Giving In to Arousal or Staying Stuck in Disgust? Disgust-Based Mechanisms in Sex and Sexual Dysfunction

Abstract

Sex and disgust seem like strange bedfellows. The premise of this review is that disgust-based mechanisms nevertheless hold great promise for improving our understanding of sexual behavior, including dysfunctions. Disgust is a defensive emotion that protects the organism from contamination. Accordingly, disgust is focused on the border of the self, with the mouth and vagina being the body parts that show strongest disgust sensitivity. Given the central role of these organs in sexual behavior, together with the fact that bodily products are among the strongest disgust elicitors, the critical question seems not whether disgust may interfere with sex but rather how people succeed in having pleasurable sex at all. We argue that sexual arousal plays a critical role in counteracting disgust-induced avoidance via lowering the threshold for engaging in “disgusting sex.” Following this, all mechanisms that interfere with the generation of sexual arousal or enhance the disgusting properties of sexual stimuli may hamper the functional transition from a sex-avoidance into an approach disposition. Since prolonged contact is the most powerful means to reduce disgust, disgust-based mechanisms that counteract sexual approach may give rise to a self-perpetuating cycle in which enhanced sexual disgust becomes a chronic feature.

Notes

¹It should be noted that this particular division into three domains (i.e., pathogen, sex, and morality) is not beyond dispute and other differentiations of disgust domains have been proposed that track different theoretical viewpoints. Most important in this respect is the seminal and widely applied theory of Rozin and Fallon (1987) that was also used as the starting point for the Disgust Scale (Haidt et al., 1994). In their approach, Rozin and colleagues differentiate among four domains: core, animal-reminder, interpersonal, and sociomoral disgust. One of the most salient differences between both approaches concerns the domain of animal-reminder disgust. Rozin and colleagues argue that this type of disgust is elicited by stimuli and/or behaviors that remind us of our animal nature. This type of disgust-mediated rejection of our animal nature would serve as a defensive function by maintaining the hierarchical division between humans and animals through distancing the self from animals and animal properties. Yet the evolutionary relevance of such mechanism has recently been challenged (see Tybur et al., 2009). Moreover, although empirical data provide evidence for the relevance of differentiating between animal-reminder and core disgust (e.g., in terms of differential relationships with symptoms of psychopathology), scores on the animal-reminder and core disgust scales of the widely used Disgust Scale (Haidt et al., 1994) are typically highly correlated. In addition, content analysis suggests that many of the items on the animal-reminder scale share with core items that they both may somehow be linked to the transmission of disease. Therefore, we eventually decided to take the three domains of disgust approach as our starting point in this review. See Tybur and colleagues (2009) for a more elaborate discussion of this issue.