Content Warning: Contains graphic themes including bodily fluids, moral disgust, and sexual violence (discussed, not described). Maybe don't read over breakfast.
I found a book about disgust recently. W.I. Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust [1] is a serious academic work about vomit, faeces, and why other people’s smell is always worse than your own. Naturally, I was intrigued.
As someone into social psychology, I often encounter discussions about emotions influencing society: how anger can motivate political movements, or how social interactions are regulated by pride and shame. Disgust, meanwhile, is something I've mainly encountered as a biological matter rather than a social one. The book starts with its evolutionary function: recoil from dangerous pathogens and you are more likely to survive. So far, so logical. But then... Then I met Catherine of Siena.
The Stories We Swallow
Catherine was a fourteenth-century caretaker tending a woman with a disgusting cancerous wound. The smell made Catherine retch. But rather than keeping her distance, she saw her nausea as a personal failure and was determined to correct it. Basically, she exposure-therapied herself by staying even closer. When the retching persisted, she escalated to an act that defied the logic of stay-alive biology: she collected the pus from the wound into a cup and drank it.
At this point I had to set the book aside and focus on my breathing to avoid becoming part of the subject matter in a public library.
How could one willingly swallow pus?
Well… there's a reasonable chance you've done so yourself today.
Every morning, millions of people pour a white liquid into their coffee, their cereal and their children’s cups. It arrives cold, clean. The smell of the body it came from removed. Processing, distance and language change how we perceive what we consume significantly, allowing us to ignore the roughly one drop of pus per cup of bovine lactation. [2] Catherine drank from a wound and was made a saint; we drink from a carton with a smiling abuse victim printed on it and call it breakfast. How is any of this supposed to make sense?
The difference between Catherine's cup and ours is less about the substance than the story attached to it. We don't just invent our disgust; we learn what to recoil from and what to accept as normal. Social structures pass these judgements on until they become so familiar that questioning them hardly occurs to us. (Bourdieu’s concept of habitus seems relevant here for how this encodes into subconscious physical habits, which is next on my reading list.[3])
At this point in Miller's book, disgust has stopped being a safeguard and become a verdict. The initial logic seems to disappear… My fluids are fine; yours are a problem. A saint is holy for overcoming it; a woman is expected to overcome it and thanked with oppression. And a whole people can be declared disgusting, with the feeling serving as apparent evidence that oppression is justified.
Orwell's Sense of Smell (Miller's final chapter)
The bridge between gagging and judging is short, neurologically. Sapolsky notes that evolution essentially"duct-taped moral disgust onto the insula's existing repertoire."[4] It appears to be the same alarm for both rotten food and rotten behaviour, firing first and leaving the rationalisation for later.
Orwell understood something about this connection long before we had fMRI scans. In The Road to Wigan Pier[5], he describes the class prejudice he inherited as a child, which he refers to as the four frightful words: "The lower classes smell."
When he chose to live among them in a filthy lodging house, confronted with unemptied chamber pots and non-existent table manners, he found a truth Miller emphasises: Disgust leaves no room for pity. Up close, his biology revolted and clashed with his socialist ideals. Yet on the train out of Wigan he saw a girl on her knees in a slum backyard, poking a stick in a blocked drain. He called her expression "the most desolate, hopeless expression" he has ever seen. As he was looking at her through the glass, protected from the smell, he felt pity. As Miller points out, sympathy is best elicited at middle distance.
Orwell did not hold back pointing at the hypocrisy of the bourgeois left who claimed to attribute virtue to the working class, yet "still take such pains to drink [their] soup silently". High-minded ideals, defeated by the sound of supper.
Now, it’s easy to judge a broken class system from a comfortable historical distance.
I do not have a class system to point to. But I have someone...
Dora
Two weeks ago someone called out for help right in front of my building. I let her in. It turned out that she has a serious infectious disease, and saving her would take all my energy and most of my money.
I hesitated, and I hate that. The worst part is knowing that if she had been a kitten, I would not have. But she is not; she is one of the ugliest felines this city has to offer, flea-ridden, leaking pus, and I find her disgusting.
