SEETHA RAO / DAILY NEXUS
On the final day of my freshman year feminist studies class, my professor led us in a discussion that I think about at least three times a week. She explained that often, the reason we find things gross is simply because it’s “matter out of place.” She had the class shout out examples, and people pointed out that touching food on your plate isn’t gross, but once you place it in the sink it is. Or how touching someone’s hair when it’s on their head is totally fine, but it becomes icky as soon as it falls out. Even though these things aren’t unhygienic in any way, they gross us out.
I’m fascinated by disgust. I’m fascinated by what makes us feel clean or dirty, and how little it has to do with what makes us healthy or unhealthy. I’ve brought this up to many people over the years as a fun fact, a silly little human quirk. But I honestly think it’s so much more important than that. I believe disgust is a key motivation for so much bigotry. Many things that inspire hatred are simply “matter out of place” — a phenomenon most clearly exemplified by the completely irrational moral outrage caused by people taking on aesthetics that don’t conform to gender norms, like a woman with body hair. I’m not saying that if doing dishes grosses you out then you’re probably a bigot. But I do think they’re related reactions, and finding peace with what disgusts you is a key part of becoming an open-minded, accepting person.
The term “matter out of place” has ambiguous origins, but was popularized by British anthropologist Mary Douglas. In her essay “Pollution,” contained in her 1975 book “Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology,” Douglas wrote that we consider something dirty when “a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement of things has been violated.” Many kinds of bigotry — like homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia — fit neatly into this definition.
As University of Michigan PhD Logan Casey argues in his thesis on how disgust impacts opinion on LGBTQIA+ people and policy, we assume our disgust is natural, which leads us to believe that disgust is indicative of the truth. This is what makes bigotry based in disgust so difficult to combat: “disgust is associated with harsher moral judgments, avoidant and distancing behavior, and ‘resistance to rational argument.’”
There are, admittedly, many things we find disgusting in any context — it doesn’t really matter if it’s “in place” or not. But even in those cases, our actions and feelings are often unrelated to actual health outcomes. My favorite example of this is disposable toilet seat covers. Even though they’re incredibly common across California public restrooms, they have almost no purpose for two reasons: the paper is thin enough for bacteria to travel through, and you aren’t really at risk of contracting infectious disease from a toilet seat anyway. In most parts of the world, toilet seat covers are hardly in use, and it has absolutely no effect on the health of the population. The only concrete difference is that people are more likely to hover if there are no toilet seat covers, which increases the chance of missing the bowl and getting the seat wet — which, to me, indicates that unlearning our disgust can help us reach a more hygienic world, not the opposite.
I’m not trying to deny that it’s gross to put your bare ass on a public seat toilet. When I go abroad and remember that toilet seat covers are a luxury limited to a very small portion of the world, I am indeed a little disappointed. But finding something disgusting doesn’t make it necessary to change it. At the end of the day, our cleansing rituals vary widely across cultures. Unless there’s real science that proves a legitimate health concern, there’s no reason to hold up some cleansing rituals as more important than others.
As Douglas continued, “In some communities menstrual pollution is gravely feared and in others not at all; in some, pollution by contact with the dead is feared, in others pollution by food or blood. Since our common human condition does not give rise to a common pattern of pollution observances, the differences become interesting as an index of different cultural patterning.”
In other words, humans as a species are not aligned on what we find disgusting. Which proves that our idea of disgust is largely socially constructed, not completely innate or necessarily based in harm we’re biologically tuned to avoid. Therefore, it can and must be examined and deconstructed. Especially because people often use these differences to argue that one culture is more advanced or civilized than another.
When I told my friends I wanted to write an article about disgust and hygiene, they said that an Indian girl writing something like that will set our people back. They were partly joking, but it’s honestly a perspective I take very seriously, and one that kept me from writing an article like this for a long time. However, my Indianness is a huge reason why I feel like I need to write this: I have a front row seat to how disgust is so often weaponized as a tool for racism. The recent “controversy” about Zohran Mamdani eating biriyani with his hands comes to mind.
I’ve seen this issue play out over and over, and the progressive response I see most often is that the outrage is hypocritical because it’s accepted in western culture to eat burgers, pizza, etc. with their hands. Honestly, I think that’s a bit of a false equivalency. Those are all dry foods, where you wouldn’t have anything to wash off after your meal. I can’t think of any food like biriyani that would be eaten by hand in western culture. Does that mean it’s unhygienic to do so, or that Indian culture is less civilized? Absolutely not. Does it mean that it’s disgusting? Well, that’s relative. I understand why people argue that eating with your hands isn’t disgusting, and obviously I don’t think it is. But I think the truer argument is that disgust is a completely irrational emotion, and we prescribe it far too much importance in the way we judge the moral value of an action.
