Culture-bound syndrome
Jesse Bering on symbolic disgust as a culture-bound syndrome:
What induces the symbolic disgust response is defined by prevailing cultural forces. That’s to say, for the most part we’ve learned to morally loathe whatever it is that we’ve come to do; this information isn’t genetically inborn but socially acquired.
What might have made a Japanese person commit ritual suicide in the eighteenth century because he couldn’t stand to live with himself and his shameful social offense would for most of us today be quickly forgotten as a trifling incident. Given their sheer emotional intensity, it’s easy to mistake feelings of symbolic disgust for an immovable moral reality that exists outside our own subjective heads. But they don’t.
We don’t have to “learn” how to get diarrhea or vomit, or revolt at pus-filled sores. But we do have to learn the symbolic disgust, what to hate, shun, or shame, and that is culturally relative.
Bering’s essay that is basically an excerpt from his book Perv: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/disgust-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/
Look, I’m gonna side eye any opinion on menstruation authored by a man, but the essay Is PMS Real? by Frank Bures offers a fascinating glimpse at culture-bound syndromes:
The phenomenon of so-called culture-bound syndromes, which more recently have come to be known as “cultural syndromes,” or sometimes, “cultural idioms of distress.” It was a path I started down when I traveled to Nigeria to investigate magical penis theft, in which a person believes his (or sometimes her) genitals to have been stolen via magic. This is known in the medical literatures as koro, or “genital retraction syndrome,” and versions of it have been recorded, among other places, in China, Thailand, and India.
Trying to understand koro, in turn, lead me into a labyrinth of other syndromes, many of which seem unreal to Westerners, though not to those experiencing them. People have “wind attacks” in Cambodia, where the flow of wind through the body reverses or is blocked, causing dizziness, shortness of breath, numbness, and fever. In China some people suffer from “frigophobia,” or the “morbid fear of cold… and the need to wear excessive clothing.” In parts of India you can contract “gilhari syndrome” in which patients arrive at the hospital with swelling on the back of their necks, complaining that a gilhari (a kind of lizard) crawled under their skin and terrified that they will die if the creature reaches their neck.
Eventually this path led me back to my own culture, and to our own syndromes that don’t occur in other cultures. Premenstrual syndrome was near the top of this list.
Citing other studies, he notes:
The subtext of these critiques is that PMS is “socially constructed,” meaning it’s an imaginary condition foisted on women by society, which is another way of saying PMS is “not real.” Yet just because something is a social construction does not mean we don’t experience it—it simply means that our “real” physiological symptoms can have roots in our mind as well as our body.
It’s not quite mass hysteria, but regardless of what’s “real” or not, it’s fascinating how susceptible we are to collective persuasion.
(Other fun fact from the article: “On the island of Wogeo, Papua New Guinea, menstruation is traditionally seen as so powerful and cleansing that even men are expected to menstruate. A man does this by walking into the ocean naked, inducing an erection, pushing the foreskin back, then slicing at the glans on either side with the claw of a crab. When the bleeding stops and the ocean water around the man is clear, he returns to shore, wraps his penis in medicinal leaves, and is considered cleansed. The same word is used for male and female menstruation.” !!!)