In previous posts I argued a few things about disgust. Firstly, I claimed that the main things that disgust us are things that violate the boundaries between mind (and associated things – form, structure, will, etc.) and matter (and associated things – inertness, homogeneity, etc.) – for instance, seeing someone’s body being taken apart, turned into mere meat, is strongly disgusting.
Secondly, as a consequence of this, we are all latently disgusted by human bodies themselves – because they (or should I say ‘we’?) are a prime example of blurring mind and matter togher. Another person’s body especially – to smell it, to touch it, to feel its hairs and pimples and tubes and membranes and secretions – is always liable to disgust us.
Thirdly, though, society requires that we get past this disgust – people can’t interact much if they all make each other feel sick. And there are two major, and opposed, ways that this happens.
One is the ‘magic’ of appropriateness: by observing the right formulas (what to say, what clothes to wear, what to cover or uncover, which hairs to trim, where to keep our secretions, etc.) we can in public turn ‘banish’ our disgusting bodiliness, and present to people a sanitised image that doesn’t remind them that we are disgusting and oozy.
The other is the ‘miracle’ of sexuality: by some mysterious process, under the right circumstances, what had previously been most disgusting is transmuted into what is most desirbale. Rather than wanting to minimise contact with another person’s body-as-a-body, we now seek to maximise it.
The defect of this analysis, though, is that it presents these two as being separate. But of course there is an overlap: even in public, we present ourselves partly in sexual terms, and even in sex, we make some effot to present a sanitised version of our bodies.
At this point though, we can see that the methods of ‘disgust-management’ become very heavily gendered, and open to political critique.
The most striking thing, of course, is that for women, the ‘overlap’ is made a much bigger deal than for men. On the one hand, the way women are encouraged to present themselves publically is sexualised much more reliably and fully. The are endless decisions about how much to conceal or reveal, how things will flatter the figure, etc. Men have some of the same stuff going on but to a much less degree. And on the other hand, that public sexualisation is also imported into the bedroom. For instance, there’s much more pressure for women to manage their intimate body hair of various types than there is for men.