I want to emphasize that I said truer argument, not better. I’m not sure if it’s good political strategy to respond to racist comments like “if you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World” with something like “disgust is relative, so you should try to decolonize your mind.”
Whenever I argue with this kind of logic in real life, people tend to get concerned about where “the line” is — if you can’t shame someone based on an innate sense of disgust, how can people determine which perspectives on hygiene should and shouldn’t be accepted in society? And in these conversations, I always respond that that line should be decided by science. Questions about hygiene can usually be empirically tested for, and we should act accordingly. But now that I’m discussing this in the long form, I realize that’s a bit of a cop-out answer. Scientific fact is fact; I would never try to debate that. But sometimes real life introduces other complexities that are also worth considering and possible to account for.
I think a good example of this is washing chicken. The scientific opinion is resounding: Washing poultry is a more dangerous choice because it spreads bacteria around the kitchen, which puts you more at risk of illness. However, many many people still wash their chicken, and the divide is extremely cultural.
Here’s what the research misses. People don’t necessarily wash chicken because they fear the bacteria. Rather, they wash it because people didn’t always get chicken from an industrial supermarket, so there was physical dirt or blood on the meat that had to go. Belizean-Nigerian food writer, Carolyn Desalu, wrote about her cousin’s experience growing up in Belize City for Food52: “Outside of extremely wealthy people, most bought their food, raw meat, fish, fruit, vegetables and seasonings, at the market. Beef was hung up and you told the person—he wasn’t a butcher; he could have been a farmer or a man there to just sell meat—what part you wanted, and he chopped it off and gave it to you.”
People who didn’t buy expertly butchered and industrially processed meat had to clean it themselves. They passed that tradition onto their children, and it’s now an embedded cultural practice. As Desalu wrote, “I can’t bear not washing meat. In my family, washing meat is the start to well-prepared food and something my parents, sister, cousins, and so forth do. To us, it’s a ritual, a mandate. We care equally about cleaning, eating, and communing.”
I’m not a microbiologist — I’ve never even cooked chicken before — so I’m not going to debate whether or not the preservation of cultural practices is important enough to offset whatever health risk comes from washing meat or if a carefully managed kitchen can remove the risk. But it’s undoubtedly a complicating factor, which makes me question my hardline stance that we should ignore our disgust and look only to science.
I don’t really support a culture of shame, but I agree that we have a responsibility to be hygienic and should hold each other accountable for legitimately dangerous behavior. However, science can only tell us so much about what behavior is legitimately dangerous. It’s not realistic for humans to be constantly optimizing their health outcomes. Even if an action or habit tips the scale for better or worse, the magnitude of the impact is going to be accounted for differently by each individual. The U.S. Department of Agriculture seems to recognize this flexibility with their headline “Washing Raw Poultry: Our Science, Your Choice.”
So I must agree, the line can get blurry. But I don’t think that weakens my point. Rather, these complexities are characteristic of my argument. A society’s disgust culture is built to answer these ambiguities, and in the modern world where cultures are constantly clashing and developing, it’s bound to create tension. The only way to overcome that tension is if everyone respects what disgusts them. I don’t know exactly when a behavior becomes so unhygienic that it warrants broad societal pushback. But I don’t think it really matters because regardless, I believe that pushback should be based on genuine concern and empathy, not disgust or judgment.
The range of human condition is vast and people live on its margins — sometimes by choice, sometimes by nature. Someone having a look, smell or sound that grosses you out doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of your respect and care. Truly embracing that attitude is the first step to rewiring your brain. As Douglas said in her 1966 book, “There are several ways of treating anomalies. Negatively, we can ignore, just not perceive them, or perceiving we can condemn. Positively we can deliberately confront the anomaly and try to create a new pattern of reality in which it has a place.”
We live in a world full of anomalies. Our instinct of disgust tells us that’s something to run away from, but we’re intelligent creatures that are stronger than our instincts. I hope that you want to live in a world where anomalies have their place, and I hope you realize that the first barrier to creating that sort of world is in your own mind.
Sneha Cheenath talks a lot about moral reasoning for someone who’s never formally studied ethics.
