getting too close
unfiltered thoughts on disgust and discomfort
Thoughts on the gym, tapeworms, hot chocolate, Britney Spears, and the word ‘rawdogging’. Stay with me?
At the gym and I’m jittering a bit, it’s 5.30pm on a Monday, probably the worst time to choose for this really, full of sweating boys who beat their chests and pump their biceps in the streaky mirrors, but I had a flat viewing at 3.30 and then hot chocolate with friends at 4. I spent a year coming to this gym at 6am, five days a week, dragging myself out of bed and downing a cup of green tea, swallowing half a banana and biting back bile. I’d flick through three playlists over two hours, auto-generated by the Spotify algorithm: ‘early morning gentle workout’, ‘energising wakeup workout’, then ‘hype workout’, as I gradually emerged into wakeful consciousness. In the rests between sets I’d look at the other 6am regulars and think, why are you here? It was mostly young women, like me. There was a blonde lady, a corporate type with a stern face I sort of recognised, maybe I’d seen her about town. There was a large powerlifter, with straps on her hands and cropped dark hair, who grunted as she squatted in a way most women didn’t. There was my wax therapist, who sometimes nodded at me, making me blush and count on one hand how many people had seen my vulva. If I ever made eye contact with any of them, I felt ashamed, as if I’d somehow got too-close-for-comfort. It was all very well to wonder what they were doing here at 6am, but part of that wondering seemed to involve entering an unspoken contract of silent un-acknowledgement around our actual lifting, running, sweating bodies.
Then there was a girl who was so skinny I could have put my hands around her waist with room to spare. We’d work out on the benches next to each other and I’d hate her so much, I hated myself even more. She rowed 18kg dumbbells without flinching, she had the shoulders of an Olympic swimmer and the pointed face of a character in a picture book. She noted her reps and weights down in a little notebook. I was never good enough for that. But I was dedicated. I listened to wellness podcasts whilst making dinner for one. I learnt about things like progressive overload and how many grams of protein you could fit in a pancake on Instagram Reels, and I told my friends I couldn’t meet them at the pub because I had to work out the following morning, I had to keep to my split. If I missed one of my two glute days I’d never look like the girls on my phone. If I missed upper body day, my chronic back pain would return, and then I’d miss the pub anyway, because I’d be flat out in bed, hating myself, which of course I was already, at 5.49am, eking out eleven minutes and wondering why I was already awake, wondering why.
It’s been nearly two years now, and I don’t wake up at 6am anymore. I’m still an early riser, but frankly I can’t hack that. I miss it sometimes. I miss it often, actually. I miss seeing the sun rise over Westgate every morning, the way I tracked the passage of the year through the variegated shades of sky as I arrived and left. There was a brief period in the early summer where I managed to time it to just the right moment. Ascending the escalator my gaze went white for a second, enveloping me in newborn glow. Tendrils of lo-fi escaped my AirPods into the aether. In those few seconds I felt like the first person alive. I felt like the last person left.
That person isn’t me anymore. I barely recognise her — her discipline, the value she afforded that discipline. Now I go to the gym at 5pm, a couple of weekdays, and battle for the chalk-stained dumbbells and the damp benches in the free weights section. Regarding discipline I read Foucault and say things like actually-I-think-wellness-is-just-another-technique-of-power-disguised-as-resistance and occasionally I keep to a writing schedule. When I’m at the gym I play French dance pop and Grimes on full volume, tolerate the grunts and shrugs in response to my apologies and excuse-mes, my pardon-me-how-many-sets-do-you-have-lefts. When I slip into that strange whirlpool of longing and loathing for someone else’s body, when I make the inevitable accidental eye contact, I acknowledge it then let the current take me somewhere else.
Sometimes it’s hard, though. Like today, because, look, I’m jittering. My blood is running with hot chocolate, which makes for a bad pre-workout. It’s made me bloat, badly, so I swallowed a peppermint capsule before I left. My breath tastes like mint choc chip, which I hate. Frankly I’m scared of farting in the gym (and now I’m scared of writing that — god, how funny). And I’m wearing all black, rather than my purple leggings, because subconsciously I know it makes you look skinnier, wearing all black.
I can’t unlearn this stuff. I swallowed it long ago and now it sits inside my stomach like an extra intestine, gripping me tight and griping when I fail to pay it suitable attention.
At a conference a month or so ago someone told me about the tapeworm diet, where people deliberately ingest parasites before travelling, so they can eat what they want without getting food poisoning. We’d spent the day listening to papers about bodily fluids and bodily boundaries — about digestion, excretion, decomposition, about piss and shit and bile and masticated food and effluvia of every sort — but I still recoiled. Then a couple weeks later a friend at the pub mentioned that the Victorians did the same, in order to lose weight. They put the parasites in little pills. That’s what this is like, this stuff. You think you’re saving yourself, but it eats you alive. It eats you alive from the inside out. I’ve always loved the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake which swallows its own tail. Or more prosaically, which eats its own arse. Infinity! Oneness. Boundlessness — or boundless hunger, the will to consume, to constrict. Consume what? Oneself. The promise of an end which never comes. We do this to find a way to heaven and in doing so we waste our time on earth.
