This episode is also on Bilibili too.
David Cronenberg is a famous hardcore Hollywood director. His movies are full of monsters with seriously twisted limbs and all kinds of slimy stuff hanging off their bodies. He loves using these deformed, broken bodies to get under the audience’s skin. Rick and Morty often parodies Cronenberg; one parallel universe is even called the Cronenberg Universe, and it’s packed with these slimy monsters.
Cronenberg once said:
Our own body is the reality we can touch, the reality closest to us, and yet we often have a desire to escape the body: many religions, after all, are built almost entirely on doctrines about “breaking free from the constraints of the body.” That’s because the body must die, and it also gives rise to our fear of death. If you accept that the body is part of reality, then you have to accept the reality that human beings must die. But many people are afraid to accept that reality.
This passage from Cronenberg points to an important source of death anxiety: our own flesh-and-blood body. Our bodily sensations, physiological activities, and all kinds of physical changes are constantly conveying one unmistakable fact: we humans are nothing more than animals. Like animals, we are made of flesh and blood; like animals, we have all kinds of animal instincts. So, just like the animals we eat, we will die too.
So, in order to control our fear of death, we have to transcend our bodily instincts and animality.
In fact, many rules, manners, and taboos in civilized society exist to hide the body’s instinctive activities and cover up our animality. For example, even when we don’t need the warmth, we don’t go around naked. When we eat, we have to follow all kinds of table manners; wolfing down food like an animal is a sign of low civilization. We also hide defecation: we go to a special place to do it, and we are even reluctant to call that place a “defecation room,” preferring “restroom” instead. We hide sex, too. Not only is sex forbidden in public; we even recoil from using the word “mating,” which describes animals, to describe our own sex. Even when we want to have fun, we do it in the name of “love.” We don’t mate; we make love.
The rules of civilized society essentially either hide bodily activities or transform them into a kind of “cultural ritual.” In a word, civilization means that the less you look like an animal, the more civilized you are.
Human beings work tirelessly to draw a clear line between themselves and their bodily instincts, then declare that they don’t belong to the animal kingdom.
And when we think about death, this tendency becomes especially obvious.
For example, in one study, participants first had to imagine their own death or the pain of having a tooth pulled. Then they read an article that either emphasized human uniqueness or emphasized how similar humans are to other animals. The participants who had thought about their own death generally preferred the article emphasizing human uniqueness. Those who had merely imagined the pain of a tooth extraction thought the two articles were about equally good.
Other studies have found that people who think about their own death tend to look down on animals and even feel disgust toward pets they have never owned. When thinking about death, people also become more supportive of killing animals.
This tendency to refuse to admit that we are animals also produces an extremely powerful feeling: disgust.
Disgust probably emerged during the evolution of our ancestors. Its original function was to keep us away from rotting meat and other organic matter carrying deadly pathogens. In other words, at first, disgust was triggered only by rotten and filthy things.
But later in the evolutionary process, the scope of disgust expanded. Anything that reminds us of our own animal nature—intestines, internal organs, bones, blood, bodily waste, and so on—can make us feel disgust.
Experiments have also shown that when people think about death, urine, mucus, feces, and vomit really do seem more disgusting to them. The reverse is true as well: when people think about these disgusting bodily secretions, they are more likely to think of death. That’s why Cronenberg’s mucus-filled movies are treated as horror films.
Most traditional societies have so-called menstrual taboos, treating women’s menstruation as something extremely unclean. The roots of these taboos may also lie in our avoidance of bodily secretions, because menstruation reminds us, unmistakably, that the body exists and that we humans are nothing more than animals.
To draw a line between ourselves and other animals, humans came up with another trick: decorating and beautifying our bodies. Beautifying the body does have a more direct purpose— increasing attractiveness. Much of women’s bodily adornment, for example, serves to highlight reproductive potential and increase sexual appeal. But beyond this direct function, the author of Death Anxiety argues that our efforts to beautify the body often aim at reducing the similarity between humans and other animals.
Take trimming body hair. Humans have a nickname: “the naked ape.” Our skin is exposed, without a coat of fur covering the whole body, and this is one of our most obvious differences from other mammals. So we really hate excess body hair. People often associate abundant hair with savagery, backwardness, bad character, or depraved animality. Excess hair is an especially conspicuous hint that we are nothing more than animals.
