{"id":1040,"date":"2004-08-25T09:59:12","date_gmt":"2004-08-25T17:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/08\/25\/disgust-and-prejudice\/"},"modified":"2012-03-21T16:22:51","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T23:22:51","slug":"disgust-and-prejudice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1040","title":{"rendered":"Disgust and Prejudice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martha Nussbaum has a short-and-excellent essay on disgust <\/a>in the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/i>. A sample:<\/p>\n

Disgust is distinct from both distaste, a negative reaction motivated by sensory factors, and from a sense of danger, motivated by anticipated harmful consequences. Disgust is not simple distaste because, Rozin has found, the very same smell elicits different disgust reactions depending on the subject’s conception of the object. Subjects sniff decay odor from two different vials, both of which in reality contain the same substance; they are told that one vial contains feces and the other contains cheese. (The real smells are confusable.) Those who think that they are sniffing cheese usually like the smell; those who think they are sniffing feces find it repellent and unpleasant. It is the subject’s conception, rather than the sensory properties of the object, that primarily determines the disgust response.<\/p>\n

Nor is disgust the same as perceived danger. Dangerous items (for instance, poisonous mushrooms) are tolerated in the environment, as long as they will not be ingested; disgusting items are not. When danger is removed, the dangerous item will be ingested: Detoxified poisonous mushrooms are acceptable. But disgusting items remain disgusting even when all danger is removed. People refuse to eat sterilized cockroaches; many, Rozin has shown, object even to swallowing a cockroach inside an indigestible plastic capsule.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nussbaum also relates disgust to bigotry:<\/p>\n

Thus throughout history certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.<\/p>\n

Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation — all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.<\/p>\n

Consider, finally, the central locus of disgust in today’s United States, male loathing of the male homosexual. Female homosexuals may be objects of fear, or moral indignation, or generalized anxiety, but they are less often objects of disgust. Similarly, heterosexual females may feel negative emotions toward the male homosexual — fear, moral indignation, anxiety — but again, they rarely feel emotions of disgust. What inspires disgust is male fear of anal penetration: of breaking down the sacred boundary against stickiness, ooze, and death. The presence of a homosexual male in the neighborhood inspires the thought that a man might himself be contaminated. The very look of such a male is itself contaminating — as we see in the extraordinary debates about showers in the military.<\/p>\n

Does disgust, then, contain a wisdom that steers law in the right direction? Surely the moral progress of society can be measured by the degree to which it separates disgust from danger and indignation, basing laws and social rules on substantive harm, rather than on the symbolic relationship an object bears to our anxieties.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I highly recommend reading Jason of Positive Liberty’s post on Nussbaum’s essay<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The disgust that many people feel toward homosexuals may also explain why Biblical injunctions against homosexuality remain a part of fundamentalist Christian discourse today, while the prohibitions against usury, divorce, and swearing are routinely ignored–even despite these others being far more direct and unequivocal than the prohibitions against homosexuality. Usury simply isn’t disgusting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jason’s post expands on the analogy between historic prejudice against jews and current prejudice against gays, and he makes a very convincing case. Here’s just a sample, but you really should go read the whole thing<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong: Neither the ex-gay movement nor the Jewish conversion movement contained any overt hatred for the groups they sought to influence. Then as now, these movements claim only to love the people they wish to change. They want to help these poor unfortunates, these dear, suffering, fallen brothers.<\/p>\n

They know that these people have made a terrible mistake, but they can see the good within all of us. They know that it takes a lot to own up to a colossal mistake–like homosexuality or Judaism–and they so hope that we have the courage to admit it. Above all, they know what’s right for us–and they know that their love is stronger than all of our problems.<\/p>\n

It’s fascinating, though, which side has a monopoly on “love,” and which side gets all the “problems.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think Nussbaum is mistaken, however, to say that straight male prejudice against gay men is “the central locus of disgust in today’s United States.” I don’t want to play “let’s rank the oppressions.” Nonetheless, a huge portion of the moralizing disgust and shame (Nussbaum links the concepts of disgust and shame in her article) in the US today is directed at fat people. From an article in California Monthly<\/i><\/a> (via Big Fat Blog<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Boero, a Cal graduate student in medical sociology, studies the messages conveyed by the health profession and the media about obesity. She claims that labeling obesity an “epidemic” is unleashing a new wave of blame and guilt toward fat people, and notes that obesity rates are higher among groups that already experience other forms of discrimination, including the poor and African-Americans.<\/p>\n

“The focus has been on how to make fat people thin, not how to make fat people healthy,” she says. Studies by the Cooper Institute in Houston have shown that fat people who exercise regularly perform better on treadmill-fitness tests than thin people who don’t. But we automatically assume fat people are unhealthy, says Boero. “We also automatically assume that thin people are healthy. Health is the new moralism, the way to know people’s worth.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, although Nussbaum herself doesn’t say anything about anti-fat bigotry, I think her article may nonetheless be the best analysis of anti-fat bigotry I’ve read in years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martha Nussbaum has a short-and-excellent essay on disgust in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A sample: Disgust is distinct from both distaste, a negative reaction motivated by sensory factors, and from a sense of danger, motivated by anticipated harmful consequences. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,30,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-semitism","category-fat-fat-and-more-fat","category-homophobic-zaninessmore-lgbtq-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1040"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15199,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040\/revisions\/15199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}