It's Gross
Morality sure is interesting. It’s a simple concept, charity good, murder bad, but it’s extremely complicated when it comes down to really attempting to understand it. Take the idea of nature vs nurture for instance. If you took two twins, and you raised them in totally separated households, and then after they’d grown up interviewed them and asked them about their morals, how different would their answers be? What if one house the family was a good, upstanding middle income home where they always respected rules, and the other was the home of a sleazy car salesman who believed that if someone has something bad happen to them, it’s on them for it happening? Do you think that when you interview those two twins the difference in their levels of morality would be different than if you raised them in similar environments, or even if you raised them in the exact same household?
The reason I want to talk about this is because I think there’s one argument that we as zoos get that might actually be one of the hardest arguments to counter. It’s something that we see all the time, it’s something that’s easy to discount as unimportant, while actually I think it might be one of the most important things we’ll have to tackle in our fight for acceptance.
Recently, prominent Twitter statistician Aella (https://x.com/Aella_Girl) tweeted out a simple question.Are you Vegan/Is bestiality wrong due to animals inability to consent?” The question is a good one. It attacks a very basic hypocrisy within society. Obviously consent is unimportant when it comes to the actual evil atrocities involved in the meat industry. In fact, many zoos are meat eaters too. And yet, those same people will turn around and complain that bestiality is wrong because animals lack the ability to consent. Now, I hate this whole proposition. I don’t really want the moral justification for our sexuality to be “Well, we murder them, why can’t we fuck them?” But, I noticed something really interesting reading the replies to the question. At time of publication there’s 186 replies so I’m not going to bother quoting them, but a lot read something like this. “I don’t think the issue with bestiality is that animals can’t consent. The issue is, it’s gross.”
Now, OBVIOUSLY “it’s gross” isn’t a very good argument. If intellectually challenged even a little bit, it falls to the wayside. Children might say eating vegetables is gross, that doesn’t make brussel sprouts morally wrong. If I look inside the engine of my car all the grease would probably be pretty gross looking, that doesn’t mean engines are bad. If most of these meat eaters actually saw how the sausage was made, literally and metaphorically, they would probably be extremely grossed out. In fact, a lot of them know that and would hate to put themselves in that position. And yet, that doesn’t actually change whether they morally decry the creation of those plastic wrapped meat rolls they get at the grocery store.
And yet, when it comes to the “grossness” of something, I think it’s hard to tackle that problem from an objective and argumentative position. To be “grossed out” is an emotion, not a real argument. It’d be like if someone saw a wolf kill and eat a rabbit, and that made them sad, and then you said
“Well actually wolves eat rabbits all the time, they need to do it to survive so actually you just witnessed the circle of life in practice. Isn’t that cool?”
Technically that response is factual, and I’m sure the wolf would not argue that getting fed is sad, and yet if you say that to someone that’s upset in the moment their reaction is very rarely going to be to turn back and say “Yes you’re right I’ve approached this from another angle and suddenly I’m not concerned about it anymore.” Because emotions aren’t logical arguments. They’re states of being that happen to us that can even supersede doing the rational thing.
It’s also pretty interesting that grossness tends to be a fairly united experience for people. Obviously certain people find things more or less gross, but I think the vast majority of people would find a puddle of vomit on the sidewalk pretty gross. Or a hairball stuck in the shower drain. Or maggots in their food. All emotions that we experience have their evolutionary reasons for existing. We get happy when good things happen, and therefore our brain wants to encourage us to have more good things happen. We get sad when bad things happen, and therefore we want to avoid bad things. We get scared when things are unknown because evolutionary if we don’t show caution to the dark it might end up eating us alive. But what about grossness? Well, the maggots in your food one is a decent example of a way that it can help. Rotten food makes us sick, and so feeling grossed out by an indication of rotten food helps to tell us to avoid it. But that’s a very extreme example. What about something like menstruation? The menstrual cycle is something that happens to literally once a month, it’s very normal, and yet to a lot of men it’s something that’s extremely icky. Or how about butchering an animal? Most people would be very grossed out if they had to skin and eat a rabbit nowadays, but eating meat is something that should theoretically be evolutionarily rewarded, right? But, our common experience is the same. Even many hardcore carnists would probably not be thrilled to do that.
And then when it comes to sexuality, there’s a lot of things people find gross. A lot of straight men might find the idea of them receiving anal sex gross even if it’s their wife pitching it to them, although they might not complain if their female significant other wants to give it a shot on the receiving end. I was talking to my younger brother the other day, and we were watching the gay episode from season 1 of The Last Of Us, which features a long term relationship between two older, burly men. When they kissed, I noticed he looked away from the screen, and I asked him why. He said that it was gross. Generally he’s not a homophobic person, definitely not the most left leaning, but one of his best friends is gay, so I was really surprised by the reaction. I pushed him on it, and he said “I don’t think guys kissing is bad, this was just gross because they both have beards.”
