fall victim to this ugly feeling.
Ellie: 1:35
Oh, my God. I wish. Just thinking about disgust makes me nauseous, so this is going to be an interesting episode to record. If you find that I'm like less of a full person than I usually am, this is why. I have a phobia of vomit, and that has more of a impact on my everyday life than I would care to admit.
David: 1:57
Do you run into the object of this phobia all the time?
Ellie: 2:01
Well you'd be surprised by how many TV shows and films have vomit-
David: 2:05
Oh.
Ellie: 2:05
As like a plot point. And so, like, I couldn't even get into the TV show Succession because in one of the very first scenes, this character is wearing a suit that's like for an animated character, he works at an amusement park or something, and he throws up inside the suit. And I couldn't get past the first episode. Like I had to turn the TV off. I was like, ah, or if I feel like there's a chance that a character might vomit, I have to like close my eyes and stop up my ears. Um, it gives me a lot of fear on plane rides. Like I don't have like rational fears around getting on planes. I have a fear that I, or somebody around me, is going to throw up. And so like, I go to planes with a whole arsenal of anti-nausea medications. I got my Dramamine. I even bring half a lemon, sometimes. I bring peppermint oil.
David: 2:56
This is for you. The primary object of your experience of disgust would be vomit.
Ellie: 3:02
Yes, absolutely. How about you?
David: 3:05
Uh, so I do have a narrative here to tell also about vomit, um, because when I was a child I used to get car sick, and then I developed this association between moving vehicles and vomiting, myself vomiting, and it was very
Ellie: 3:20
traumatic. I'm getting nauseous just thinking about it.
David: 3:22
So because of that, I'm going to, I'm going to change my answer because a couple of years ago, I had a really interesting experience of disgust that made me think about it from a philosophical and ethical perspective. So around the same time, when I began doing academic work on animal ethics, my relationship to food began changing. And I still have this very vivid, episodic memory of something that happened in 2016. At the time I was living in rural Ontario, Canada, you might remember I did an academic stint there. Dying.
Ellie: 3:59
A very cold year for you.
David: 4:01
I basically died of cold for eight continuous months. I went to the store and I bought a pork chop that I intended to cook and to eat for dinner. And I brought it back to my house. I started preparing it. I cooked it. And at the moment that I sat down to eat it, I had this extremely visual hallucination of imagining this pork chop being physically taken out of a living pig and being put directly on my plate. And, in that moment, in a matter of seconds, like a nanosecond, I want it to vomit at the thought of eating this pork chop. And that is the moment I became a vegetarian. And so I bought this pork chop. I intended to eat it. And as soon as this thing happened, meat became disgusting to me. And I haven't eaten meat ever since.
Ellie: 5:00
Whoa. Disgust is worth theorizing about because it's at least had a huge impact on your moral choices.
David: 5:07
And your entire life.
Ellie: 5:11
Although my vomit, my metaphobia is not moral. It's just a sheer visceral reaction.
David: 5:19
Today, we are talking about disgust.
Ellie: 5:23
How do evolutionary theorists and philosophers understand disgust?
David: 5:28
How does disgust function to police social boundaries and taboos around race and sexuality?
Ellie: 5:35
Why do we find ourselves somehow attracted to what disgusts us, and how do artworks reveal the intimate relation between disgust and desire? David, I want to start with your view of disgust because you work in philosophy of science. And I think of biology and evolutionary theory as having a lot to say about the role of disgust as well as its nature. What are your thoughts on disgust, aside from the fact that vomit and meat are disgusting?
David: 6:11
Well, there are a number of evolutionary theorists who write about disgust because for some people, it is one of the primal emotions in the animal kingdom, something that we share with a lot of other animals, along with things like fear, joy, pain, pleasure, so on and so forth. Different people have different taxonomies of what those basic emotions are.
Ellie: 6:32
Yeah. I don't believe that animals experience pleasure.
David: 6:35
You're like, you're like, I don't think they experience pain, give me the pork chop. But there are some evolutionary theorists who take a very different perspective and argue that, in fact, the experience of disgust, because it is cognitively more demanding than other base emotions like fear or pain or pleasure is something that emerged evolutionarily quite late and is something that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animals. So there's a pretty wide range of opinions out there among scientists and even philosophers of science about at which point in our evolutionary history the emotion actually kicks in.
Ellie: 7:15
Okay. And how are these folks defining disgust?
David: 7:18
Well, typically what you get is a definition of disgust as an emotional response with adaptive value, right? Because we're talking here about evolutionary theorists and typically the value of this emotion is that it gives us critical information about what we need to avoid in order to increase our likelihood of either surviving or reproducing. So that's why the things that typically disgust us, or animals, if you include them in the theory, are things like poop, which is something that figures very prominently in most theories of disgust because it's by making us avoid those things that the emotion proves its evolutionary value.
Ellie: 8:02
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And it also reminds me of this troubling experience that I had recently, where I entered my apartment. And there was this overwhelming stench. And it was like, what is this? It smells like a dead animal or like really, really, really bad trash. I go to my trash can and I don't smell anything there. I'm like, what is going on? I kind of peek around. I can't find anything. And then, so I'm just like, okay, whatever, I guess I'm just going to go about my day and open the window. And then the next day my friend comes over and is like,oh, my God. Why does your apartment smell so bad? And I was like, I can't figure it out. Like what is going on? So we locate the source of the smell in this like little room ish thing that I have that has my trashcan, my laundry, and like my microwave, it's kind of an extension of my very small kitchen. I live in this cute little bungalow, which is quaint, but not particularly large. So there's not a lot of places to look. So we're in this sort of like room-let and it seems like it's near the trash, but like I said, I'd already checked that yesterday. And that's when I discover, oh my God, the microwave. Three days ago, I microwaved leftover bok choy.
