The Complexity of Self-Disgust

I learned my most profound lesson about self-disgust at the poker table one night several years ago (no, I did not unsuccessfully try to draw to an inside straight). Rather, one of my regular playing partners, Dr. Henry Adams, was the head of the psychology clinic at the University of Georgia, and he had just finished an interesting study of attitudes about homosexuality. He had surveyed a large group of men about their attitudes toward homosexuals.  He then showed them gay porn and measured their sexual response in terms of turgidity.  You guessed it--those who evidenced the most disgust about homosexuality were the most aroused by gay porn.  For a brief summary of the study see http://www.blurtit.com/q446401.html

Henry was not a gay rights activist. In fact, I remember him expressing an inappropriate level of disgust when he was invited to celebrate his findings as grand marshall of a gay pride parade. But he was interested in the phenomenon of self-disgust, and his findings intensify the story told in yesterday’s post. If behavioral uniformity is the primary cloak whereby we lessen our feelings of anxiety about our body, about the desires of the flesh that St. Paul declares will damn us, then nothing is more frightening than not fitting within the norm. We lessen our anxiety about our decaying vessel by observing a litany of societal strictures about what we do with and to our bodies and those of others. Trying to conform against one’s nature creates a double anxiety: discomfort with the body and discomfort with the only accepted cultural attitude toward it.  Self-disgust is to be expected in some cases.

Self-loathing and self-disgust are hardly inevitable. Martha Nussbaum points out that American attitudes toward homosexuality are softening, that the Politics of Disgust may be being replaced by a Politics of Humanity. Presumably the double anxiety of the closet is disappearing too. And not all homophobes are homosexual; for many a single anxiety is probably enough to distort their personality.

A final note. Martha notes that the Politics of Disgust seems to be relatively absent in discrimination toward lesbians. Henry’s study may provide a hint of an answer, at least for those men filled with self-disgust. Men may not be disgusted by what women do because they are too caught up in their own anxiety with their own bodies.

Comments

[Susan Sage Heinzelman]

Paul suggests that "Men may not be disgusted by what women do because they are too caught up in their own anxiety with their own bodies." Anxiety about the body is, in Pauline discourse, also anxiety about interpretive practices and thus about the power to preach the "Word." For St. Paul, the flesh obscures the visionary in-sight that brings understanding of God's Word. Desires of the flesh produce mis-readings of logos and thus render what should be a spiritual practice an earthly (gross) practice. In alchemical terms, gold becomes dung. In this hermeneutic calculus, disgust is always already a gendered response: women's bodies are the source of all flesh and when men behave like women (as homosexuals are perceived to do), they engender an intensification of the "normal" revulsion associated with the flesh of the woman.

[Martha Nussbaum]

In his striking book, The Anatomy of Disgust, law professor William Ian Miller argues that both male disgust toward female sexuality and upper-class disgust toward the imagined dirt and filth of lower classes are ineradicable features of human society. Therefore, he thinks, our aspirations to a political culture of equality are doomed to failure. With Paul, I do not agree. While I doubt that we will ever live in societies in which no people at all experience some sort of disgust toward some subordinate group ("projective disgust," as I call it), I think that we can expect the general amount of disgust to decline if, in bringing up children, we present the body in a positive light and encourage good attitudes toward issues of gender and sexuality. We can see this happening around us. Perhaps even more important, we can make sure that the negative disgust-laden attitudes are not dignified by giving them the force of law. One of the important achievements of recent Supreme Court doctrine, I think, in Romer v. Evans, was the idea that a law motivated by mere "animus" (in this case, disgust and loathing) does not pass the rational basis test. To uphold laws such as Colorado's Amendment 2 is in contradiction with the most straightforward and basic meaning of equal protection.

[Resveratrol]

We can see this happening around us. Perhaps even more important, we can make sure that the negative disgust-laden attitudes are not dignified by giving them the force of law. One of the important achievements of recent Supreme Court doctrine, I think, in Romer v. Evans, was the idea that a law motivated by mere "animus" (in this case, disgust and loathing) does not pass the rational basis test.

[Acai]

In this hermeneutic calculus, disgust is always already a gendered response: women's bodies are the source of all flesh and when men behave like women (as homosexuals are perceived to do), they engender an intensification of the "normal" revulsion associated with the flesh of the woman.