Search Google for the English keyword “body hair” and you get more than thirty million results, most of them about how to remove it. Throughout the civilizations humans have created, hair removal and the reshaping of body hair have also been longstanding practices. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had a habit of removing body hair. The ancient Romans didn’t like excess hair either. Caesar liked using tweezers to remove facial hair, and he also shaved hair from his entire body with a razor.
In ancient China there was a saying: “The body, hair, and skin are received from one’s parents.” People therefore did not dare casually meddle with their hair. On the one hand, though, this was partly because our species got lucky: East Asians naturally have less body hair. On the other hand, ancient Chinese people did not absolutely refuse to trim hair. The practice of facial threading, for example, appeared quite early: cotton thread was stretched across the face to remove unwanted peach fuzz.
Humanity’s rejection of its animality has another interesting expression: our attitude toward sex.
We have a deeply ambivalent attitude toward sex. We feel that sex is pleasurable, but it also makes us panic, because sex is the strongest symbol of our animal nature. Sex reminds us in the clearest possible way that we humans belong to the animal kingdom. Apart from urinating and defecating, sex is the human behavior that comes closest to animals.
When we are dressed up neatly in the office, it’s easy to keep a comfortable psychological distance from our bodies. But when we are naked and having sex, it becomes much harder to maintain that distance.
Sex makes it hard not to think about the fact that we are merely temporary warehouses for the genes inside our bodies. We travel briefly along the track of life, pass our genes on to the next generation, and soon after completing that task, we join the ranks of countless silent dead.
In one experiment, participants had to imagine how appealing various scenes in romantic relationships were. Some scenes were emotional, such as “feeling spiritually connected with one’s partner” or “feeling loved by one’s partner.” Others were physical—in other words, sexual—such as “having one’s partner lick one’s ear” or “feeling the sweat one’s partner has left on one’s body.”
The results showed that if participants associated the scenes with their own death, their feelings about the emotional scenes did not change much. But after thinking about their own death, most participants found the physical scenes less enticing. This result may seem counterintuitive. Many people assume that death stimulates sex—after all, we want to leave offspring behind before we die. But in this experiment, death actually reduced the appeal of sex.
The reverse was true as well. If participants were first reminded of sex, they subsequently thought of more words related to death. These studies suggest that sex and death really are twins: in our minds, they tend to appear together.
So our attitude toward sex becomes deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, we enjoy its pleasures and hope to use it to reproduce; on the other, it makes us a little afraid.
So how do we resolve this contradiction?
The most common solution is to **give sex symbolic meaning,** transforming it from an animalistic behavior into something serious, even solemn. That makes sex a little safer psychologically. Cultures all over the world have all kinds of sexual taboos specifying the circumstances in which sex is allowed. These taboos are bizarre and varied, and some even contradict one another. For example, the Hopi, an Indigenous people of Arizona, have sex only at night, while the Chencus, an Indigenous group in India, have sex only during the day.
Exactly what cultural restrictions are placed on sex is not the important part. What matters is that restrictions exist. When a culture clearly establishes appropriate norms for sexual behavior, sex is no longer a purely animalistic physiological act; it becomes a cultural ritual.
Another way we ease sexual anxiety is much uglier: by putting women down and repressing them. In nearly every culture, women’s bodies and sexual behavior are constrained by all kinds of rules and regulations. There are many reasons for this. But one psychological root may be men’s fear of death. Men need to satisfy their physical desire while simultaneously denying their own animal nature. That makes them deeply uneasy about the emergence of their sexual desire. Men find women extremely sexually alluring, so they accuse women of causing their desire and impulses. They want to demean, punish, and abuse women because they feel that women remind them of their own bodily nature.
In an experiment conducted by the author of Afraid of Death (Pa Si), when men were prompted to think about their own deaths, they recommended a lighter sentence for a man who had abused his girlfriend in a virtual court.
In other words, when death and sex are brought together, they seem to make men more tolerant of violence against women.
This twisted mindset is reflected in horror movies. We know that horror films are often packed with connections between death and sex. There is a huge horror-movie cliché known as “the slut dies first, the virgin strikes back.” If a female character has sex in a horror movie, she is toast: the moment she finishes, she is bound to be hacked to death by the killer. And the one who ultimately strikes back and makes it to the end is always a virgin. Think about it for a moment—what kind of mindset does this reveal?
In the next installment, we will switch perspectives again and discuss, from the conscious and unconscious angles, two strategies for coping with the fear of death: proximal defense and distal defense.
Written by: Zhichao Wei
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