Madeline’s Reviews > Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life > Status Update

Disgust is a socially learned response/emotion in most cases

How do our disgust responses hinder or hurt us?

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

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.”

“Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves. If we dare to say that we like ourselves as we are.”

Ex: showing up to dinner w friends and saying ‘I feel so beautiful today!’ would typically be seen as outlandish/narcissistic, but showing up and saying ‘I feel so fat today’ is totally normal

3 core cultural messages about women’s sexuality:

Moral: you are evil
Medical: you are diseased
Media: you are inadequate

“Hardly anyone fully buys into any one of these messages, but they are there, encroaching on our gardens. The better we are at seeing them for what they are, the better we’ll be at weeding them out.”

“If you want to have a healthy garden, a garden you choose, you have to go row by row and figure out what you want to keep or nurture and what you want to dig out and replace with something healthier. It is not fair that you have to do all that extra work. After all, you didn’t choose what got planted by your family or culture. No one asked for your permission before planting the toxic crap.”

- body shame