#aj plays psychologist

[aj-lenoire]

by the way whilst aj the viewer is intrigued by this episode aj the psychologist is very much horrified

[aj-lenoire]

HEY WHOA don’t put these fuckin stanford-prison-idolising fuckers with actual psychology graduates, the ethics board on my program were RUTHLESS (as they should well have been) and no professor in his right MIND would sign off on an undergraduate experiment using live subjects?? with ptsd?! who the FUCK approved this?! i’ll rip their phd out with my TEETH

[aj-lenoire]

I find your poll fascinating and a little hilarious because my friendship group has had this exact discussion before of "not to defend incest, but if everyone is consenting and there will be no children, is it really that bad?"

Specifically it came from a few of us in the group read a lot of very kinky/fetishy fanfics which can make you start thinking about what is socially acceptable and why things are or are not.

find the poll here!

sexual disgust is really fascinating, i loved my morality module, and i think it’s something more people think about these days (like you said, kink and fetish) than they realise because they might not have the academic jargon

something worth pointing out is that incest is not always seen as bad even in fiction—Lone Star (1996) ends with the reveal that (spoilers) the romantic leads are half-siblings, but since they’re the only ones who know, and the woman can’t have kids, they decide to continue their relationship

but yeah kink and fetish are coming up more and more in disgust literature because they’re excellent examples of acts that are 100% not harmful (because the rules of consent are really explicit in bdsm spaces) yet some people might find them disgusting. unlike pathogen disgust, there’s not a clear reason why someone would have such a visceral negative reaction, certainly not one that’s innate, because there’s no biological reason to avoid kink the way you’d avoid something like rotting food that could sicken or kill you. the reaction is socialised--but disgust remains very difficult to alter.

(one interesting caveat to the kink/disgust discussion is that when you’re aroused, your disgust response is lowered, which might be able to provide insight on how to lower disgust responses to non-harmful ‘disgusting’ acts like kink or homosexuality)

also, it’s potentially worth mentioning that people with a more conservative political bent tend to have higher disgust sensitivity (that is, they are disgusted more easily), specifically they have much greater sexual disgust sensitivity, and it seems related to purity (or lack of it) because there’s ostensibly not much distinction between things like ‘being gay and having gay sex’ and ‘someone menstruating because they’re on their period’. disgust is a very indiscriminate reaction.

it’s thought that ambiguity mediates this relationship, because more ‘ambiguous’ lgbt+ identities (that challenge the western gender binary; identities like bisexuality, pansexuality or being transgender) tend to be more discriminated against