By Liat Clark, Wired UK
When women are aroused, they overlook certain "disgust elicitors" associated with sex, enabling them to go ahead with the deed, according to a paper published by Dutch clinical psychologists.
According to the study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, humans have somehow managed to strike a successful balance between two important evolutionary functions — sex and disgust. The latter is considered by some psychologists to be a natural defence mechanism against disease — other peoples' mouths, for instance, pose a higher risk of contamination and are therefore considered an external threat perceived as highly disgusting. When it comes to the nitty gritty of sex, there are plenty of "disgust elicitors" that we relate to contamination says the paper, namely saliva, sweat and semen.In making this link, the paper's authors decided to tackle a rather interesting question: How do people have pleasurable sex at all?
To find out, the team rounded up female university students all aged around 23 and publicised the study as being purely about arousal and behaviour, so as not to bias them. The test subjects were then split into three groups of 30 and asked to watch different film clips. The first group — the sexual arousal group — had to watch a "female friendly erotica" film, the positive arousal group watched an extreme sports film and the neutral group watched a jaunty train ride.
Each film elicited the desired response, as shown by follow-up questions. After watching the clips, each candidate had to take part in a range of 16 behavioural tasks split into four "disgust types" (core, contamination, animal-reminder, and moral disgust). The tasks all sound pretty horrific, ranging from rather tame challenges of holding a bloodied bone (really a dog's bone covered in red ink) or sipping from a cup with a dead insect in it, to putting your hand in a bowl full of used condoms (in reality, new and covered in lubricant). The women had to rate each task and watch further clips in between.
On a scale from one to repulsive, the team found that those women who had watched the erotica clip reacted with far less disgust to the sex-related stimuli than the other two groups. In fact, their responses were dampened to pretty much all disgusting stimuli, while the other groups displayed increased avoidance behaviour when it came to actually following through and completing a task. This implies that the side-effects of sexual arousal are not purely linked to sexual stimuli, as has been suggested in previous studies — rather, it makes a whole world of external stimuli seem a little bit less disgusting.
The conclusion that women are more likely to have sex because arousal dampens the disgust response still seems like a be a bit of a stretch, however. The original study that deemed things like saliva to be up there with the most disgusting of bodily stimuli was carried out on a relatively small test group of, again, university students, and doesn't take into account factors like social pressures to deem certain things repulsive. The Dutch authors do admit however that the study is heavily reliant on individual subjective notions of sexual arousal and disgust. They warn that, general disgust factors aside, you can never really be sure of what turns some people on: "We cannot be entirely sure, if what we denote as sex related actually differed from the non-sex related disgusting stimuli in the perception of the current participants in terms of sexual relevance".
A 2009 paper did come to similar conclusions when investigating the affects of sexual arousal on the disgust mechanism in male undergraduate students. Overall, the authors of this new study are hoping that further investigation could shed light on their hypothesis that low arousal is to blame for certain sexual dysfunctions.
Source: Wired.co.uk
Chris Kohler 19 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/Lc8EoF6YqNk/
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