That's Gross! | Navigating Disgust in Relationships
What’s the grossest thing that you can think of?
Hell of a way to start an article, I know.
In this week’s episode of Sexvangelicals, we continue our conversation about sexually transmitted infections with Jenelle Pierce, the executive director of The STI Project.
This week, in part two, we begin our episode with the following prompt:
A person is beginning to date and is exploring multiple potential dating, sexual, and or romantic relationships. What are some ways to help set initial conversations around STI or pregnancy prevention?
This episode is filled with important relational and conversational tips about how to have conversations about hard, vulnerable topics, such as sexually transmitted infections.
Along the way, we discuss the psychology of disgust, which Jenelle explains is,
“One of the core central emotions that helps us to navigate life in a way that we can be healthy and productive. It’s a central emotion that’s necessary from an evolutionary standpoint. It teaches us the things that we should be wary of to stay alive.”
Think about your answer to the introduction question. Chances are, it fits into one (or more) of the following six categories of disgust:
Hygiene, or more specifically, the lack of hygiene
Animals that represent disease (mice, mosquitoes, etc.)
Sexual behaviors that might lead to STIs
Atypical physical appearance, including (but not limited to) infection cues, abnormal body shapes, and contextual cues related to poverty/homelessness
Lesions on the body
Food, specifically food that doesn’t smell or taste good.
Disgust is a natural emotion. In fact, as Jenelle explains,
“Our disgust level changes. And so does our assessment of risk changes based on reward and the relationship level and dynamic that exists.”
The problem with disgust centers around this question:
How does the emotion disgust impact the way that you engage with other people?
Typically speaking, the emotion disgust encourages us to distance, often as quickly as we can.
When I was a little boy, my family lived in a farm town in north Texas. And on the way home from daycare, we drove by a cattle farm.
It. Was. Rank.
So rank in fact, that my little two-year-old self would gag, hold my breath, and loudly express “Shoo-wee! Mama, drive faster!” My family lovingly referred to the place, and eventually the town itself, as “the shoo-wee place”.
Even as a two-year-old, there were certain smells and geographic associations with said smells (and sadly, class associations with smells) that encouraged me to get away as fast as I could.
Now, these conversations were had in the privacy of my family’s vehicle, so the dairy farmers and cattle ranchers had no accessibility to my emotion of disgust.
Plus, I was two. My parents thought my display of disgust, combined with my thick Southern accent, was hilarious, and I imagine that the dairy farmers and cattle ranchers would have met my disgust with a sense of amusement.
If an adult were to communicate that sense of disgust to a cattle rancher or dairy farmer, I guarantee you their reaction would be different. If these comments weren’t said, there’s a high likelihood that they’d be thought.
“You rich city folk have no idea what it’s like to do the type of work that I do.”
Or imagine responding to a partner communicating disgust, especially in a condescending tone: “I work so hard for this family, and this is the welcome home that I get? F--- you!”
While disgust is a natural emotion, the communication of disgust can bring out some highly judgmental, classist, moralistic responses.
So for today, I want to ask you to do three things.
Make a list of five things that activate the emotion of disgust.
Write out what your body typically does, and what you typically say when you encounter these disgust ignitors.
Write out what you’d like to do and say differently when engaging these disgust ignitors that align with your values. The answer may be “Nothing different.” But disgust responses may also be contributing to moralistic, judgmental comments that are negatively impacting your relationship.
One more note, and this brings us back to our episode with Jenelle. I noted during last week’s episode that while I didn’t learn much about sexual anatomy, contraceptions, communicating needs, or negotiating a sexual experience, I learned a hell of a lot about sexually transmitted infections.
Sexually transmitted infections are a dream for producers of abstinence-only sex education. We can talk about sexuality from a scientific perspective, while also injecting the disgust of the bacteria chlamydia, gonorrhea, and the virus herpes and HIV as a way to discourage people from having sex before marriage.
Don’t get me wrong. These are serious things to get tested for, and if you have an STI, to receive treatment for. Lack of treatment can produce some serious long-term side effects.
But then again, the same thing is true for my allergies. I’m thankful for my daily dosage of Zyrtec, and I know that if things flare up for a long time, I can return to allergy shots. Avoiding this treatment will result in serious damage to my sinus cavity and ears.