Why disgust is a turn-off

If you plug the words “sexual turn-ons” into your search engine, you will find yourself presented with all sorts of interesting and (mostly) dubious pieces of wisdom. You will have to make up your own mind about that world of net-nonsense but here’s a piece of information that you can bank on: if you want to increase your chances of having sex, try not to disgust your prospective partner.

This information comes from a new study that was ground-breaking in that it not only relied on women’s reports of arousal but also objectively measured their levels of physical sexual arousal.

The study involved women aged 18 to 42 who were shown disgusting images and then asked to watch an erotic film. The disgusting images included things like injured people, human corpses, faeces and people vomiting. The erotic films were produced and directed by women and were specifically intended for women.

In a second group of women, the subjects first watched the erotic video and then watched disgusting images. Then, in a third group, the women were shown frightening images before being shown an erotic film, while a fourth group watched the erotic film before watching the frightening images. The frightening images included violent people, dangerous animals, weapons, extreme heights, tornadoes and fire.

In all of the groups, the women were asked to insert a vaginal photoplethysmograph, a clear acrylic tampon-shaped device that measures blood flow to the vagina and indicates sexual arousal. The women were also asked to report their levels of arousal, disgust and fear after each experiment.

The results showed that women exposed to disgusting images before viewing the erotic film were three times less sexually aroused than either the women who were exposed to fear-inducing images or those who saw the erotic film first. It also emerged that women who are highly sensitive to disgust show greater disgust when sexually aroused, while women who are less sensitive to disgust reduce their disgust sensitivity even more when they are already sexually aroused.

This is interesting because you might think that fear would be quite a strong sexual turn-off as well. In fact, we do know from other research that for men disgust is not such a turn-off but for women it seems to be a big problem. This is probably because disgust is a protective evolutionary emotion that encourages people to reject anything that might cause disease. Women are more vulnerable to contracting diseases during sex and have worse outcomes once they are infected.

So the clear message here, if you want to enhance your chances of sex, is that you might want to think twice before you eat spaghetti with your hands or share the video of your recent hernia operation on your next date.