The Ick
Is a Border

There is a distinction the research makes, and an earlier version of this zine walked straight past it. It matters enormously, so it goes here, before the argument.

Paul Rozin's own framework separates two things that both feel like "ew."

Distaste is sensory. It is a response to the actual properties of a thing — bitter, sour, slimy, sticky, cold and wet in the wrong way. And it is there from the beginning. Put something bitter on a newborn's tongue and you get the gape face: mouth open, upper lip pulled back, nose wrinkled, brow down. It is highly conserved across species. It has been observed in humans in utero.

And then the finding that settles how deep it runs. In 1973 Jacob Steiner published observations of the gustofacial response in anencephalic newborns — infants born without most of the higher brain. They make the face too.

The response does not require a cortex. It isn't a judgement, it isn't an attitude, and it cannot be a prejudice, because there is nothing there to hold one.

Disgust proper is a different animal. Rozin calls it ideationally based and contamination-sensitive: you don't have to taste a cockroach to be disgusted by one. It attaches to ideas about things — where they have been, what they touched, what they count as.

This zine is about the second one. Everything that follows — the borders, the projections, the sorting of bodies — is the ideational kind doing political work. The sensory kind is not a prejudice and never was.

You were never a blank slate. You arrived with a body that already had positions on the world, and that gape is older than our species — history, carried in you. Which is, after all, the premise of this entire collection.

The gape was there at birth. The contamination logic was not, and small children are famously unbothered by it.

Paul Rozin and April Fallon, in a 1987 paper that still anchors the field, treat disgust as a food emotion at root — revulsion at the prospect of taking something into the mouth. Its objects are overwhelmingly of animal origin. And crucially, this kind develops, arriving across a child's first eight years or so rather than being present at the start.

They also describe what it runs on. Disgust obeys the laws of sympathetic magic — including the law of contagion, under which contact transfers an essence. A cockroach touches your sandwich; the sandwich is now inedible. Not partly inedible where the legs went. All of it. Forever.

Sit with that, because it's the whole argument in one move: the reaction is out of all proportion to any physical fact. No amount of chemistry explains the whole sandwich. What's operating is a rule about categories and contact — and rules about categories are things a culture teaches you.

Which means the border can be redrawn. People do it constantly, in both directions, without noticing.

In 2004 Greg Rouse, Shana Goffredi and Robert Vrijenhoek named a genus that shouldn't work.

Osedax — the name means bone-devourer — lives on whale skeletons on the deep sea floor. The adult females have no mouth and no gut at all. What they have instead is a root system: a branching, blood-supplied network that grows down into the bone, carrying symbiotic bacteria that break the bone down from inside.

The animal doesn't eat. It roots, like something between a worm and a small tree, into the skeleton of something enormous that died above it.

And the males never grow up. Dozens of them — tiny, paedomorphic, arrested partway through development — live inside the female's own tube, doing the one job they are there for.

Every clause of that is a small horror in English, and not one of it is a problem. It is a lineage that found a food source nobody else could reach, and built a body that could get at it. Read from inside, it's just competent.

The deep-sea anglerfish is the one everybody has heard about, usually told as a joke.

A male, far smaller than the female, finds her in the dark, bites on, and fuses. Tissues join. The two circulatory systems merge into one. He never leaves. It is the only case in nature of two vertebrates becoming, permanently, a single joined body.

Here is the part that isn't a joke, and it is the reason this zine exists.

In 2020 Jeremy Swann, Stephen Holland, Malte Petersen, Theodore Pietsch and Thomas Boehm looked at the genomes and found what the fusion cost. Species whose males attach temporarily have lost functional aicda — the gene behind antibody maturation. Species whose males attach permanently go further, some losing functional rag genes altogether, which abolishes the somatic shuffling of antigen receptors that is the defining hallmark of adaptive immunity.

Your immune system's entire job is telling you from not-you, and rejecting the not-you. So:

To be permanently joined to another body, they gave up the machinery that draws the line between self and other. They did not solve rejection. They dismantled the thing that rejects.

Nothing triggers the reflex like a corpse. So let's take the biggest one there is.

A whale dies and sinks. Down there, food arrives as a slow drizzle of scraps from far above — and now, all at once, forty tonnes of it lands in one place. Craig Smith and Amy Baco, reviewing the whole field in 2003, put the scale plainly: the sediment beneath a sunken carcass gets an initial pulse of organic matter equivalent to roughly 2,000 years of the normal background supply.

Then a town builds itself, in three overlapping stages.

Months to years. The mobile scavengers — sleeper sharks, hagfish, rat-tails — strip soft tissue at 40 to 60 kilograms a day.

Months to years. Enrichment opportunists move onto the enriched sediment and the exposed bones: dense assemblages of polychaetes and crustaceans, up to 40,000 animals per square metre.

Decades. The sulphophilic stage. Bone lipids break down without oxygen and give off sulphide; bacteria make a living out of the sulphide; a large, trophically complex community assembles on top of that. Smith and Baco report a mean of 185 macrofaunal species on a large skeleton at this stage — higher local diversity than any other hard surface in the deep sea.

Across the world's whale falls, 407 species. Twenty-one of them are known from nowhere else on Earth.

The thing you were taught was the end of a body is, down there, one of the most generous events that ever happens.

Now the part this zine was actually written for.

That reflex — the one that fires at a rooted worm and a fused fish — does not stay in the ocean. It gets pointed at people, and it does an enormous amount of work.

It fires at a feeding tube. At drooling. At an adult in incontinence pads. At a stim that isn't the socially cleared kind — the loud one, the wet one, the one with hands. At a communication device that speaks in a voice somebody decided was unpleasant. At bodies that need help with the parts of being alive that everyone has agreed to pretend are private.

Nobody says disgusting out loud. They don't have to. The reflex does its work in the face, in the half-step back, in the seat that stays empty, in the invitation that doesn't come, in the tone of the assessment paperwork.

Martha Nussbaum gave this its name in 2004: projective disgust. We take what we cannot stand about being animal — that we leak, decay, depend, and die — and we load it onto a group of people, who then function as a buffer between us and our own bodies. Push them out and the animal facts feel further away.

Which is why the ick is not a matter of taste, and why we are not asking anyone to find worms charming. Disgust is how a border gets enforced without anyone having to defend it. It doesn't argue. It just refuses, and then it acts hurt if you ask it to explain.

Go back to the worm.

It is still rooted in the bone. It still has no mouth. The males are still small and still in her tube. Not one fact about it has moved since page four.

If it reads differently now — and it might — then the thing that changed was on this side of the glass. That's the whole demonstration. The verdict was never in the water. It was in the frame, that part of the frame was learned, and a learned thing can be widened.

Your body may still not want to touch it. That's allowed, and it always was — that part isn't the frame, it's you, and it has a history in it older than our species. Not wanting to touch something is not the same as ruling it out of the world. The whole argument is the gap between those two.

And widening it is not a favour you do the deep sea. The deep sea is fine. It's a favour you do yourself, and everyone who has ever been on the far side of somebody's flinch — which, at some point, is everybody.

Because here is the thing the reflex is actually protecting you from, and it's not the worm: you are an animal. You leak, you decay, you need enormous amounts of help, and one day you will be food for something. Every one of those is also true of the whale, and the whale's version fed a town for thirty years.

The atoms doing all of this were made in stars. That part is true of the worm, the anglerfish, the whale, and you — the same calcium, the same carbon, the same everything, arranged into a few thousand ways of being alive, not one of which is the correct one.