When I told that story to Merritt and Carol, Carol laughed and said, “I love that mom!” but Merritt turned pale.
“If I had been that boy,” she said, “I’d have burned my sheets before I would have told my mother.”
Merritt, remember, didn’t grow up in a sex-positive environment.
But in America, each generation is rapidly overturning old ideas about social control and sex. She is the first in her family to go to college, and only the second generation to make a living doing something other than farming. And along with the social and economic revolution she represents, she’s also the first out lesbian—and she’s the first in her family to argue with her spouse about how to teach their kid about sexual pleasure.
“My parents taught me a lot of valuable things about commitment and loyalty and being a kind and loving person,” she said. “But they also told me that if I had sex outside marriage I’d go to hell, and even now, after almost twenty years of Carol coming home with me for Christmas, they still can’t look her in the eye.”
“It sounds like they didn’t mean to teach you shame, but that’s what you learned,” I said.
“And when you came out,” Carol said, “you were attacked.”
“So no wonder you don’t feel like you can fully trust your own body,” I said.
Merritt closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’d never want Julia to feel like there was anything wrong with any part of her body. I am not being a role model for her.”
And so, of course, she proceeded to change her entire relationship with her body and to trust herself—to relax into pleasure and swim in the water of life. I’ll describe how in chapter 8. when somebody “yucks” your “yum”
Disgust can function as a social emotion—that is, we learn about what aspects of the world (including our own bodies) are disgusting by reading the responses of the people around us. For example, infants will avoid a toy 18that their adult caregiver looks at with an expression of disgust.
Predictably, the experience of disgust is context sensitive—we’re less 19 grossed out by sex-related things while we are sexually aroused.And women tend to be more sensitive than men to learned disgust, particularly 20 21in the sexual domain,though it’s not yet clear why.
We can see how the process of learning disgust can unfold, moment by moment, in a person’s life if we imagine, for argument’s sake, a pair of identical twin girls separated at birth. Let’s call them Jessica and Theresa.
Imagine that both Jessica and Theresa, when they’re maybe five or six years old, have a habit of masturbating in their rooms at naptime. (If you noticed a disgust-withdrawal response in yourself at the idea of a young girl masturbating, you’ve just experienced what I’m about to describe!) So one day, Jessica is masturbating in her room at naptime, when her adult caregiver walks in and sees her with her hand down her pants. The parent recoils in an involuntary disgust response, and says, “Stop that!”
On that same day, in a different home, Theresa is also masturbating, and her adult caregiver also walks in and sees her with her hand down her pants.
But that parent says calmly, “We’re leaving for your aunt’s house in a few minutes. Get your shoes on.”
Jessica’s brain learns to associate the shame and distress (brakes) communicated by her parent with whatever sexual arousal (accelerator) she was feeling at the moment her parent scolded her.
Theresa’s brain, by contrast, learns no such association. She was interrupted but not shut down—her accelerator deactivated, but without necessarily hitting the brake.
This one incident may not have any lasting impact. If there are no other incidents to reinforce this one, the association in Jessica’s brain will be decoupled.
Now twenty years have passed, and Jessica and Theresa’s life experiences have routinely reinforced these patterns. Jessica’s brain has learned to associate sexual arousal with stress, shame, disgust, and guilt.
Theresa’s has learned to associate sexual arousal with pleasure, confidence,
joy, and satisfaction.
Which of them has a better sex life?
Jessica will feel conflicted about her sexual sensations—they’re pleasurable . . . and they’re not, at the same time. And she won’t have a clear idea why she feels guilty, ashamed, depressed, or even physical pain when she’s sexually aroused.
If a girl has a particularly sensitive brake system, one incident might be enough to create a tangled knot in her arousal process. For many women, though, it takes consistent reinforcement of a negative message in order for
it to be embedded in sexual response, and consistent reinforcement takes a sex-negative culture.
In other words, it happens all the time.
Often disgust is reinforced in subtle ways, but sometimes we can remember a specific moment when the message is made clear. I talked to a grandmother—a badass Southern belle sex educator grandmother, to be specific—who told me about just such a moment from when she was a teenager. She had been sitting on the front porch making out with her boyfriend, but when she went inside, her mother came up to her with disgust in every line of her face and said, “What you were just doing out there? That’s sex!”
And this sixty-something grandmother told me, “It took me a long, long time to realize why I got so anxious about sex with my husband—and I mean nauseated anxious—and when I finally figured it out, I was angry for about ten seconds, and then I was just so sad for my mother.”
She went on, “Now when I do health education at my church, I just say it right out loud: ‘I like sex!’ I want everyone to know that it’s okay!”
I love this woman.
For sex educators, the rule is, “Don’t yuck anybody’s yum.” And since we can’t know what everybody else’s yums are, we don’t yuck anything.
We know that disgust is a social emotion and that our students have already been exposed to too many people who communicate disgust around sex.
That’s why sex educators and sex therapists go through an educational process of intensive exposure, deliberately designed to minimize our own judgment, shame, and disgust reactions, so that we can respond with open neutrality to whatever students or clients bring into the room. This training often takes the form of a Sexual Attitude Reassessment, a multiday training that includes values clarification exercises, guest panels and speakers, plus (in my experience) a range of porn that would surprise most people in its variety, intensity, and creativity, followed by reflection and processing of our reactions to all of it.
Unless you become a sex educator, you never need to go through a process like this. All you ever need to do is begin to recognize where your learned disgust response is interfering with your own sexual pleasure, and decide whether it’s something you’d rather let go of. Your genitals and your partners’, your genital fluids and your partners’, your skin and sweat and the fragrances of your body, these are all healthy and beautiful—not to