I resent her for costing me everything I chose to spend on her. I know that's wrong. I know I would complain far less about the effort if she were cuter. I know that's not right. A kitten could be twice as filthy without repulsing me. I know that's completely illogical. But knowing a reaction is not rational doesn't turn it off. And watching my own empathy stutter over aesthetic repulsion created a second, deeper layer of disgust, this time directed inward.
And it gets worse. She is an obligate carnivore. So to keep her alive, I have to buy dead animals from the industry I find morally disgusting, and have spent years advocating against.
And of all of that, what finished me was the burp. Just a small warm noise, smelling of the death I paid for, delivered right into my face in the middle of the night. I puked into my mouth and then had to swallow it again because she was lying on top of me.
The Anatomy of a Double Standard
I know I'm weird… One of the many weird things about me is that I have always had a strange sense of disgust. Ketchup and vinegar made me gag as a child, while things that sent other people running left me cold.
At school there was a boy who wore merch of my favourite bands and read alone. I wanted to talk to him, but first I consulted someone who was more socially competent.
“Don’t. Stay away from him.”
“Why?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
“I just told you I do.”
“He fucked a sheep.”
“What?”
“Told you.”
I asked how anyone could know that. There was evidence, apparently, and the subject was closed. The verdict arrived and everyone simply went with it.
But I kept turning it over. What exactly was the crime? Don't get me wrong, I think harming a sentient being for personal gratification is unethical. But is a single horrific act, or even just an accusation, enough to permanently ban someone from human connection? Anger calls for punishment; disgust calls for exile. Once that label attaches to you, you aren't just guilty - you are toxic.
As I watched him sit alone, I couldn't stop looking at the ham sandwich my friend was eating. In both cases a reproductive system has been violated for a few minutes of temporary sensory pleasure. The boy engaged in the abuse directly to satisfy his genitals; my friend paid an industry to handle the forceful impregnation and slaughter so the result could slide over her tongue. He was declared a monster because he touched the victim himself, but literally eating ass for lunch is okay because the violence happens somewhere else?
At least his victim survived… that day.
Everyone I have asked treats one of these as an unspeakable crime and the other as a normal meal. To me the experiencing organ is irrelevant; violence for temporary sensory pleasure is unnecessary violence all the same.
So where is the actual moral boundary? If you condemn bestiality and still consume flesh or secretions of other animals, I especially want to hear from you. If you can see a logical difference between direct abuse for pleasure and outsourced abuse for taste or convenience, please tell me. And if the answer is distance: why is it less wrong when it is out of sight, and not only easier to bear?
Thank you for taking it seriously.
PS:
I am attempting to write something like a horror story (not the scary kind, but disgusting on multiple levels) together with an essay on how it connects to the epistemology of social psychology. I had been saving for months to hire an editor... For reasons I cannot logically explain, the money is now going to medication and many dead animals to keep one carnivore alive. So if you are into amateur short stories or social psychology, can handle graphic content and would give brutal feedback, please PM me. I would be ever so grateful!
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (as cited in Wickert, C. (2025) Pierre Bourdieu – distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (1979) | SozTheo. Available at: https://soztheo.com/sociology/key-works-in-sociology/pierre-bourdieu-distinction-a-social-critique-of-the-judgement-of-taste-1979/(Accessed: November 2, 2026).)
Absolutely. That's why I argue we should examine our emotions more closely and not just trust them as moral guides. I tried to summarise the political implications in one line but I guess it wasn't enough.. Miller also goes quite into detail about the role of disgust in modern politics in chapter 9: Mutual Contempt and Democracy. But this can prompt an entire essay of it's own so I decided not to dive into it here.
If you can see a logical difference between direct abuse for pleasure and outsourced abuse for taste or convenience, please tell me.
I think it's very important to decouple how bad the direct consequences of some act are and how strong the signal "the person who did this is bad" is. The latter is often more important because this signal helps you to calibrate what consequences should be expected from this person's actions in a wide range of potential scenarios.