David: 9:12
Oh.
Ellie: 9:13
And I don't think I ever it out. It's just like a wall of rotten food smell. And so I think that's a great example of what you're describing, David, because what the stench of the bok choy was doing was disgusting me. And that was alerting me to the fact that the bok choy was not healthy to eat.
David: 9:33
Yes. I think it's fair to think of most contemporary evolutionary theories of disgust as being either loosely informed or directly descending from what is known as the taste-toxicity theory of disgust that was first put forth in the 19th century by Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory. And I want to read a short quote in which Darwin introduces this theory.
He writes: 9:58
"The term disgust, in its simplest sense, means something offensive to the taste. It is curious how readily this feeling is excited by anything unusual in the appearance, odor, or nature of our food. A smear of soup on a man's beard looks disgusting though there is, of course, nothing disgusting in the soup itself. I presume that this follows from the strong association in our minds between the sight of food, however, circumstanced, and the idea of eating it." End quote. And so, you look at food, you immediately associate it with the idea of eating it and whenever the idea of eating that which you're seeing strikes you as repulsive or aversive, that's when the emotion of disgust kicks in, like licking the man's beard as a way of getting to the soup.
Ellie: 10:51
Or like, one of my friends has this intense aversion to cream cheese exclusively because she hates the way that it looks when it gets stuck in people's teeth.
David: 10:59
Oh.
Ellie: 10:59
You know, when people have like a mono because they're- like that divisions between their teeth are filled in by cream cheese. What I find really interesting about this though, David, is that it's a little bit different from what I originally understood you to mean, which is that disgust is essentially linked to things that are unhealthy for us, like in my bok choy story. Here, it seems like it could also be just unusual, right? It's unusual and related to food. And so I'm also thinking about ways, and I want to talk about this a little bit later in the episode too, that we might find disgusting foods that aren't unhealthy for us, but ones that are just different from what we're familiar with. And I think too, that, that relates to the etymology of disgust because, you know, I love my word origins.
David: 11:41
It's Philologist to the rescue.
Ellie: 11:44
I'm just like a pseudo Heidegger in thinking that figuring out the origin of any word is going to help elucidate its meaning, but disgust has a Latin origin and comes from the word gustos, which means taste. And then the reversal of that, right, through the dis prefix.
David: 11:58
Yeah. So like, for example, in Spanish, when we meet somebody to say, nice to meet you, we say mucho gusto.
Ellie: 12:05
Yeah.
David: 12:05
Gustus like a lot-
Ellie: 12:07
Oh, a lot of gusto. I would like to taste your beard.
David: 12:11
I don't.
Ellie: 12:11
Thank you.
David: 12:14
No and you're right that there is a difference, which is why I said that a lot of contemporary theories are only loosely informed by this taste toxicity theory. And they're not necessarily direct mirrors of it, but in general, we can identify two strands. There is the cognitive interpretation of disgust, which here Darwin is putting forth, according to which we see something we think about eating it, and then respond to the feeling of that idea. The other one is an unconscious theory of disgust where we are disgusted by certain things, we don't really know why, and it's simply because through a long process of evolutionary selection, our ancestors who had this aversion to this particular object were simply more likely to survive than those who were attracted to it, right. So if in the Pleistocene period, you have two groups of prehuman ancestors. One of which is like running to cadavers and carcasses and eating them when they're rotting, chances are, they're not going to make it, you know? So we are the descendants of the ones who didn't do that.
Ellie: 13:26
So many things to say about that, but I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna let it go. Um, okay. So like the necrophilic ancestors were not evolutionarily-
David: 13:35
Well, there's a lot of death thinking in theories of disgust.
Ellie: 13:39
So is the idea here that we are kind of evolutionarily programmed to feel disgust? And if so, like you said, there's a division between people who think that that's just for humans and people who think that other non-human animals experience disgust too, or is it rather that disgust trades on sort of like something intrinsic to our biology, but it's like overlaid by society, if it's fair to put it that way.
David: 14:03
Yeah. So I think we can differentiate between two questions that are at the center of contemporary debates around disgust. One of them is, is it a human only emotion? Do only humans experience disgust? Some animal researchers have begun talking about whether other mammals, especially dogs and the great apes, experience a version of disgust.
Ellie: 14:26
Definitely not to vomit, in my dogs experience.
David: 14:28
Yeah, definitely not to vomit, but maybe to other things. So the thing for dogs appears to be wetness and coldness. So whenever something is cold and wet, they make this face that is being interpreted as an indicator of canine disgust. Anyway, so that's one question, right? The human versus animal. The second question, which I find equally fascinating is whether, as you said, we are pre-programmed to find certain specific things, innately disgusting, like the smell of poop, the smell of death, of rotting cadavers, and there's nothing we can do about that because it's just written into our DNA. Or is it that we simply have a capacity for disgust, but then that capacity is expressed differently in light of the social world that we inhabit, in light of the experiences that we have. And so those are the two tensions that I see.
