Welcome to Rising Gorge

….in which I meditate upon the “gag factor”. So—trigger warning: this is gonna get…eww, gross!

Lately in Oklahoma, one public school had a “fundraiser” at which students licked peanut butter off of other students’ bare toes.
Followed quickly by a fundraiser” at another school, where the event was students licking each others’ armpits.

(Before we go any farther: for what charity or cause were they raising funds? I don’t know and can’t imagine.)

Has anybody read John Updike? His short stories and his novels, notably Couples, have descriptions of that kinda thing. I remember as an adolescent reading about sex in some adulterous affair he was describing, where he talked about his pleasure in taking the woman’s toes in his mouth: it was summer, he might find a little flake of a dried leaf or sump’n….and in his novel Kush his character describes drinking a few drops of his lover’s urine. I wondered if I would EVER come to like that sort of thing? Was that what grownups do? I knew I would never want o do it TO some guy, but I also felt queasy about the thought of being on the receiving end of such attentions. What was wrong with me?!?

But back to the Ok schools: they couldn’t raise funds by giving people the chance to watch such activities as toe licking and armpit licking if there weren’t some kind of frisson involved. I mean who would pay money to watch the students shaking hands with each other, patting each other on the head or back, and the like? No, people come there to watch an activity which will make the gorge rise, make their stomachs churn.

It reminds me of the “jokes” adolescent boys delight in, which aren’t really jokes in the sense that the aim is to make the listener laugh. They involve a setup where the punchline reveals that one of the characters in the joke scenario has unwittingly eaten something disgusting—and it turns out he wasn’t even the first person to eat it, somebody else already regurgitated it! 😂😂😂😂😂😂! It is the joke teller who is amused, by the look of repulsion and the noises of disgust exhibited by his interlocutor.
If that gag reaction weren’t elicited, these japes would be pointless. Good times!

what’s behind all this? If you’ve ever inadvertently taken something into your mouth which wasn’t food ( it doesnt have to be something repulsive, just not edible) you know it goes shooting outta your maw like a cannonball, with tremendous energy and conviction. It’s like a survival mechanism.

I think this is a basic human inhibition. In the throes of sexual ecstasy such as the priapic Mr.Updike ( of blessèd memory!) was describing, idk, maybe the gag reflex is muted temporarily?

Or possibly, the thought of the pleasure he was giving, his pride in that, overwhelmed his inhibition? Because: when my dog licks my toes—it DOES feel so good, tickle-y , a totally novel sensation! And I’m sure our dogs would lick our armpits too, if we presented them salty with sweat, and THAT would also feel delightful.

But (and here I realize I may lose the Ettes— it’s ok, my sisters) I think the only reason one can take pleasure from a pet’s polymorphously perverse tongue gyrations is that the pet is NOT human. I KNOW the dog doesn’t feel her gorge rising, stifle the impulse to gag, as she licks someone”s smelly toes—she’s doing it because she wants to. For whatever reason, she likes it!

So here, at last, I reckon is the nub of my visceral condemnation of the toe sucking and armpit licking after-school activities:

They are de-humanizing.

it is not human to be able to watch another human sucking your toes without feeling the shiver of empathetic repulsion.
And it is not human to be able to perform these oral acts without gagging.

This is the kind of stuff animals do.

Amimals…and one other specie of human:

those who aspire to sainthood by mortification of the flesh.

Let’s just take the voluntary abasement of the foot-washing ritual. It’s only symbolic these days of course, people’s feet may be smelly from their shoes, but they won’t be caked with excrement from the roads, hirny with calluses like they woulda been in Jesus’ time, and also, although they aren’t most people’s ideal of the most beautiful body part, we don’t regard them as religiously “unclean”. Still, the overcoming of the natural human repugnance for such a task is supposed to be the salvific feature of that ceremony. Lenten fasting, the deliberate frustration of appetite, is another such practice.

St. Catherine of Siena was ordered to clean the walls and floor of her cell with her tongue—but even her confessor nearly tossed his Eucharistic cookies when she related that she had swallowed spider webs with the live spiders in them .

When St Theresa of Lisieux was dying of tuberculosis, her devout sister nuns jostled each other for the chance to drink the bloody sputum she had expectorated.

Such activities are methods of mortifying the flesh, of deliberately dissociating and alienating oneself from what is universally and quintessentially human.

Can any reasonably benevolent human authority want to encourage this? Can any deity reasonably well disposed toward human beings delight in this?

About the human authorities like those in charge in the Oklahoma public schools, I have no hesitation in answering : NO.

About the deity……no comment.