Read Online Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jesse Bering
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Sunday afternoon involves wallowing in feces and smelly assholes can be alarmingly effective at keeping heterosexuals from seeing them as fellow human beings. For example, whenever the subject of gay men crops up at the various websites, news feeds, and online forums that cater primarily to social conservatives (they do really love to talk about us queer folk), post after scatological post is a display of this antifecal-therefore-antigay mentality. “If your personal identity revolves around your lust for other men’s stinking anuses,” wrote one man at the Free Republic website in response to a news story about gay pride, “a particularly disgusting form of depravity that spreads horrific diseases, the chest swells with self-satisfaction.” Another weighs in: “Homosexuals should never have got their special rights like civil unions let alone marriage or Don’t-Ask[-Don’t-Tell] in the first place. The ignorant and stupid on our side wanted to appease them and usually say: ‘I know a couple and they are nice’ … friggin idiots … when did we base special rights based on fecal diseased sex in the constitution?”
When the romantic relationships of gay men are repeatedly linked with excrement this way, the disgust response makes it much easier to sell them as immoral. And in the battle against the “homosexual agenda,” this has quickly become a core strategy in the tireless and patriotic efforts against, ahem, “evil.” Really, I’m not kidding: anything even remotely related to gay men—Anderson Cooper chuckling uncontrollably during a newscast, Barney Frank bending over to tie his shoelaces, a scandalous plot twist on the sitcom Modern Family —will faithfully serve to induce a reverie of maledictions for their anuses.
We can also induce disgust to sway a person’s political views. It’s one of the oldest tricks around. “Just look at these guys!” the Nazi author of an illustrated children’s book wrote for his young German readers in 1938. “The louse-infested beards! The filthy, protruding ears, those stained, fatty clothes … Jews have an unpleasant sweetish odor. If you have a good nose, you can smell the Jews.” (The book’s publisher was later executed as a war criminal for his central role in peddling anti-Semitic propaganda.) For those who don’t know how the trick works, it can get them every time. A study by the psychologists Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, and Paul Bloom illustrates how the experience of disgust can make even those who aren’t normally intolerant express strikingly bigoted views. In the study, a group of straight male and female undergrads from Cornell University were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. For the sake of clarity, we’ll call these the “stink” and “no-stink” conditions. All of the students sat alone in a private room and completed a survey about their attitudes on a range of social and political issues. For those in the stink condition, a research assistant had sneaked in beforehand and applied a novelty spray to a trashcan in the corner. (This smell—I got the sense from speaking to one of the authors—was vaguely akin to that of a hospital emergency-room toilet.) The no-stink participants were tested in the same room and answered the very same survey, but, luckily for their brains’ olfactory bulbs, they weren’t exposed to the bad odor while doing so.
The findings are revealing. Irrespective of the gender of the participants and their self-reported political orientation (they ranged from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative” in their worldviews), those who were randomly assigned to the stink condition expressed significantly more disapproval toward gay men than did those in the no-stink condition. It wasn’t that the bad smell simply made these participants crankier in general while pondering their feelings on social issues. In fact, their opinions of other minority groups (such as blacks and the elderly)
When the romantic relationships of gay men are repeatedly linked with excrement this way, the disgust response makes it much easier to sell them as immoral. And in the battle against the “homosexual agenda,” this has quickly become a core strategy in the tireless and patriotic efforts against, ahem, “evil.” Really, I’m not kidding: anything even remotely related to gay men—Anderson Cooper chuckling uncontrollably during a newscast, Barney Frank bending over to tie his shoelaces, a scandalous plot twist on the sitcom Modern Family —will faithfully serve to induce a reverie of maledictions for their anuses.
We can also induce disgust to sway a person’s political views. It’s one of the oldest tricks around. “Just look at these guys!” the Nazi author of an illustrated children’s book wrote for his young German readers in 1938. “The louse-infested beards! The filthy, protruding ears, those stained, fatty clothes … Jews have an unpleasant sweetish odor. If you have a good nose, you can smell the Jews.” (The book’s publisher was later executed as a war criminal for his central role in peddling anti-Semitic propaganda.) For those who don’t know how the trick works, it can get them every time. A study by the psychologists Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, and Paul Bloom illustrates how the experience of disgust can make even those who aren’t normally intolerant express strikingly bigoted views. In the study, a group of straight male and female undergrads from Cornell University were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. For the sake of clarity, we’ll call these the “stink” and “no-stink” conditions. All of the students sat alone in a private room and completed a survey about their attitudes on a range of social and political issues. For those in the stink condition, a research assistant had sneaked in beforehand and applied a novelty spray to a trashcan in the corner. (This smell—I got the sense from speaking to one of the authors—was vaguely akin to that of a hospital emergency-room toilet.) The no-stink participants were tested in the same room and answered the very same survey, but, luckily for their brains’ olfactory bulbs, they weren’t exposed to the bad odor while doing so.
The findings are revealing. Irrespective of the gender of the participants and their self-reported political orientation (they ranged from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative” in their worldviews), those who were randomly assigned to the stink condition expressed significantly more disapproval toward gay men than did those in the no-stink condition. It wasn’t that the bad smell simply made these participants crankier in general while pondering their feelings on social issues. In fact, their opinions of other minority groups (such as blacks and the elderly)
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