Mastering Fear by Rikke Schubart

Author:Rikke Schubart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501336720
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2018-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Magic Circle and the Moral Circle

Let us return to the question my German colleague asked, why we should watch extremely disgusting horror. In Chapter 1, I mention sociologist Margee Kerr who explains people self-scare because they feel stronger and more confident after visits to extreme haunts.53 Basically, overcoming your fears makes you less fearful. The same dynamic is the core of disgust exposure therapy, which is when people become less disgust sensitive by exposing themselves to disgusting objects. “Clinically, exposure therapy is done in gradual steps of learning how to relax, confront, and accept your terrorizing-repulsive trigger.”54 By slowly exposing oneself to disgust, you learn to stay in your response emotion of terror-repulsion, and control your instinct to pull back from the disgusting object. You become less disgust sensitive. Such exposure is the appeal of texts that heap disgusting things upon the viewer, like Hostel and The Human Centipede (2009, Tom Six), or reality shows like Fear Factory. Basically, their challenge is how much we can stomach, before we must break game.

Why, you may ask, is this relevant to women? Is there a feminist perspective on disgust and gender? Yes, I think there is. Social experiments show women are more disgust sensitive than men. Haidt, McCauley and Rozin say, “gender was the most powerful predictor” of disgust and that “the best demographic predictor of disgust sensitivity in our data was gender. Women scored significantly higher than men in each of our five samples.”55 Women are more easily disgusted than men are. There is no innate reason for this difference. We can speculate that society expects men to be more emotional robust than it expects women to be, and that men, therefore, self-disgust more than women, and so become less disgust sensitive. Social expectations about gender and disgust could explain why men watch disgusting horror films, that women avoid. As my approach is textual analysis and not qualitative data, I can only speculate if our socially constructed gender roles explain the difference in men and women’s taste and choice in horror films.

The downside to women’s higher disgust sensitivity is that we are more fearful than men: “Highly disgust sensitive people [are] guarding themselves from external threats: they are more anxious, more afraid of death, and less likely to seek out adventure and new experiences. Disgust appears to make people cautious not only about what they put into their mouths, but about what they do with their bodies.”56 To be more disgust sensitive than men means women are also more anxious. It is my experience that women dislike films with extreme disgust more than do men—at least, this is what I have heard people say.

I must underline, I am not saying men like being disgusted any more than women do. Rather, the point is that disgust is part of the meta-narrative of how men and women are, and how they ought to behave. When men practice to master extreme emotions, this is challenging, and perhaps it is equally challenging for men and women.

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