Content Warning: Contains graphic themes including bodily fluids, moral disgust, and sexual violence (discussed, not described). Maybe don't read over breakfast.
I found a book about disgust recently. W.I. Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust [1] is a serious academic work about vomit, faeces, and why other people’s smell is always worse than your own. Naturally, I was intrigued.
As someone into social psychology, I often encounter discussions about emotions influencing society: how anger can motivate political movements, or how social interactions are regulated by pride and shame. Disgust, meanwhile, is something I've mainly encountered as a biological matter rather than a social one. The book starts with its evolutionary function: recoil from dangerous pathogens and you are more likely to survive. So far, so logical. But then... Then I met Catherine of Siena.
The Stories We Swallow
Catherine was a fourteenth-century caretaker tending a woman with a disgusting cancerous wound. The smell made Catherine retch. But rather than keeping her distance, she saw her nausea as a personal failure and was determined to correct it. Basically, she exposure-therapied herself by staying even closer. When the retching persisted, she escalated to an act that defied the logic of stay-alive biology: she collected the pus from the wound into a cup and drank it.
At this point I had to set the book aside and focus on my breathing to avoid becoming part of the subject matter in a public library.
How could one willingly swallow pus?
Well… there's a reasonable chance you've done so yourself today.
Every morning, millions of people pour a white liquid into their coffee, their cereal and their children’s cups. It arrives cold, clean. The smell of the body it came from removed. Processing, distance and language change how we perceive what we consume significantly, allowing us to ignore the roughly one drop of pus per cup of bovine lactation. [2] Catherine drank from a wound and was made a saint; we drink from a carton with a smiling abuse victim printed on it and call it breakfast. How is any of this supposed to make sense?
The difference between Catherine's cup and ours is less about the substance than the story attached to it. We don't just invent our disgust; we learn what to recoil from and what to accept as normal. Social structures pass these judgements on until they become so familiar that questioning them hardly occurs to us. (Bourdieu’s concept of habitus seems relevant here for how this encodes into subconscious physical habits, which is next on my reading list.[3])
At this point in Miller's book, disgust has stopped being a safeguard and become a verdict. The initial logic seems to disappear… My fluids are fine; yours are a problem. A saint is holy for overcoming it; a woman is expected to overcome it and thanked with oppression. And a whole people can be declared disgusting, with the feeling serving as apparent evidence that oppression is justified.
Orwell's Sense of Smell (Miller's final chapter)
The bridge between gagging and judging is short, neurologically. Sapolsky notes that evolution essentially "duct-taped moral disgust onto the insula's existing repertoire."[4] It appears to be the same alarm for both rotten food and rotten behaviour, firing first and leaving the rationalisation for later.
Orwell understood something about this connection long before we had fMRI scans. In The Road to Wigan Pier [5], he describes the class prejudice he inherited as a child, which he refers to as the four frightful words: "The lower classes smell."
When he chose to live among them in a filthy lodging house, confronted with unemptied chamber pots and non-existent table manners, he found a truth Miller emphasises: Disgust leaves no room for pity. Up close, his biology revolted and clashed with his socialist ideals. Yet on the train out of Wigan he saw a girl on her knees in a slum backyard, poking a stick in a blocked drain. He called her expression "the most desolate, hopeless expression" he has ever seen. As he was looking at her through the glass, protected from the smell, he felt pity. As Miller points out, sympathy is best elicited at middle distance.
Orwell did not hold back pointing at the hypocrisy of the bourgeois left who claimed to attribute virtue to the working class, yet "still take such pains to drink [their] soup silently". High-minded ideals, defeated by the sound of supper.
Now, it’s easy to judge a broken class system from a comfortable historical distance.
I do not have a class system to point to. But I have someone...
Dora
Two weeks ago someone called out for help right in front of my building. I let her in. It turned out that she has a serious infectious disease, and saving her would take all my energy and most of my money.
I hesitated, and I hate that. The worst part is knowing that if she had been a kitten, I would not have. But she is not; she is one of the ugliest felines this city has to offer, flea-ridden, leaking pus, and I find her disgusting.
