Conditioned Mindscape

In one of the episodes of the TV sitcom Friends, Monica discovers to her horror that the seeming mature and prosperous-looking beau with whom she’s had gone out, was, in fact, hardly old enough to vote. So why is he now being rejected, the agitated teenager wants to know. After stammering around for explanations, Monica exclaims: “It’s icky!”

Monica’s outburst sidesteps the teenager’s query: why was it all right to go out with someone considered to be older and was it only retrospectively knowledge that suddenly made it seem disgusting? The teenager’s question also raises fundamental questions about the perceived universality versus innate subjectivity of our moral judgments and responses.

All physical contacts, which certainly includes sex, is considered potentially polluting or disgusting under a formulation called jujupsa in the Indic tradition. As the pioneer of research into the physiology and psychology of disgust Paul Rozin notes, when we have sex we temporarily “suspend” our capacity for disgust; something most of us will do only under certain circumstances. “Except for very promiscuous males who will stick their tongues in the mouths of virtually any woman,” he says, “imagined sexual encounters with most other people are usually considered offensive.”

Here we're only talking about realistically imagined scenarios with ordinary people, not overheated fantasies or bowdlerised romps in the boudoir with airbrushed archetypes. But even ‘normal’ sex seems to be disgusting when it is judged deviant when, as in Monica's example, one partner is extremely young or old or, in rare cases, isn't even human!

Such a sentiment is reflected in the celebrated stanza of Adi Shankaracharya’s Bhaja-Govindam on the ‘burden’ of women’s breasts (naristhanabhara) and the region of their navels (nabhidesham). These are nothing but parts of the body formed by fat and flesh that is destined to expire!

The conditioning of the mind plays a pivotal role in this. How critical this was revealed in a landmark experiment: Rozin put asterilised cockroach in fruit juice and offered others chocolate fudge shaped like dog do. He asked whether subjects would wear Adolf Hitler’s laundered sweater. Most people refused, even when they knew the cockroach and sweater were clean and that the fudge was in fact fudge. Mind conditioning proved too strong.