When you really consider it, sex is gross, sticky, and clearly shameful. It should disgust way more of us than it actually does, but, somehow it…doesn’t. How is this possible? How could something that involves so many lukewarm body fluids and so many unexpected birthmarks not make our skin crawl so much that we drive all the honest mom and pop condom makers out of business, quit making new people, and follow Cotton Mather’s express instructions to wear pilgrim outfits and work really hard for Jesus? Though disgust may be among the most visceral of emotions, it is often mitigated by sexual arousal. That, at least according to a new study, is part of the reason why a “potentially icky activity such as sex can seem pleasant and doable.” And because sex feels good or whatever.
As part of this new exploration into the underworld of disgust that humans wade through every day of their gross little lives, researchers recruited 90 heterosexual women to complete 16 ostensibly revolting tasks, such as drinking juice from a cup with a huge, mealy-mouth bug in it, wiping their hands with a used tissue, and fishing around in a bowl of purportedly used condoms. The women were not aware that the bug was made of plastic, the tissues just marked with phlegm-colored ink to make them seem like they’d absorbed a stream of tuberculosis snot and the condoms simply unwrapped and drenched in lube. This of course begs the two-part question: Who the fuck would agree to stick her hands in a bowl of used condoms and why should we listen to anything that person has to report on?