![]() ![]() Large crowds viewed public executions, and the corpses of criminals were left hanged by chains for the public to gawk at. In early modern England, in fact, there was a cottage industry of disgust. When exploring the “problematic appeal of this play’s violence,” literary critic Cynthia Marshall asks, “Why would an audience, any audience, enjoy Titus’s reiteration of violence against the human body?”The answer, I believe, owes to the alluring nature of disgust that psychologists have documented. According to one estimate, the play stages “14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity, and 1 of cannibalism – an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines.” The playwright’s notorious tragedy “ Titus Andronicus” contains as much gore as today’s slasher movies. It was even happening in Shakespeare’s time. Shakespearean disgustĬelebrating and profiting off this attraction isn’t a product of the digital age. So not only are you predisposed to be captivated by disgusting things, there’s also a psychological mechanism that enables you, in the right circumstances, to enjoy them. Psychologist Nina Strohminger suggests that the pleasurable features of disgust may be an instance of what has been called “ benign masochism” – the human tendency to seek out seemingly “negative” experiences for the purposes of enjoying “constrained risks,” such as riding a roller coaster or eating extremely spicy foods.Īccording to Strohminger, it seems “possible that any negative feeling has the potential to be enjoyable when it is stripped of the belief that what is happening is actually bad, leaving behind physiological arousal that is, in itself, exhilarating or interesting.” Psychological research suggests that disgusting stimuli both capture and retain your attention more effectively than emotionally neutral stimuli do.Īccording to media scholars Bridget Rubenking and Annie Lang, this likely happens because, from an evolutionary perspective, it seems that “an attentional bias toward disgust – no matter how aversive – would better equip humans to avoid harmful substances.” So although disgust can be an unpleasant feeling, the emotion has evolved to simultaneously seize people’s attention.īut disgusting things don’t just capture your attention you can even enjoy them. How, then, do we account for the fact that disgusting things can sometimes captivate us? This is why some people might say they’re “disgusted” by an act of racism.īecause of these regulatory functions, disgust is often known as the “ gatekeeper emotion,” the “ exclusionary emotion” or the “ body and soul emotion.” The allure of disgust What’s more, disgust seems to have evolved further to regulate things that are symbolically harmful: violations of morals, cultural rules and cherished values. Scientists believe that disgust originally concerned food Charles Darwin noted “how readily this feeling is excited by anything unusual in the appearance, odour, or nature of our food.” According to this theory, it slowly evolved to guard over all sorts of things that might put you in contact with dangerous pathogens, whether via disease, animals, bodily injury, corpses or sex. ![]() What is disgust?ĭisgust is fundamentally an emotion of avoidance: It signals that something might be harmful to your body, and encourages you to avoid it. Why are so many people drawn to things that should, by all rights, compel them to turn away in horror? Modern science has an answer, and it has everything to do with how the emotion of disgust fundamentally works. Early modern England has a similar culture of disgust, which I’ve written about in a forthcoming book. It isn’t just a recent media phenomenon, either. And, most extreme of all, there are internet shock sites that host real footage of death and dismemberment for those who want to seek it out. In romance novels, for example, you can find portrayals of consensual sibling incest that are designed to titillate the reader. You can see this in other forms of media, as well. Halloween is a time to embrace all that is disgusting, from bloody slasher films to haunted houses full of fake guts and gore. But the attraction to stuff that grosses us out goes beyond this annual holiday.įlip through TV channels and you’ll come across “adventurous eating” programs, in which hosts and contestants are served all manner of stomach-clenching foods reality shows that take a deep dive into the work of pimple-popping dermatologists and gross-out comedies that deploy tasteless humor – think vomiting and urination – to make viewers laugh. Irish, Arizona State University, via The Conversation ![]()
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