Now, people can be grossed out about whatever they want. I don’t particularly care whether or not my brother doesn’t like it when the beards touch so long as he’s generally an ally to the cause. It becomes an issue however when it starts to influence morality. Taking it back to the gays again, the argument around homosexuality was never that there was anything wrong with it. God hates the gays sure, but when we look past the surface level of the criticism, the more realistic reason why gay discrimination existed was because people found gay sex to just be kinda icky. This is reflected incredibly well in the difference between the perception of two men dating versus two women. The sentiment is somewhat less prevalent now, but if you look at media from 90’s, early 2000s, and even into the 2010s, the idea of two women hooking up was seen as super hot, and was fetishised by straight males, where as gay male couples were still seen as taboo, and bad, and gross. The predominant cultural class could appreciate two women together as that’s two of what they like (Although god forbid the women reject men over their attraction), but two dudes is zero of the thing they want, and therefore even though the sexuality at the end of the day is the same, one is hot, and one is gross. One is taboo in a kinky way, and one is taboo in an immoral way.
Sexuality isn’t the only thing targeted by the moral gross police though. Have you heard of lab grown meat? It’s a very cool technological breakthrough being explored as a way to make meat production cheaper, more accessible, better for the environment, and less just totally evil. The idea is this. They can take muscle cells from some kind of animal, say a cow for instance. Then, they place those cells in a bioreactor and the cells are given a specific diet and exposed to the same kinds of conditions that would be found were they growing normally, and that’s what they do. They grow. Give it some time and eventually you have a chunk of meat that is quite literally animal meat, but without the need to harm an animal at all.
Now, some of you out there might already be queazing a bit at this definition. It’s a very scientific process. But, from an objective standpoint, it’s just a better way to do things on every level than it is to do the whole animal slaughter thing. And I mean, is it really any more gross than the way that we harvest animals now? I think the real reason find it gross is because the idea of something created in a lab seems odd, but if you look at the billions if not trillions of dollars that have been poured into optimizing animal agriculture based around the kinds of food, the drugs, the genetic manipulation and specific cross breeding, the meat you’re eating from a farm is really just as lab made as any kind of cultivated meat. I think from pretty much every single angle, lab grown meat is something that we should be absolutely encouraging, and putting money into so we can try and escape the trap of animal slaughter altogether. Even if you might not trust lab meat right this second, I think many people would agree that it’s something that we should probably keep researching. And yet, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Montana and Indiana all have already banned lab grown meat, and 6 other are working on doing the same. Now, you can make the argument that a lot of that has to do with the GDPs of a lot of those states relying heavily on meat production, but if you ask the average person on the street, they’re not thinking at that level. They just think it’s kind of gross.
This is where we’re at with zoosexuality. I really don’t think there’s a single good argument that really contests the points that we’re making. There’s definitely a couple ethical considerations that I think are important that we talk about, but those are less hard stopping points and more just things to keep an eye out for as a community as we grow. But like we established, grossed-out-ness isn’t an argument, it’s an emotion. So what do we do about that?
Well, there’s really only one thing that can solve for grossness and that’s exposure. My brother is grossed out by two very masculine bearded men kissing because that’s not what homosexuality looks like in his head. He’s not grossed out by homosexuality, it’s just the social expectation that doesn’t match his view, and he reacts by calling it gross. But, if that was more common of a trait in common media, I bet he sees it another three times and he never even thinks about it again.
A hairball in the drain is gross unless you’re a plumber, and then it’s just part of the job. Engine grease is gross unless you’re a mechanic. Lab grown meat is gross if you’ve never seen it before, don’t understand how it’s made, and picture a bunch of scientists doing weird chemistry until they create life in some kind of Frankenstein nightmare and then ask you to eat it. But once it starts getting rolled out and people actually see it’s exactly the same product minus the extreme cruelty, it wont be gross anymore.
And this is why representation is so important for us. The only way to expose people to zoosexuality is by being big and loud enough that they see us. And their first reaction might be a bad one. They’re going to see us and they’re going define us by the sense of grossness that they get. But grossness being an emotion has an upside too. It’s not a wall, like an argument trying to put us down. It’s a speed bump. Something that you don’t beat by flooring it and hitting it as hard as you can, but by slowing down, taking your time, and then suddenly it’s not an issue at all. The second time they see a zoo, they might still be grossed out, but the reaction wont be so visceral. The third time they see a zoo, maybe it’s with some art and they might get that feeling in the pit of their stomach, but they’re digesting. The fourth time they see a zoo, the feeling might still be there, but it’s not a big deal. And this is even more true for more powerful forms of representation. Zoo characters in media, zoo art, zoo songs. All of those things make it feel less gross, and just more... normal.
At the end of the day, everyone what is and isn’t gross for them. I personally find milk disgusting. The idea of drinking what’s essentially a biologically made protein shake designed for babies hits to me the same as someone saying that they want to eat umbilical cords, and the fact that it’s produced by keeping cows permanently in lactation by impregnating them over and over again without reprieve adds to that feeling. But, even though I’ve expressed this to my boyfriend many times, he still likes to keep cream around for his coffee. He doesn’t think that it’s not gross, but he’s adjusted. I think it’s important to not just discount when people’s reaction to zoosexuality is to be grossed out. I think fighting against that feeling is going to be half the battle we face. But grossness is what we make of it, and it’s up to us to show that we’re no more gross than anything else. Don’t think about the fact that every food has an acceptable amount of insect parts that are allowed to be in them per gram (up to 30 fruit fly eggs or one live maggot per hundred grams in tomato sauce, wow!)
Thanks for reading!
Article written by Tarro (June 2025)
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