Ellie: 15:25
Okay. Cause it's that final tension that you mentioned that was behind my question of like, do humans inherently feel disgust regardless of what we feel it for or is disgust itself something that maybe historically and, or evolutionarily contingent, but I'm also interested in the other questions cause it also, those two are compelling.
David: 15:43
Well, maybe I should just put my cards on the table here and say that I do think that the capacity for disgust is innate and we do see it in a lot of cultures. There might even be some things that are very widespread as objects of disgust. Again, cadavers and poop, but they are not really universal. And so my own view is that disgust doesn't quite have an object. In other words, we might have the capacity for it, but that capacity is modulated by experience. So it means that you can pick up new objects of disgust along the way, and maybe things that you think are innate can be rewritten in light of experience. So let me give you two examples to make this very concrete. For instance, you can acquire new objects of disgust and experience them as if they were natural and unavoidable, even though they really were acquired over the course of your life, you weren't born with them. And this is what is known among biologists as the Garcia effect, which is named after the American psychologist, John Garcia, who discovered, while conducting experiments on rats in the 20th century, that if a rat eats something that makes it vomit, even if it's just a one-time exposure, that rat will learn to forever avoid that particular kind of food. Now in itself, that doesn't seem all that interesting. But what stands out from Garcia's research is that the rat experiences as disgusting the thing that prompted the vomiting in the first place even though they only had that one-time exposure, which means that the rat has this capacity to incorporate new objects of disgust into its way of being in the world. And that incorporation is not really through learning because that requires multiple exposures. It's just a one-time exposure.
Ellie: 17:49
That's exactly what happened to me when I was like five years old and developed disgust around croutons. Because one time I threw up after eating croutons from Hamburger Hamlet, a classic LA restaurant.
David: 17:59
Well, and you know, all of my undergraduate students typically have
a story that begins like this: 18:03
I can't have tequila because this one time- I'm telling you, and this is the Garcia
Ellie: 18:11
effect. They're really open with you.
David: 18:12
I force them to be open with me so that I can be the cool professor.
Ellie: 18:18
For me, it's the peach Svedka vodka.
David: 18:22
Yeah. So as soon as you smell that vodka, chances are, it gives you a queasy feeling, but Garcia would say, it's not because you are remembering, it's actually because the experience was written into your body, which is why you experience it as a gut reaction rather than as an aversive memory. Like oh yeah, that was not great.
Ellie: 18:44
And I think that does make a lot of sense because there's something so visceral disgust. Like I know that a lot of things I find disgusting are probably sort of like culturally coded or, you know, came about at a particular time in my own personal history, but it doesn't feel that way, right. It feels like it's just this like immediate uncontrollable reaction.
David: 19:02
And so this is what we might call second nature. It's nature in the sense that we can't avoid it, we can't control it voluntarily, but it's second because it's acquired. You were not born with it, you know. Not surprisingly you were not evolutionarily pre adopted to avoid that crappy peach vodka.
Ellie: 19:20
Croutons.
David: 19:20
Croutons. Yes. Now, there is also research that suggests that even if we have certain objects of disgust that we already find viscerally disgusting, again, without conscious cognitive control, we can rewrite our relationship to them. We can make it so that they're not disgusting anymore. So I want us to think for a moment about the research of the neurobiologist James Pfaus, who is at Concordia University in Canada, and he conducted a really clever experiment. Now we know that rats have this quote-unquote innate, because you see it from a very young age, aversion to the smell of dead rats, right. To the death smell. And so Pfaus decided that he would take a bunch of female rats in heat, and then he would cover them in a synthetic version of the rat smell of death. So these-
Ellie: 20:20
Oh, my.
David: 20:20
These horny rat-
Ellie: 20:22
You're like, oh, this casual, clever experiment. I'm like, this is absolutely
David: 20:25
terrifying. Well. it is, oh, it's nightmarish. Most research on animals is nightmarish, but it's interesting in terms of what it shows. So he took all these horny rats and covered them in the death smell. And then he put a bunch of male rats looking to mate in the same cage as these rats that smell literally like death. And initially the rats, the male rats, ran for their lives, right. They're just like, get me out of this cage. I cannot interact with these zombie lady rats. Over time, however, the male rats got over their natural aversion and eventually came to mate with the rats that smelled like death. And the interesting part came later, because over time, Pfaus noticed that the male rats who worked through their aversion to the smell of death came to prefer rats that smelled like death over female rats that didn't.
Ellie: 21:25
This is good news for everyone with chronically terrible breath.
David: 21:28
Yeah. So you can find a rat to love you. That's what this means.
Ellie: 21:32
I'm just leaping from the rat to human, you know, implications.
David: 21:38
Yeah, it just means that like rats are little fetishists, like little kinky creatures who can come to desire even things that maybe originally they found disgusting, which shows, on my interpretation, the plasticity of disgust. Even if there is an element that is written into our very biology, experience can overpower it.