Apparently it’s coming back, the tapeworm diet. Apparently it’s cool again. People swallow them in pills. Like natural Ozempic. Everything changes but nothing changes.
I’m trying to get to a point, a point about the hot chocolate. I’m struggling to reach it, though, because that’s what it’s like, isn’t it, this? You’re trying to get to the gym but you have to change into the black leggings, you’re trying to order hot chocolate but you’re calculating the calories. I didn’t do that today, I’m proud of myself for that. Two years ago my brain would be all numbers, all oat-milk-or-almond, and six years ago I wouldn’t have even tried. Instead today I stood in the chocolate shop with my friends, watching the staff smush sweet grainy ooze through a strainer, and I thought only about a paper I read not long ago, which connected the nineteenth-century European craze for chocolate, an exotic foodstuff wholly reliant on the brutal excesses of the Triangular Trade, to concurrent public works projects in sewerage and excretory technology. Essentially to say that they about the same time the Victorians were popping parasite pills and cleaning up the undesirables, they were figuratively eating shit, kakao and kaka, swallowing the abject into their good colonial stomachs. It’s a great paper; I’m doing a bad job at summarising it.1 Except to repeat the truism that there are politics in how we eat, in how we shit, and in how we regulate both.
I don’t mention it in the chocolate shop, though. Because wouldn’t that be weird, to bring it up here, even though that’s what makes the thesis so compelling? Wouldn’t it be, well, disgusting?
Whenever something is being restricted, disciplined, sanitised, tidied-up, it is worth examining in closer detail, whether that’s on the social or individual level. Whenever something is being labelled disgusting, it is worth asking why. The sociologist Deborah Lupton has written that disgust operates as a ‘pedagogy’, a means of shaping individuals’ behaviour, making them more ‘socially acceptable’.2 Lupton and other feminists drawing on Foucault have asserted that the postmodern consumer-subject is placed under a dual pressure, to engage in untrammelled and enthusiastic consumption of goods, and to enact a strict self-discipline, a regulation aimed at producing a productive, moral citizen. This dual impulse to excess and requirement of discipline, the sanctioned-yet-limited drives to consume and restrict, is one of the paradoxes of contemporary life, and yet it is an bifurcated identity we learn to perform early. An example from my own life: for a while as a teenager terrified of gaining weight I kept a single artisan chocolate bar in my jewellery box and nibbled a corner each night. I think I saw my body as a beast I had to tame in order to survive. I was scared sometimes it would eat me. I was scared I’d eat myself. But I wanted to consume, and I permitted myself to, enjoyed even the status markers of the artisan chocolate, its aestheticism, the 70% purity of it, the conspicuous-conscious-consumption of it all. I hadn’t yet learnt that I was imprisoning myself in culture; that the way out of this bind would be to eat the whole thing.
Anyway here’s the point I’m getting to. Why am I bloated after eating out but not at home, I googled recently, after a meal out. I looked at the still-open tab again after drinking that hot chocolate. Because you’re happy, the internet tells me. Because when talking and laughing, you swallow air as well as food. Because when food is good, you eat it faster, and with gastronomic glee. It isn’t that the food is bad, as I’d convinced myself, or toxic or inflammatory. It is, in fact, that the food, and the commensal culture of the table it sits upon, is so very good. When we restrict some of our bodily functions, when we insist on the closed, immaculate, neat and clean ideal of what Bakhtin called the classical body, we lose the pleasurable experience of the world that the others can bring us. Or to put it another way: if we can’t cope with that which instantly disgusts us — with bloating, with gas, with what polite theorists call excretory functions — we can’t claim that which brings us joy.
Let me segue sharply. Take Britney Spears. During and after the success of the #FreeBritney movement, which liberated the star from her oppressive family-run conservatorship, Britney began to post videos on her Instagram account of her dancing. Wearing teeny-tiny noughties outfits, she’d shake her hips whilst making eyeliner-contact with the camera. People — by which I mean the internet — found it weird. Messy. Concerning. Cryptic. Odd. Gross. Disgusting.
Britney, though, called it joy.
And she’s right. There’s nothing better than dancing alone in your bedroom, with your top ruched up and your sweatpants low, whipping round your unbrushed hair like a child with a glow-stick on Guy Fawkes Night. There’s nothing better than being in your body like this, uncaring, caring only for its joy in the world. But the world — or again, the internet, if that makes any difference — has not been kind to Britney, the woman with the glowstick-gold hair, the oversized child of Hit Me Baby all grown up. She’s too close to her body, too close with her body. We liked her when she was body-as-beauty, when she was tender flesh. Now she is too much body, a body which has refused to stay in her place (remembering, of course, that pollution is matter out of place).
