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Science Attempts To Explain Why Sex Isn't Totally Repulsive

Sex should be disgusting. We're naturally disgusted by things like cum and spit because of their potential to spread infection -- thanks, evolution -- which is also why we're protective of things like mouths and vaginas. Yet we still have sex, which...

Sex should be disgusting. We’re naturally disgusted by things like cum and spit because of their potential to spread infection — thanks, evolution — which is also why we’re protective of things like mouths and vaginas. Yet we still have sex, which (spoiler alert) involves all kinds of fluids going in and out of all kinds of holes. Somehow we don’t seem to mind and, c’mon, most of us that actually enjoy sex generally celebrate its disgustingness. This apparent dissonance between sex being disgusting and humans thinking it’s awesome is something studied by science, and a new paper out in the open-access journal PLOS One suggests that sexual arousal has the side effect of neutralizing our natural disgust mechanisms. That is, we become not just less disgusted by sex-related stuff (like a goopy dildo), but by non-sexy disgusting stuff, like a cup of juice with a bug in it.

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Here’s the methodology, from the paper’s abstract: “Participants were healthy women randomly allocated to one of three groups: the sexual arousal, the non-sexual positive arousal, or the neutral control group. Film clips were used to elicit the relevant mood state. Participants engaged in 16 behavioural tasks, involving sex related (e.g., lubricate the vibrator) and non-sex related (e.g., take a sip of juice with a large insect in the cup) stimuli, to measure the impact of sexual arousal on feelings of disgust and actual avoidance behaviour.”

So not-sexy things suddenly become sexy. The paper uses a really unfortunate example of this in a really unfortunate contex, but I’ll still relay it to convey the general point:

Similarly, other studies have shown that sexual motivation can distort judgements about the risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease, and sexual arousal has been shown to have a strong impact on decision making. In a similar vein it has been demonstrated that men when sexually aroused reported that they would consider having sex with a woman who is extremely fat, which contrasted their perceptions and reported repulsion when they were not sexually engaged. Therefore one can argue that sexual arousal may attenuate all kinds of mechanisms that may act in a way to avoid particular sexual behaviours or stimuli – be it general repulsion, moral borders (e.g., having sex with a 12 year old) or contamination risk (e.g., condom use). Thus, sexual arousal may influence mechanisms that normally help people avoid certain (disgusting) stimuli.

Which brings us to why research like this matters and might help do some good. That involves the study of why people engage in risky behaviors, and that understanding the brain’s changes in relation to risk perception is perhaps key to developing ways to educate people or condition people to stop doing that already. Also: sexual dysfunction. Anyhow, now you know this thing that you really already knew, but in a more scientific way.