Disgust

I feel like such a New Yorker, or Parisian. I can now talk about discussions “with my therapist” because for the moment at least, I have a therapist. I feel so urbane. And a bit lost and confused about a few things in my life, hence the therapist. The upside is that I already feel good about going through the process of looking for help. I’m taking time for myself. The downside is that I feel like I need to talk to someone in the first place, which means things are a bit fuzzy around the edges.

So the therapist asked me to name the basic emotions and I came up with a few: joy, fear, anger, sadness. There are a few more, she said, and among the others she added “disgust”. This one surprised me, because it’s not an emotion that I feel very often.

I needed to think about it because it seemed like it was just a variant of fear. I thought I’d look it up, when I got the chance, and have found myself a nice, deep rabbit hole to sink into.

Disgust seems to be a universal emotion, felt by in everyone in the world and often about the same things, but it’s not on everyone’s list of basic emotions (as some researchers do consider it to be a variant of fear, which is what I’d imagined at first).

It appears that some of the things we find disgusting across cultures are often related to pathogens or things that could make us sick — bugs on food, larva on dead things, feces, all things that we should mostly avoid handling because doing so can increase the chance of us falling ill. So this makes sense.

After this, it can be extended to culturally specific things. It seems some people experience their racism as disgust. I guess that makes sense. If someone feels that some other group is “impure”, that would could be related to the same avoidance of pathogens. They’re just taking it large. This is no excuse. They’re still assholes.

I found it strange that I don’t experience this emotion very often. I wonder if that’s a quality of modern society, that all the basic things that invoke “disgust” (the ones with the pathogens) are swept away? We don’t have much to do with poop, unless we’re plumbers. We don’t have much to do with dead bodies, unless we’re undertakers (or serial killers, I suppose). We don’t have to deal much with rotten food. Maybe that’s why it seemed to strange to add “disgust” to the list.

I’m trying to think of the last time I truly felt disgust, and I have a hard time separating it from shock. I ran across a dead cat once, but my first reaction more shock because it was unexpected, just lying on a regular hiking path. (I found the name of the folks in my village who take care of that sort of thing and sent them a photo to get them to come remove the body, and accidentally sent the image to my friend whose birthday it was. That wound up being really funny.)

I should admit that I initially felt disgust when I’ve run across a few people who are affected by facial tumors. It’s called Brooke-Spiegler syndrome and I just needed to look closely at the person to understand what it was. One woman was working in a bakery, and after looking it up, I could only feel for her. She was having to deal with a tumor on her eyelid, which was swelling her eye partly closed. I am ashamed of my first reaction but it related to the first reason for the emotion of disgust. We think that someone has a pathogen or something that is contagious, and we want to avoid it (and them). When we understand that it’s just a very rare, genetic disorder, we just need to get a good eyeful and move on.

I wonder if folks will take issue with that, the stare. Is staring at someone who is unusual wrong? I feel perfectly okay staring at someone with facial tattoos. I mean, if you don’t want people looking at your tattoos, don’t put them on your face. That’s a choice. You’ve opened yourself up for being stared at for the rest of your life.

I guess the issue is the difference in faces: burn victims and others with skin conditions. It takes a bit of time to incorporate how they look into our knowledge of a person and forget about it. I know that staring is rude, but I don’t know how else to get over the initial feeling of fear or disgust. It would be great if there was just a switch to flip, that we could identify a difference and absorb it instantly. Maybe that just takes practice? I’m sure if I worked in a place with burn victims, it wouldn’t take me long to forget about it. I’m sure if I was a burn victim, I’d want people to get over it.

It feels very innate, though, this disgust (I’m using the term because that’s where this all started. I still feel it’s a variant of fear, though). That first explanation — that we feel disgust towards things associated with pathogens — is doing a lot of heavy lifting. We feel this even when we can intellectually know for a fact that what we are seeing isn’t contagious. We also feel disgust when we see someone whose appearance is unusual, and wish to avoid these people because we’re genetically set up to look for and appreciate “beauty” (clear, blemish free skin, regular features, all characteristics which would be good for a mate). This also makes no sense for burn victims, because we know full well that this person’s appearance isn’t going to be passed on to a next generation. It’s ridiculous. We’re ridiculous.

What’s also ridiculous are the images used to identify different emotions….are played by actors! “Here is a face showing happiness! Here’s a face showing sadness!” It would be much more amusing, theoretically, if they, like, had waited for some happy moment and filmed the person. “Here’s the puppy you always wanted!” — happiness: click — “and now the puppy is dead” — sadness: click — “and now the puppy is rotting with larva on it” — disgust: click — “and now he’s come back to life! Zombie puppy attack!! Run away!!!” — fear: click— “and we were just messing with you the whole time, the puppy is fine, but you can’t keep him” — anger: click.

Foro thinks that finding him adorable is a basic emotion. I agree.