Ellie: 22:03
That intersects with some of the work that people do in overcoming phobias. So like my phobia vomit is not so severe that I've had to do any like exposure therapy or anything like that, even though it grosses me out when I'm watching TV and films and on planes, you know, it doesn't really get in the way of my everyday social life. But for whom it does, people will sometimes do exposure therapy or other forms of therapy to sort of like help them get over their disgust. And that strikes me as sort of the inverse of what happened with your meat phobia, David, where you were acquiring that disgust response. I guess one thing I want to ask you about there is how this relates to ethics, because a lot of people will say that disgust is sort of a morally bunk notion and others will say no, disgust can really motivate ethical behavior. Where does this disgust about meat fit in? Was it a catalyst for the ethical choice to become vegetarian?
David: 23:01
Well, this is why I said that I thought a lot about this experience because it seems as if my intellectual, philosophical interest in animal ethics definitely prompted an experience of disgust, but then it was that experience that actually prompted me to become a vegetarian and what I can't quite make sense of very well is what kind of disgust I experienced, because of course there is intellectual disgust and there is moral disgust you know, like I find depression morally disgusting. I find murder morally disgusting, but in this case it was half intellectual, but half guttural disgust, like I wanted to vomit, for ethical reasons. And so the fact that it had this deeply physical embodied dimension made me think about the relationship between ethics and the body.
Ellie: 23:57
Well, I think what you're describing is really interesting because what you're saying is that first there was this increasing commitment to animal ethics. That, then, prompted the disgust response.
David: 24:10
But unexpectedly.
Ellie: 24:11
And the disgust response- Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because disgust precisely feels like this immediate uncontrollable reaction and that that disgust response in turn enabled you to make a commitment that maybe you'd like already been wanting to make, but hadn't yet committed to. And I do think that there's something really particular about the visceral feeling of disgust there, because I would actually disagree that I feel disgust towards murder. I don't think that murder is morally disgusting. I don't think that there's intellectual versus moral versus disgust, I think disgust is disgust. I would say murder is morally abhorrent, morally wrong, all kinds of other morally XYZ, but I wouldn't actually say that I think it's morally disgusting.
David: 24:53
But you presumably would agree that there is a difference between seeing vomit and seeing something that you find morally reprehensible or disgusting? Presumably the phenomenology is not the same.
Ellie: 25:05
No, no, no. I don't think it is. I would say that maybe like, for instance, everything about murder, I think murder could absolutely be disgusting. I would say that what you were calling moral disgust, I would be inclined to say wrong or reprehensible. The situations in which murder would be disgusting are situations in which it's provoking a really strong gut reaction because I'm seeing it, you know, in life or on screen and it's connecting to that physical sense of, of repulsion.
David: 25:33
You're right. And this raises that fundamental question, which is whether disgust is a purely biological emotion or whether it is, in fact, a moral emotion that can guide moral thinking in various circumstances.
Ellie: 26:13
When it comes to the relation between ethics and disgust, philosopher Adam Smith says that there is really a negative connection there. For Smith, the experience of disgust blocks sympathy, and sympathy is the basis of our moral feelings towards others. So Adam Smith, this 18th century Scottish philosopher, who's associated with the tradition of moral sentimentalism also has like an outsized influence on our economic policy and the idea of the invisible hand. But that's neither here nor there. Here let's focus on this idea of disgust. Disgust is morally dangerous because it blocks this reaction of moral sympathy that we have for others. Thoughts on this?
David: 26:58
Yeah, I can't imagine sympathizing very much with the object of my disgust, right. Uh, so we were just talking about the case of morally reprehensible cases of murder or oppression or anything else that triggers our moral response. And I think he's right that there is a relationship of inverse proportion between disgust and sympathy. The more I sympathize with somebody, the less I find them disgusting. And vice-versa.
Ellie: 27:27
Yeah, well, and that I think is really interesting to put in dialogue with Sianne Ngai's argument in Ugly Feelings, which I mentioned at the beginning, because Ngai says that disgust is actually really different from a lot of other what she calls ugly feelings, such as envy or anxiety, because a lot of ugly feelings tend to blur the boundaries between self and other. So when it comes to envy, when I'm engaged in the ugly feeling of envy, I'm actually sort of unclear about where the other begins and I end. And same with anxiety, right? It's kind of difficult to separate what's causing the anxiety for me as a subject of anxiety. But for her, disgust is really different because disgust intensifies the boundaries of self and other. So it's like we want whatever is disgusting to be as far away from us as possible. It's like, this is not me, get it away from me. And this can ultimately, when we're thinking about this on a broader social level, create and strengthen an in-group out-group mentality between say the housed and the unhoused, you know, when we find unhoused folks disgusting or, you know, black versus white.
David: 28:34
Yeah. And I think we can think about this in terms of the self and the body and the purification of the self. So even something as simple as like, uh, like the popping of a zit, right. That you want to get this impurity out of the body.
Ellie: 28:48
Do you know what I'm obsessed with that?
David: 28:50
With popping zits?
Ellie: 28:52
Yes. Oh my God. I do not find it disgusting when I'm like popping zits of people close to me. It's actually like a weird obsession of mine.
David: 29:00
Okay, so interesting because, you know, we want to talk about whether disgusting objects can be also weirdly attractive and desirable, but I suspect that part of your creepy gratification with popping sets is precisely the expulsion of that which is otherwise gross.
Ellie: 29:18
Totally resonate with that. Agreed. Continue your point.
