Status Updates From Je jouis comme je suis: Gui...

Disgust is a socially learned response/emotion in most cases

How do our disgust responses hinder or hurt us?

okok it's kinda fun to read a nonfic sex book ngl

We judge as wrong anything associated w/ lowness. In the judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high. Animals low/human reason high. Women low/men high.

Sex draws attention downwards to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and therefore triggers a disgust response.

- not true of all cultures, some are deeply sex positive or see different sexual acts/bodies as sanctified/glorious/sacred

2/2 Humans have generalized from avoidance of physical contaminants (innately repelled by rotting corpses) to avoidance of conceptual contaminants (we can be repelled just by the words ‘rotting corpses’)

Sanctity: a vertical axis w/ stigmatized and taboo behaviors described as low and dirty & socially sanctioned behaviors as high and pure.

1/2 Moral foundations theory: Jonathon Hite/ 6 moral foundations in the human brain, each of which is a solution to a particular evolutionary problem our species have faced.

Of the 6, Sanctity/degradation moral foundation most relevant to sex. About contaminant avoidance and powered by disgust.

Sexual disgust: a learned withdrawal response from things that are “gross”

- what happens when that same sexual disgust is triggered by one’s own body?

“You know who’s always thin? People who have been living in a prison camp.”

uhhh that’s a pretty distasteful thing to say / in the discussion on weight loss, cultural notions of whose body is ideal, etc.

- it used to be a status symbol for a man to have a wife who is too weak to work bc that showed that he could afford to run the whole house w his income

“Self criticism is one of the best predictors of loneliness.”

curious about this statistic… is it a chicken and egg type of thing? Or does being more self critical drive people away? Or being lonely makes you more self critical?

“We can’t understand women’s sexual satisfaction without thinking about body satisfaction, just as we can’t understand women’s sexual pleasure without thinking about attachment and stress. Women will not be fully, blissfully satisfied with their sex lives until they are fully, blissfully satisfied with their own bodies.”