Although typical side effects of sex such as sweat, semen, saliva and body odors can trigger disgust, this feeling decreases in women with sexual arousal. This is the result of a Dutch study.

Using 90 subjects, the researchers at the University of Groningen found that sexual arousal significantly lowers the disgust threshold in women: “Sex can be dirty, but most people don’t seem to mind that,” they write. To find out why this is the case, they divided the subjects into three groups. The first of them was shown a woman-friendly soft porn film, the second sports clips that tend to arouse joy, and the third completely neutral pictures of a train journey.

The test subjects now had to indicate their sexual arousal on a scale of one to ten before they were given 16 disgust-triggering tasks by the researchers. Among other things, they were to drink from a cup in which a dead fly was floating, holding the bones of a dead animal and placing worn underpants in a laundry bag. The group of women who rated their arousal as relatively high completed most of these tasks and also rated them as less disgusting overall than subjects in the other two groups.

Since body odor, sweat, saliva and semen are among the things that can normally trigger disgust, the mechanism thus documented is of great importance from an evolutionary point of view: the sinking disgust threshold caused by sexual arousal ensures that people can reproduce.

Older studies had already shown that sexual arousal in men has a similar effect. completed most of these tasks and also rated them as less disgusting overall than the subjects in the other two groups.