Britney took down most of the videos in late 2024.
If you start to probe at the pedagogy of disgust you will find it everywhere.
Here’s another segue. Recently a few people have told me they’re quitting social media or restricting phone usage, say, by avoiding headphones in public places or stopping scrolling on their commute. I’m giving up headphones, I’m rawdogging life, a friend said in the hot chocolate shop, and we all shuddered and squirmed, at both the visceral image and the millennial cringe. I wonder now if the squirm is useful, if we should have stayed with it. In Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities, the philosopher Elspeth Probyn called on feminists to revalue disgust, that which violates ‘abstraction or distance’, which brings us into too-close-for-comfort contact with other bodies and beings.3 Remembering shit when you taste chocolate’s dark soft sweetness, imagining rawdogging in a public cafe, encountering unexpectedly the body of another. This discomfort, this shame at our own disgust, Probyn suggests it can be productive to sit with it, to reflect on and redirect it.
Here, what were we disgusted by? By the suggestion of sex, messy sex, or the rawness more generally, the sense of a bloody, unmediated touching with the world. I suppose even the cringyness is a sort of touching, an uncomfortable friction that gets just too close to the real. But above all there’s the idea of rawness, which connotes carnality, carne as both edible and sensual flesh, two different ways of intense, perhaps painfully transformative contact, of stripping back and bare. Rawness is the opposite of culture, says Lévi-Strauss. How different is that rawness from the state my friend was trying to escape, that of constant mediation disguised as immediacy, of layering up and blocking out, a techno-numbing multi-tasking hyper-cultural escape from interaction with the sensory actuality of the material world? No wonder it evokes both frisson and fear.
I think what I’m suggesting — and I’m aware I’m doing it in a roundabout, personal, blog-posty way — is that disgust and rawness and viscerality, even the abject, can offer valuable ways of thinking and being in the world. I have found in these concepts not just new ways to think about my intellectual interests and my gendered (and intersectionally privileged) identity position, but also new ways to conduct myself, to notice and amend some of the practices I have learnt from society. If I rigorously surveil and discipline my own body out of fear of being disgusting (say, through the universal yet embarrassing facts of bloating, farting, needing to shit), do I lose the ability to connect through my body with others, both over and with food? If I react with a sudden gut reflex of disgust at an object, image, or another person’s body, how can sitting with that disgust help me understand its origins and operations? What is that disgust trying to teach me, what social, political, and moral values does it conceal? And if I don’t pay attention to the more visceral, less pretty, less intellectual connections between things and people, will I fail to enact my ethical and political ideals due to an internalised sense of propriety?
I want to end with a final segue, or perhaps an invitation to dive headfirst into that whirlpool of longing-loathing I described at the start of this essay, the visceral overwhelm which sometimes submerges me when I encounter another’s actual body. The sense of too-close-for-comfort anxiously surging within my stomach. Disgust and discomfort often feel like waves. They can threaten to overwhelm. But they can also lift, and enter, and change, and carry the longing-loathing body elsewhere.
I know I said I was going to write shorter pieces but as my undergrad tutors discovered long ago, I’m incapable of keeping anything under 2000 words. One thing this is, though, is more unfiltered than most of my essays on here. So I’d love to hear your thoughts and any reading recommendations on disgust.
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The paper is Alison Moore, ‘Kakao and Kaka: Chocolate and the Excretory Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Europe’ (2005)
Deborah Lupton, ‘The pedagogy of disgust: The ethical, moral and political implications of using disgust in public health campaigns’ (2015)
Elspeth Probyn, ‘Eating Disgust, Feeling Shame’ in Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (2000)
Very well done. You’re one of the few people on Substack who can write. Or perhaps I should say, who can write on Substack. There are many people who can write, but who don’t write well on Substack. Because we’re in the attention economy here and everything is performative, and so often suffers from look-at-me-ism. This reads as though it was written for a conference a few months down the road. That’s a compliment!
Also, a question: have you read William Ian Miller‘s Anatomy of Disgust? Very good IMHO.
Finally, an anecdote about Martin Luther, who was known to be an earthy guy. He and his wife made dinner for a bunch of people. He asked them if they enjoyed it. They said yes. And he responded: “well then why aren’t you all burping and farting?”
Nice post. Good reading flow; astonished that you can talk in public so vulnerably about all those internal anxieties which would otherwise seem to inhibit sharing. Courageous—not as fearlessness but overcoming fear. Like most people reading this, I have fewer anxieties and more inhibitions. It’s admirable.
I like how the piece communicates your skill as a writer — whether or not you edited this heavily, it reads raw, flowing and uncomfortably captivating.