But if disgust is problematic in principle, we have all the more reason to regard it with suspicion when we observe that throughout history it has been used as a powerful weapon in social efforts to exclude certain groups and persons. So strong is the desire to cordon ourselves off from our animality that we often don't stop at feces, cockroaches, and slimy animals. We need a group of human beings to bound ourselves against, to exemplify the line between the truly human and the basely animal. If those quasi animals stand between us and our own animality, then we are one step further away from being animal and mortal ourselves.

Thus throughout history certain disgust properties -- sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness -- have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.

Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation -- all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.

Consider, finally, the central locus of disgust in today's United States, male loathing of the male homosexual. Female homosexuals may be objects of fear, or moral indignation, or generalized anxiety, but they are less often objects of disgust. Similarly, heterosexual females may feel negative emotions toward the male homosexual -- fear, mor-al indignation, anxiety -- but again, they rarely feel emotions of disgust. What inspires disgust is male fear of anal penetration: of breaking down the sacred boundary against stickiness, ooze, and death. The presence of a homosexual male in the neighborhood inspires the thought that a man might himself be contaminated. The very look of such a male is itself contaminating -- as we see in the extraordinary debates about showers in the military.

Take shame. It is connected to deep human insecurities that similarly project themselves outward, via the stigmatization of vulnerable people and groups. As Erving Goffman showed in his classic sociological analysis, Stigma (Prentice-Hall, 1963), all societies contain a composite image of the \"normal\" person that is actually embodied, as a whole, by more or less nobody. (Goffman's account of the American norm is that of \"a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports.\") People who lack any of those desirable characteristics are made to feel shame; so more or less all of us feel shame about something. But some people's lives are more dominated by shame than others. Racial and sexual minorities, people with marked physical disabilitiesthey, in particular, are ostracized and made to feel that they must hide themselves.

Why do all societies inflict stigma? I suggest that the desire to stigmatize others grows out of the insecurity that all human beings experience, being intelligent creatures who soon learn how weak and helpless they are in regard to things of the highest importance. The more our development encourages us to expect and seek control, the more likely we are, finding out that we can't really have it, to gain a substitute kind of safety by defining a dominant group as perfect, lacking in nothing, and projecting weakness and inadequacy onto an outside group. To the extent that societies can teach people that the desired condition is one of interdependence, rather than control and self-sufficiency, such pernicious tendencies can be minimized. But they are never likely to be completely eradicated, given that people really are weaker than they want to be and, as they grow older, are likely to have an increasing desire to conceal their weaknesses.
The history of punishment bears witness to the ubiquity of the desire to shame others. In many societies, penalties based on shaming (tattoos and brands, the stocks, the pillory, the scarlet letter) are often introduced at first to target a truly harmful vice. But history shows that they quickly take on a different purpose: to demonize people who are merely unpopular or who belong to a minority religion or sexuality. We hear many proposals today to revive shame-based punishments; given the history of such pun-ishments, they need to be examined with a skeptical eye.

Fear of a dissident minority often masquerades as moral disapproval. Societies frequently experience what social scientists call \"moral panics,\" in which some \"deviant\" group is thought to be a threat to key moral values and is stigmatized in consequence. Often the danger posed by the group is purely imaginary, and the real issue is a desire to create a zone of safety and security by defining the dominant group as good and \"normal,\" the outsider groups as the bearer of a disgraceful tainted identity. Our debates today over gay marriage contain much of this muddled thinking, whatever else they also contain.

In general, a society based on the idea of equal human dignity must find ways to inhibit stigma and the aggression that are so often linked to the proclamation that \"we\" are the ones who are \"normal.\" Such a society is difficult to achieve, because incompleteness is frightening, and grandiose fictions are comforting. As a patient of the psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott said to him, \"The alarming thing about equality is that we are then both children, and the question is, where is father? We know where we are if one of us is the father.\"