David: 29:21
And so, I mean, moving to a more serious discussion, when we think about it on a social scale, taboos enter the picture because a lot of taboos are taboos about what is considered disgusting and has to be purified out of the social body. So here, I'm thinking about the French philosopher, Georges Bataille, who is known for writing a lot about the categories of the sacred and the profane and the pure and the impure. And his philosophy is based on this idea that the categories of sacred and profane use disgust, so they hinge on disgust, to prohibit social behaviors. According to him, both sacred objects and profane objects are both prohibited from touch, but only the profane objects actually wield disgust more explicitly. Only those are deemed socially disgusting. So for example, I am not allowed to touch a sacred object like the sceptre of a king or the chalice that holds the blood of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.
Ellie: 30:28
Except within the specific ritual, right? When the priest is giving it to you.
David: 30:31
Yeah. So I am forbidden from touching them with these exceptions, but nobody would say that those are disgusting objects. Quite the opposite.
Ellie: 30:38
The blood of Christ, gross. No, just kidding. Oh my God. Oh my God. Blasphemy. Blasphemy. The high school Catholic girl within me is like cringing. I'm sorry, Sister Celeste.
David: 30:48
Sister Celeste is literally unfollowing us on Instagram at this very moment.
Ellie: 30:53
She's uninviting me to alumni career panel day.
David: 30:57
Um, and one of the things that's interesting about Bataille's writings about the sacred and the profane in connection to disgust is that you can rewrite the relationship between the two of them so that the disgusting is elevated to the level of the sacred. That is what we would call blasphemy, right? When you take something that is low and you raise it to the position of the high.
Ellie: 31:21
But then also I take it that the claim is that a lot of rituals actually operate by using what might be considered disgusting, I think the blood of Christ is a really good example here because blood is often something that's seen as disgusting, especially when it comes out of people with uteruses. But maybe we'll get to that later on. We'll see. Or the semen, right. There are a number of ritual acts that boys go through in puberty, um, that have to do with semen. Uh, sometimes including like drinking semen or something like that, where those bodily fluids are elevated to a ritual level.
David: 31:51
Yeah, and it has to do again with the process of purification, that it's the expulsion of the profane that produces the sacred.
Ellie: 32:00
Okay, well, and in a super different way, I think that the notion of taboos on the disgusting has been one of the major ways that things like homophobia and racism have operated in everyday society, perhaps the ritual that sort of like raises homophobia to a sacred level in the fraternity is the circle jerk. But we will leave that aside. I keep referring to things and then just leaving them aside in this episode, I'm like is that too much? But I think sexual acts among people of the same gender have often been seen as disgusting by homophobic societies. So I was actually telling my dad that we were going to record an episode on disgust and talk about homophobia. And he was like, oh, you should discuss this one Downton Abbey clip that leverages the concept of disgust against homosexual activities. And so I guess, like there's a gay character.
David: 32:53
Thomas.
Ellie: 32:54
You, you take over cause you watch Downton Abbey.
David: 32:56
Oh, so, okay. Uh, for our listeners, you should know that I recently went down a Downton Abbey, uh, rabbit hole very recently. So I'm like eight years late to the party here. There is this scene in which one of the butlers, who is a gay man named Thomas, falls in love with another worker of the Abbey. And he kisses him. And then the boss discovers this and calls Thomas into his office and goes on this really awful rant about Thomas's disgusting lifestyle. And you see in that scene the extent to which for this man, it really is a question of viscerality. He just cannot stomach the fact that somebody like Thomas, whom he has brought up under his wing now for a couple of seasons, is a homosexual, right, is a perverted man who has a same sex attraction. So totally a really good example of disgust.
Ellie: 34:37
Yeah and I think what's really behind the butler's disgust is the specter of acts that are considered taboo and that separate normal quote, normal people, from deviant people, right? This idea, whether it's of the oral sex of homosexual activity or of anal sex or of different sex acts that who knows maybe the butler doesn't even know to imagine. It's the fluids, right, um, that are really involved. And I think disgust also was leveraged in such toxic ways to condemn homosexual activity during the AIDS crisis. And so this idea of HIV being passed through blood and that the blood of the HIV positive person, who is associated with gay men, although of course it's not only gay men who have HIV, this blood as contaminated, right, as dangerous. And because it's contaminated and dangerous as like really provoking this visceral, visceral disgust. There's a terror of blood, right. And, uh, disgust at it. And so I actually think one of the interesting things about that example is that disgust here is used as a mask for an intolerable fear or terror of death.
David: 36:19
AndI mean the association.
Ellie: 36:21
As have the repulsive subject,
David: 36:23
That's why gay men have been associated with death as such, right. Something that we discussed in some detail in our episode on hooking up and queer theory. But I think we can jump also from homophobia to racism, which, you know, sometimes those leaps can be a little rough. Using the logic of contamination as the bridge, because we see a similar fear of contamination, for example, in Jim Crow era policies around racial segregation, especially the ones that have to do for instance, with water and public pools where black people were not allowed to drink out of the same fountain or enter and swim in the same public pools. And the reason there was they would contaminate the water source that then would envelop the otherwise pure body of the white people, right. So it's not simply that there is a desire for separation, but that that separation has a purificationist component or function.
Ellie: 37:24
And this idea that the liquid can be contaminated. Sharing air isn't a problem, um, like you could be on the same bus as somebody else, provided right, they're sitting in the back, according to this Jim Crow era logic, but to share the same space of the water is kind of too much, I think, for the racist white subject.
David: 37:44
Something that touches you.