I resent her for costing me everything I chose to spend on her. I know that's wrong. I know I would complain far less about the effort if she were cuter. I know that's not right. A kitten could be twice as filthy without repulsing me. I know that's completely illogical. But knowing a reaction is not rational doesn't turn it off. And watching my own empathy stutter over aesthetic repulsion created a second, deeper layer of disgust, this time directed inward.
And it gets worse. She is an obligate carnivore. So to keep her alive, I have to buy dead animals from the industry I find morally disgusting, and have spent years advocating against.
And of all of that, what finished me was the burp. Just a small warm noise, smelling of the death I paid for, delivered right into my face in the middle of the night. I puked into my mouth and then had to swallow it again because she was lying on top of me.
The Anatomy of a Double Standard
I know I'm weird… One of the many weird things about me is that I have always had a strange sense of disgust. Ketchup and vinegar made me gag as a child, while things that sent other people running left me cold.
At school there was a boy who wore merch of my favourite bands and read alone. I wanted to talk to him, but first I consulted someone who was more socially competent.
“Don’t. Stay away from him.”
“Why?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
“I just told you I do.”
“He fucked a sheep.”
“What?”
“Told you.”
I asked how anyone could know that. There was evidence, apparently, and the subject was closed. The verdict arrived and everyone simply went with it.
But I kept turning it over. What exactly was the crime? Don't get me wrong, I think harming a sentient being for personal gratification is unethical. But is a single horrific act, or even just an accusation, enough to permanently ban someone from human connection? Anger calls for punishment; disgust calls for exile. Once that label attaches to you, you aren't just guilty - you are toxic.
As I watched him sit alone, I couldn't stop looking at the ham sandwich my friend was eating. In both cases a reproductive system has been violated for a few minutes of temporary sensory pleasure. The boy engaged in the abuse directly to satisfy his genitals; my friend paid an industry to handle the forceful impregnation and slaughter so the result could slide over her tongue. He was declared a monster because he touched the victim himself, but literally eating ass for lunch is okay because the violence happens somewhere else?
At least his victim survived… that day.
Everyone I have asked treats one of these as an unspeakable crime and the other as a normal meal. To me the experiencing organ is irrelevant; violence for temporary sensory pleasure is unnecessary violence all the same.
So where is the actual moral boundary? If you condemn bestiality and still consume flesh or secretions of other animals, I especially want to hear from you. If you can see a logical difference between direct abuse for pleasure and outsourced abuse for taste or convenience, please tell me. And if the answer is distance: why is it less wrong when it is out of sight, and not only easier to bear?
Thank you for taking it seriously.
PS:
I am attempting to write something like a horror story (not the scary kind, but disgusting on multiple levels) together with an essay on how it connects to the epistemology of social psychology. I had been saving for months to hire an editor... For reasons I cannot logically explain, the money is now going to medication and many dead animals to keep one carnivore alive. So if you are into amateur short stories or social psychology, can handle graphic content and would give brutal feedback, please PM me. I would be ever so grateful!
Miller, W.I. (1998) The anatomy of disgust. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674031555
Greger, M. (2011) How much pus is there in milk? NutritionFacts.org. Available at: https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/how-much-pus-is-there-in-milk/ (Accessed: October 30, 2026).
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (as cited in Wickert, C. (2025) Pierre Bourdieu – distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (1979) | SozTheo. Available at: https://soztheo.com/sociology/key-works-in-sociology/pierre-bourdieu-distinction-a-social-critique-of-the-judgement-of-taste-1979/(Accessed: November 2, 2026).)
Sapolsky, R. (2017) The yuck factor, Walsworth.com. LabX Media Group, Inc.-The Scientist. Available at: https://digitaleditions.walsworth.com/publication/?i=413226&article_id=2801184&view=articleBrowser (Accessed: November 1, 2026).
Orwell, G. (1937). The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Victor Gollancz. (as cited in 1)
Image credit: Joel Bombardier https://www.flickr.com/photos/bombardier/84930702/