How disgust explains everything

At work, you glance with suspicion at the person who neglects to wash his filthy hands after a trip to the toilet. At home, you change your child’s diaper, unclog the shower drain, empty your cat’s litter box, pop a zit, throw out the fuzzy leftovers in the fridge. If you manage to complete a single day without experiencing any form of disgust, you are either a baby or in a coma.

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Disgust shapes our behavior, our technology, our relationships. It is the reason we wear deodorant, use the bathroom in private and wield forks instead of eating with our bare hands. I floss my teeth as an adult because a dentist once told me as a teenager that “Brushing your teeth without flossing is like taking a shower without removing your shoes.” (Do they teach that line in dentistry school, or did he come up with it on his own? Either way, 14 words accomplished what a decade of parental nagging hadn’t.) Unpeel most etiquette guidelines, and you’ll find a web of disgust-avoidance techniques. Rules governing the emotion have existed in every culture at every time in history. And although the “input” of disgust — that is, what exactly is considered disgusting — varies from place to place, its “output” is narrow, with a characteristic facial expression (called the “gape face”) that includes a lowered jaw and often an extended tongue; sometimes it’s a wrinkled nose and a retraction of the upper lip (Jerry does it about once per episode of “Seinfeld”). The gape face is often accompanied by nausea and a desire to run away or otherwise gain distance from the offensive thing, as well as the urge to clean oneself.

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The more you read about the history of the emotion, the more convinced you might be that disgust is the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, from our never-ending culture wars to the existence of kosher laws to 4chan to mermaids. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.

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