Ellie: 37:46
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
David: 37:48
And one small but important historical detail here is that whenever Black people did go into pools, even after desegregation in the 1960s, a lot of white people refused to go into the water that had been polluted by black bodies and would demand that either the water be cleansed or that it be entirely replaced.
Ellie: 38:08
Yes. And of course there were horrifying experiences, including one in St. Augustine, Florida, where white people would literally pour bleach into the pools while black bathers were in there. And so I think, you know, all of this is to say that disgust can be really socially dangerous because it functions as a tool of reinforcing things that are not just like taboo because they relate to death, decay, you know, rottenness, but because they relate to social hierarchies, right? Whether it's the black people sharing the pool with the white people, whether it's the blood that's contaminated by HIV, there have also been all these taboos around women's menstruation because their blood has been seen as disgusting during that time. And so I think this is like one way that disgust actually really worries me because I don't think that there's a lot of potential for it on its own, at least, to function in a positive, moral way.
David: 39:03
There are a lot of dangers precisely because we think of disgust as something that is an evolutionary given, right? So when people experience something like Thomas' homosexuality as disgusting or black bodies in a shared pool as disgusting. They think to themselves, oh, well I just had a bodily reaction, a visceral reaction that I had no control over. So there must be something natural about that reaction and therefore justified. That's what makes disgust as an emotion for me so ethically troubling, even though there are a lot of ethicists who make the argument that we can rely on the experience of disgust to guide our moral reasoning. So a lot of bioethicists, for example, talk about what is called the yuck factor. You know, like there are things out there that we can't quite explain why they're wrong, except that they're yucky. And whenever I hear that, I'm like, ugh, yuck.
Ellie: 39:58
No, I don't think that's going to take us very far because I think precisely what you're getting at so nicely, David, is the fact that disgust serves to hide the social contingency of what we find disgusting by making divisions seem natural.
David: 40:13
Yeah. And th- that's why you see it in so many places. One thing that comes to mind here is the politics of food, of that which we ingest and how we react to that because that's one place where again, people say, oh, well, I just don't like this thing that is disgusting. And I cannot be held morally or politically accountable for that reaction.
Ellie: 40:34
So let's get into that, you know, idea of disgusting food, a little bit more David, because I'm thinking about a controversy that I heard about on LA Public Radio, a while back about a segment on the James Corden show, it's spill your guts or fill your guts. And in this segment, James Corden would basically do like a truth or dare with celebrities where he would have a table that had a bunch of ingredients of foods from different cultures on it that seemed disgusting. And then he would have a celebrity, like be forced to eat one of these foods. And a lot of Asian Americans protested the segment because they said, look, this disproportionately features foods from Asian cuisines. And so like, your bit is low key racist. Like sure, James Corden, one time featured some like gross ass British foods, but there were a lot of Asian foods, Filipino foods in particular, such as balut, which is, it's like a fertilized egg that's a delicacy in Filipino cuisine and a bunch of Asian American chefs and activists were like, you got to get rid of this segment because you're leveraging disgust in a way that's like really racist.
David: 41:40
Yeah. And I think in this example, we really see the political dangers of disgust in the way in which people talk about something like food, especially food that they're not familiar with, like the food from other cultures. In this case, it seems like Asian food was the primary target. And it reminds me of a controversy that happened on Twitter, of all places, where a lot of controversies these days happen.
Ellie: 42:03
Yeah, you got a controversy, it originates on Twitter or at least Twitter has something to say about it.
David: 42:08
But yes, there was an incident a couple of years ago. This was in 2019, in which this academic by the name of John Pepinsky did what he called an objective ranking of Southeast Asian cuisine on Twitter, where he's like, Hey, I am an expert in Southeast Asian studies. I think he teaches in a Southeast Asian program and he ranked the foods by country and called his ranking objective. So for him, Vietnamese food was number one.
Ellie: 42:41
As like the most delicious, right?
David: 42:43
As the most objectively good, yes, the most delicious and Filipino food for him was disgusting. And it was number nine. And needless to say, there were a lot of accusations that I think we're pretty well grounded of a kind of culinary racism that hinges on passing judgment on other cultures on the basis of what they eat, simply because the ingredients they use or the combination that they subject those ingredients to doesn't figure in the same way in, you know, the cuisine of whatever country this guy grew up in.
Ellie: 43:17
And I think the case of Filipino food is super interesting here, because I know from my friend Jacob that there's a really colonial legacy here where a lot of cuts of meat in Filipino cuisine were the castoffs of the Spanish colonizers. And so Filipino cuisine is kind of built around the cuts of meat that the Spanish found disgusting. Give me an adobo fried rice any day. I love Filipino. Um, but I think that like, that's also a way that, you know, Pepinsky's quote, objective criteria not only is not objective, but it's also historically coded in the legacy of colonialism.
David: 43:52
No, you're right. And that's what makes me cringe whenever I see new trendy restaurants in places like San Francisco or LA or New York or whatever, where they're like, we rediscovered, you know, how to use this part of the animal. And in fact, what they're doing is simply appropriating a culinary practice that's been a staple of another culture's cuisine for decades or centuries, like the white rediscovery of certain foods is quite prevalent too, which is just another version of like culinary neocolonialism. So bougie American food culture will sell any objects to its participants, as long as they can claim the right to have discovered it.
