Girls, be frank: Do some things in sex occasionally make you feel grossed out? If your answer is positive, you’re not the only one, and there exists a psychological and physiological reason for you to feel that way. Having sex and feeling disgusted are important parts of our experience of being human. It is believed by scientists that disgust is something that came together as a defense mechanism to protect us from being infected by something outside of ourselves.
Consequently, your mouth and your privates, two parts of you that are located at the end of your body (and as such have a higher chance of getting infected with something), show a higher sensitivity of disgust; e.g. you are much more likely to feel grossed when having an insect crawl on your mouth or vagina than, for example your right leg.
When we combine this with the findings that some of the strongest stimuli for feeling disgust are the smell of person, the saliva, the semen and the sweat, all things which are connected with having sex, and you can begin to imagine how the connection between disgust and sex may be contradictory and even disruptive. You may even be left to question how our species is able to feel any delight having sex.
Well Charmaine Borg and Peter de Jong were very curious about the sex/disgust thing and created an scientific test to clear things up. They came to the conclusion that there was another player in the game of sex, and that is sexual arousal – and that sexual arousal might actually make triggers that make you feel disgusted outside the intercourse make you feel not so grossed out during the act and, and actually decrease your shilly-shallying when approaching “gross” things. What this meant, was that feeling sufficiently aroused might remove the “nasty” from “doing the nasty”.To find out whether they were right or not, the researchers gathered 90 healthy women at the University of Groningen. After that they divided them into 3 groups of 30 and here’s what they did next. The group that was to be sexually aroused was shown a female-friendly erotica. The second group were to be the positively aroused group, and were subjected to watching a sport or activity producing high levels of adrenalin (likeclimbing, sky diving etc). The last group was the neutral one and the researchers made them watch a boring movie involving a train ride.
The reason why they did the division in such a way is because the authors wanted to compare the weight of sexual arousal (with relation to another form of arousal or having no arousal) on feeling disgusted. After the test, the subjects were made to rate different stimuli on how disgusting all thought each was, some of the triggers were sexual, and some not.
Then the participants were requested to physically do a few behaviors which usually arouse disgust. Some of the activities were sexual ( lubricating a dildo, putting strange used underpants in a bag) and non-sexual (sipping from a glass with an insect, putting a strangers used toothbrush on your skin)
The results were that, in comparison to normal arousal and the neutral group, females from the sexually aroused group decided that specifically the sex-related triggers were less gross, and finished a bigger portion of the disgusting tasks (sexual and non-sexual). The conclusion is that there seems to be something about sexual arousal which in comparison to general arousal decreases disgust and the desire to stay away from disgusting triggers. This is what helps to clear up why we have sex for fun regardless of the fact that it might be inherently disgusting, especially some aspects of it. So maybe in the future if your other half asks you to do something that is kind of icky, you might try getting yourself hotter and more bothered and you might be able to reconsider how disgusting it actually it is.
