glandular secretions that you’d rather not know about gathering unseen around the anus, face, groin, scalp, and umbilicus. There’s also, of course, prodigiously generated sweat, tears, urine, dental plaque, sebum, earwax, smegma, and that most formidable foe to our sexual arousal that is feces. More specific culinary hurdles depend on the sex of your partner. If employing your mouth on a man’s body, for instance, your palate can anticipate being greeted unexpectedly by pre-ejaculate or semen. Women’s equally aqueous bodies, by contrast, are often plentiful reservoirs of vaginal fluids, breast milk, and menstrual blood. Considering what walking factories of ick we human beings are, it’s amazing that we’ve managed not only to survive as a sexual species by wanting to copulate with each other but to do it often enough over our 150,000-year eyeblink of an existence that we’re now straining the planet’s natural resources beyond all capacity.
The secret to our “success” lies in how our lustful mammalian minds evolved to handle each other’s sometimes-repellent bodies. It’s quite an exquisite operating system, too. Lust and disgust are antagonistic forces in an emotional balancing act that serves to push us toward orgasm (through lust) or to turn us away from it (through disgust). It’s a dynamic relationship with ancient origins. For example, DNA sequencing reveals that the “murid rodent ancestor” (a term that signifies the last common ancestor of human beings, mice, and rats—so a slightly different take on Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men ) last scurried upon this earth around eighty-seven million years ago. Yet the subjective experience of disgust is every bit as much the modern rat’s carnal kryptonite as it is ours. If you take a healthy, virile adult male rat and allow him to have unbridled sex with a female in heat and then immediately inject him with a nausea-inducing drug such as lithium chloride, he’ll acquire a total aversion to sex. Nothing else has this effect. Even if you shock him while he’s doing it, or inflict any other type of cruel punishment, this won’t diminish his sexual appetite—only disgust does that. It’s just his mating behaviors that are affected, too; the lithium chloride has no effect on his social behavior in general. He’ll be as affable with his rat friends as ever, in other words, but he won’t be doing that horrible pelvic-thrusting stuff for a while, since that’s what made him so miserable the last time around.
While we’re on the general subject of our animal ancestry, one of the more creative accounts of the relationship between sex and disgust in human beings comes from the field of “terror management theory,” which postulates that any disgust reactions we have to sex actually stem from the fear of our own mortality. Sex is so corporeal, or bodily, the argument goes, that it’s a uniquely powerful reminder of our animal nature. And just like other animals we’ve got one-way tickets to Decomposition Central, which is a very scary place to us. It’s so scary, terror-management theorists claim, that if our brains were to dwell on this reality for too long, we’d become so paralyzed with fear that we’d no longer be able to function adaptively. Human beings coped with their awareness of death, these scholars believe, by inventing various cultural expressions of immortality to quell their existential fright. (All of this is presumably happening subconsciously, mind you.) And by the looks of it, the idea of sex presents some big challenges to our species in this uncomfortably mortal regard.
In one study, for instance, having people contemplate their own deaths caused them to favor a definition of sex in its more lofty, abstract forms (such as “making love” rather than “copulating”). Concepts like love and romance are said to be “symbolically immortal,” helping to return the individual to a more manageable state of death anxiety.
The secret to our “success” lies in how our lustful mammalian minds evolved to handle each other’s sometimes-repellent bodies. It’s quite an exquisite operating system, too. Lust and disgust are antagonistic forces in an emotional balancing act that serves to push us toward orgasm (through lust) or to turn us away from it (through disgust). It’s a dynamic relationship with ancient origins. For example, DNA sequencing reveals that the “murid rodent ancestor” (a term that signifies the last common ancestor of human beings, mice, and rats—so a slightly different take on Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men ) last scurried upon this earth around eighty-seven million years ago. Yet the subjective experience of disgust is every bit as much the modern rat’s carnal kryptonite as it is ours. If you take a healthy, virile adult male rat and allow him to have unbridled sex with a female in heat and then immediately inject him with a nausea-inducing drug such as lithium chloride, he’ll acquire a total aversion to sex. Nothing else has this effect. Even if you shock him while he’s doing it, or inflict any other type of cruel punishment, this won’t diminish his sexual appetite—only disgust does that. It’s just his mating behaviors that are affected, too; the lithium chloride has no effect on his social behavior in general. He’ll be as affable with his rat friends as ever, in other words, but he won’t be doing that horrible pelvic-thrusting stuff for a while, since that’s what made him so miserable the last time around.
While we’re on the general subject of our animal ancestry, one of the more creative accounts of the relationship between sex and disgust in human beings comes from the field of “terror management theory,” which postulates that any disgust reactions we have to sex actually stem from the fear of our own mortality. Sex is so corporeal, or bodily, the argument goes, that it’s a uniquely powerful reminder of our animal nature. And just like other animals we’ve got one-way tickets to Decomposition Central, which is a very scary place to us. It’s so scary, terror-management theorists claim, that if our brains were to dwell on this reality for too long, we’d become so paralyzed with fear that we’d no longer be able to function adaptively. Human beings coped with their awareness of death, these scholars believe, by inventing various cultural expressions of immortality to quell their existential fright. (All of this is presumably happening subconsciously, mind you.) And by the looks of it, the idea of sex presents some big challenges to our species in this uncomfortably mortal regard.
In one study, for instance, having people contemplate their own deaths caused them to favor a definition of sex in its more lofty, abstract forms (such as “making love” rather than “copulating”). Concepts like love and romance are said to be “symbolically immortal,” helping to return the individual to a more manageable state of death anxiety.
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