Ellie: 44:43
Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other listeners through our Facebook page or group as well as on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. Let's talk about how disgust pertains to aesthetics, including desire and art. Because one thing that I find really interesting and it was actually Ngai's book that alerted me to this, I didn't remember this, is that Immanuel Kant in his very famous account of aesthetics, Critique of Judgment from 1780 something.
David: 45:21
Very quick read if you have a free Sunday afternoon.
Ellie: 45:26
Major topic of our genius episode- says that the only thing that art cannot render beautiful is whatever is disgusting. So I could create a painting of something that in real life is really ugly, like a freeway overpass, or a pair of, you know, old shoes. But I can't render something beautiful that arouses my disgust, or in some translations, loathing.
David: 45:51
Okay. So then the idea is that you cannot beautify the disgusting. Okay. So you will never have like still life of poop.
Ellie: 46:00
My rotten bok choy or poop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although there's this amazing Christopher Ofili painting that leverages elephant dung that I love so much. So that's actually an interesting question for us, David, right? Like, so Kant says that you can't render the disgusting beautiful, but I think there's a lot of art, especially, let's say in the past like 60 ish years, that has played on disgust. And does that mean that we can render the disgusting beautiful or does it mean that actually art is moving away from even giving a shit about whether it's beautiful or not, giving a shit taken in this case literally.
David: 46:37
To the standards of an enlightenment moralist like Kant of all people.
Ellie: 46:42
Yeah.
David: 46:43
One way to think about this is that over the last 80 to a hundred years, so here, we're talking about the rise of avant-garde art, uh, in the 20th century. And afterwards you really have this search among artists for ever new subject matter and ever new materials for their art. So a lot of artists enter the scene not so much by their technique or by their method, but by the object that they put in an artistic space. And so I would easily imagine somebody trying to do work that pushes on the boundary in between and what we've earlier called the sacred and the profane here in an aesthetic context, by trying to say, look at this disgusting thing, it too can be aesthetically pleasing, or maybe art just no longer follows the dictates of the beautiful.
Ellie: 47:33
Yeah. So I mentioned the Christopher Ofili painting that uses elephant dung, and it turns out actually I'm taking a closer look here because when I saw this exhibit, it was a number of years ago, Chris Ofili has a number of works that involve elephant dung, and I take him to be creating really beautiful art. He does a lot of figurative pieces. He does a lot of pieces that press on the realities of racism in super provocative ways. Some of which are sort of more traditionally inscribed within an aesthetics of the beautiful and some of which are really kind of pushing the limits of it. But there's one in particular. It's called the Holy Virgin Mary. So super interesting because it gets back to that sacred and profane link that you just mentioned, David, where we see Mary, the mother of Christ, depicted as a black woman, and she has an exposed breast that's made of elephant dung. In 1999, when this was put on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Rudy Giuliani, who then was the mayor of New York, basically freaked out and threatened to withdraw funding for the museum. He then lost this lawsuit because it was suggested that he was trying to censor the choice of artists and this would violate freedom of speech and Giuliani responded, quote, there's nothing in the First Amendment that supports horrible and disgusting projects, end quote. So Giuliani was accusing Chris Ofili, who is a Black British artist, whose work was on display at the Brooklyn Art Museum and it was of a Black Madonna, of creating disgusting art because of the use of elephant dung.
David: 49:11
Um, talk about that elevation of the low into the high, right? Where here it seems to happen on two dimensions. It happens with the religious iconography of the painting, because we're talking about the Virgin Mary who suddenly has a breast made out of elephant poop, so the divine, or in this case, the virginal, is also excremental, but then secondarily, then there is the inclusion of this painting in a museum, right, or in a gallery, which is the sacred of the art world.
Ellie: 49:42
Yeah. And I think Chris Ofili is a great example of an artist who does, in many ways, create art that would traditionally be recognized as beautiful but at the same time kind of brings in this tying of the sacred and profane through ritual that we saw in say the work of Bataille. And I think this is pretty different from what some artists are doing when they're actually just trying to provoke a visceral disgust reaction, because I will say, you know, at least in my experience, Ofili's paintings do not provoke a disgust reaction at all for me, including the ones with elephant dung of which I've seen a number. I thought I'd only seen one, and then I'm like doing this online research and be like, oh I've actually seen a bunch of these paintings with elephant dung cause he had this amazing retrospective a number of years ago. But there are some artists who kind of like want to provoke that disgust reaction, including the most recently hired member of SNL cast, Sarah Squirm also known as Sarah Sherman, who does these kind of gross body art comedy, where she creates cum out of cottage cheese. But then also going back a little bit further to the 1970s with somebody like Paul McCarthy, who's a Los Angeles based artist who did all of this vomit art. And I remember having to learn about this in art history and just being like, do I have to? Luckily our professor did not make us watch any of the videos, but McCarthy would do things like eat a ton of ground meat, David here's-
David: 51:06
My God. Oh my God. This is where our meat.
Ellie: 51:10
Yes. And then throw them up.
David: 51:13
Oh my God.
Ellie: 51:14
And actually there's this narrative from a fellow artist, Barbara Smith, who saw one of McCarthy's performances and was overwhelmed with nausea. It was a performance where he was stuffing a ton of hotdogs in his mouth. And she found herself in this situation of being like, I need to vomit, but I think I'm going to go excuse myself, because I don't want to vomit in the middle of a performance possibly provoke McCarthy's vomiting, like interfere with the art.
