There’s a weirdly tense chapter in the poet Patricia Lockwood’s 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy, about the night her mother discovered semen on the bedsheets of her supposedly fresh hotel room. “She looks like Edgar Allan Poe, haunted by cum, chased through the slick streets at night by cum,” Lockwood writes. Who can blame her for her horror since, when taken out of context, “the stimuli involved in sexual encounters are… strongly perceived to hold high disgust qualities”, according to psychologists at the University of Groningen?
The researchers noted, however, that these “feelings of disgust” weaken following sexual arousal. In a 2012 study, after exposing a group of women to “female-friendly erotica”, they found that the test subjects became “more willing to touch and do initially disgusting tasks”, such as taking “a sip of juice with a large insect in the cup” and lubricating a vibrator. “Saliva, sweat, semen and body odours,” they wrote, are generally considered gross. But turn a person on and somehow it’s all hot stuff.
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