David: 51:41
Yeah, don't- don't upstage the artist, please.
Ellie: 51:46
There's like a total rejection of the aesthetics of the beautiful there. And I really, I think Giuliani would definitely not find that to be art, if he had been mayor at the time.
David: 51:55
Well, and you know, there is something also about the contagion of vomit, which is a trope in a lot of comedy movies, where one person begins another one follows and so on and so on and so forth.
Ellie: 52:06
Yeah. I mean, I think that precisely gets at the idea that when we are overwhelmed with disgust, we can't be disinterested observers and Kant, for instance, does think that we need to be disinterested when we're viewing art in order to properly recognize it. And going back to Ofili for a moment, I think there's even more to this depiction of the black woman Madonna with the elephant dung breast than we've covered so far, because I'm thinking here about Julia Kristeva's association of the feminine with the abject. She has this whole theory of the abject, which is basically whatever we want to sort of repel from ourselves, recognize as not part of ourselves. It's linked closely with death for her. And it's also linked closely with femininity and especially with the maternal. So she identifies the abject, which, you know, isn't necessarily the exact same as disgust, but she does use as an example of the abject the rotten milk that you put to your lips and you feel the skin of it on your lips, you're just like, ah, and she says it's similar to the way that in our culture, we take the mother to be a figure of attraction, but also a figure of disgust.
David: 53:18
With Kristeva's notion of the abject, most of the things that we find disgusting tend to be associated with the female body and the mother, right. So think about anything that reminds us of our animality because women have historically been associated with animality and men with the transcendence of animality. Women have been associated with the body and bodily fluids, men have been associated with reason and concepts and language and thought and one important point to make about Kristeva's notion of the abject is that the abject is that which we want to repel in our path to subjectivity, to becoming autonomous subjects, but that we cannot repel because it is that which sustains us and that reminds us above all of the infinite debt that we have to the figure of the mother that we can never repay.
Ellie: 54:10
I'm thinking here about how one dominant theory of disgust that we haven't actually addressed yet is known as the animal heritage theory, which is the notion that we are disgusted by what reminds us of our own animal inheritance, of the fact that we as humans are not sort of pure hairless scentless beings, right.
David: 54:30
Speak for yourself.
Ellie: 54:32
But we have body odor. We have hair, right? We are ultimately animals.
David: 54:38
And this is definitely why Kristeva places so much emphasis on things like our disgust at birth, right? Scenes of birth, scenes of the womb, anything having to do with bodily fluids, like menstrual blood, the milk of the breast, anything that is the opposite of that Western ideal of subjectivity that has always been masculine, right? The disembodied rational agent.
Ellie: 55:06
And I think that feminization of the disgusting and or of the abject is also tied with one thing that Ngai's theory of disgust focuses on, which is the link between disgust and desire. And she says that they're often conjoined. We secretly desire what disgusts us. I personally can't relate to this on a conscious level with vomit, but like David, you know what I'm thinking about here?
David: 55:32
No.
Ellie: 55:33
What some people are turned on by, the two girls, one cup video.
David: 55:40
Way to go now from the sacred to the profane, from the high to the low. I watched that when I was in college,
Ellie: 55:49
I know. I've never seen this video. I understand that it's a video where women are pooping and then eating each other's poop and then throwing up. And it's a porn video.
David: 55:59
Let's leave it at that. So pornography that involves the disgusting, there are multiple genres of this like food porn, uh, various kinds of kinks turn on that as well.
Ellie: 56:12
Not the food porn you see on Instagram when it's like a chic kale smoothie.
David: 56:16
No, actual pornography involving food. Also sorry for our listeners, but what is called barf porn. I think that eroticization of the disgusting highlights a point that Bataille makes, which is about the disgusting violence at the core of eros, that in a way, all erotic connection, all eroticism, includes an element of the disgusting in it. So think about the fact that sex could be easily described as a fundamentally disgusting act, an inherent befoulement that combines the purest sense of humanity, bonding connection, becoming one, with the most hideous animality of the organs, that's a phrase that he uses. And so even something like sexual erotics cannot be separated from the logic of disgust.
Ellie: 57:13
Well, I wonder, David, if that also is linked to Bataille's notion of the wedding of the sacred and the profane, which is that it's a kind of wedding of the pure impulse of humanity to transcend the self and like the nasty bodily fluid filled reality of human existence, because it's combining our hideous animal organs with our human spiritual aspirations.
David: 57:43
And I think we might summarize Bataille's point simply by pointing to the dialectical, necessarily dialectical, relationship between the sacred and the profane, which is that you cannot have the sacred without the profane, because the sacred is simply what remains after the exclusion of the profane.
Ellie: 58:00
Well, on the point of eros being tied to the disgusting. I want to end with a quote from James Joyce's December 16th, 1909 love letter
to his future wife, which goes as follows: 58:18
Fuck me if you can squatting in the closet with your clothes up, grunting like a young sow doing her dung and a big fat dirty snaking thing coming slowly out of your backside. James Joyce, everybody.
David: 58:35
Lady, lucky lady.
Ellie: 58:38
Literary light of the 20th century, and really, really down with the disgust in the bedroom.
David: 58:48
We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 58:56
You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.
David: 59:03
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Ross Harris, and our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Anna Solomon.
Ellie: 59:13
Thanks to Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us today.