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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Folk history judges people by the quality of their skin (to the dismay of adolescents in particular). You see it in hollywood and in literature: the hero has clear skin while the villain is surprisingly often described as being disfigured. This could stem from a long practice of disease avoidance before modern medicine, even when no disease is relevant (a birthmark, recovered from smallpox, etc).

Years ago I worked in dermatology (pharma side) and I started out thinking that apart from skin cancers it was just about vanity. Wow, I could not have been more wrong! The point I started this comment with was pointed out to me. And because of that phenomenon, people with skin issues often do restrict their social activities because of it. In some extreme cases (say, fungal infections that you can't even catch from other people) they even become shut ins. Terrible.

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Historically the notions of cleanliness and health are excpetionally strongly aligned with virtue, and filth, disease, ugliness, and disability with sin or evil. This appears across a large range of Eurasian cultures that I'm aware of, and quite probably even more widely elsewhere (though I'm less aware of those).

Even such attributes as handedness can be ascribed to virtue or sin, as with, well, sinister, literally, "of the left side", but with the evolved sense of "prompted by malice or ill-will". See: <https://www.etymonline.com/word/sinister>

(And apparently "sinister" and "sin" are not related, though that possibility had occurred to me whilst writing this.)

The same concept often extended to medicine and medical practice, and it wasn't until the emergence of germ theory of infectious disease that medical knowledge and practice began to emerge from its moralising of pathology to a general understanding of disease and dysfunction as being organic in nature. That shift is still incomplete, and there are places, institutions, individuals, and conditions in which moralisation remains a too-common occurance (obesity, addiction, sexually-transmitted diseases, and mental health most especially). We also see moralisation of pathology in other contexts, most notably in criminal law and politics.

It may be a primal aversion to illness and its manifestations because of a natural selection favoring the best and the fittest, as anything skewing from that could pose a danger to survival. Let me be clear that I do not justify any discrimination or prejudice but I also acknowledge that there are primal urges at play and it's from this point of view that I speak, not my human own.

I would agree with most of that.

There still comes a point at which the notion that there are physical (as in real-world, manifested, measurable and discoverable) causes to dysfunctions rather than metaphysical or spiritual ones (and I'm including such phenomena as behaviours, social dynamics, and psychology as "physical", inasmuch as they exist within and not beyond the physical world). At which time the concept of moralising pathologies itself seems to become a pathology, hindering rather than assisting in resolving those issues.

The primal aversion model works where such knowledge isn't present, and as that aversion is itself likely wired deeply within our genetics and psyche, it's not something easily banished. But it is advantageous in general to override that tendency, most especially if one's goal is to actually solve the underlying problem, as physical causes imply chains of causality and opportunities to influence outcomes.

Yeah, I believe that the absurd “virgin” obsession in some cultures is an archaic holdover to try to avoid STDs.

gumby says >"I believe that the absurd “virgin” obsession in some cultures is an archaic holdover to try to avoid STDs."<

No shit, Sherlock!8-)) But to characterise this as an "absurd ...obsession" is wrongheaded.

Of course people don't want STDs!

STDs for the most part killed people (syphilis, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B, et al). Only in the last century have we had antibiotics and only in the last 50 years antivirals. Were there a major war supplies of those drugs, along with the birth control pill, would dwindle or vanish.

STDs are a scourge b/c we have nothing to make them go away permanently. Maybe someday we will, but until then being a "virgin" has certain very real advantages.

> But to characterise this as an "absurd ...obsession" is wrongheaded...[STDs bad]

Of course they are but it’s archaic and thus absurd today when they can be avoided (ubiquitous condoms) and in most cases treated.

Not to mention I like to engage in activities with others with a modicum of skill…not like I seek out novice chess or tennis players. Without the STD risk the characteristic has no benefit.

There is always an STD risk, IIRC ~3% per year for condoms, which accumulates each year, always increasing, never decreasing.

So the probability that your condom does not fail in any year is 97%. The likelihood that your condoms don't fail for N years is (0.97)*N. Odds of "no failure" for 10 years is ~74% and for 20 years ~54%. Not so great. You're looking like a fuzzy STD taco -a high risk matchup with no gain. Your gambling friends seek out younger, safer partners. [And that's part of what they're doing, isn't it? After all, studs can calculate probabilities too.]

And that's just for condoms.

What you're describing is not "skill" but a peculiar form of addictive gambling.

And to top it off, there's always the "Lorena Bobbit" factor: a mate slices and dices b/c you gave him/her an STD.

no - because sex has a biological cost. Many mammals have a "heat" cycle where adults become sexually active, then it goes away. Then everyone can return to survival. It is arguable that only certain niche creatures with relatively easy lives, can afford to be sexual more than that.

So long as we're discussing nonhuman animal behaviour, polyamory seems far more the norm than monogomy, so far as I'm aware.

(Definitely outside my wheelhouse.)

There's that nagging little issue that female virginity is far easier to reasonably validate than male virginity.

Whilst the disease transmission risks are not similarly asymmetric.

Explain how? Cause as far as I know, the hymen is not a reliable indicator of virginity.

"Reasonably" is doing heavy lifting in my earlier comment.

False negatives are possible, but not false positives, of PiV activity.

(Other activities of course leave no such evidence.)

And there's no equivalent physical indicia for males.

Also, as noted, if the concern is disease, then the fact of a test (however fallible) creates a highly asymmetric burden.

https://www.skinema.com/

> "Beauty equals good" is an age-old trope in entertainment, points out Doris Bazzini, a professor of social psychology at Appalachian State University. In a 1999 study she co-authored, a panel watched 20 of the top-grossing movies in each decade from 1940 to 1989, rating characters by attractiveness and other traits. They found that the stereotype held true across all decades and genres. She discovered the same thing in a 2010 study on human characters in 21 Disney animated movies.

> "Attractive characters displayed higher intelligence, lower aggressiveness and greater moral virtue," the study said. Even animal characters show similar patterns, Bazzini points out: The villain in "The Lion King" is literally named Scar and has one across his eye. "Evil as plain as the scar on his face," says one song in "The Lion King II."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/why-does-hollyw...

It's always tempting to impute / unlikely virtues to the cute

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness.” - Leo Tolstoy, 1889.

You can find reference to this in Chaucer. It's very very old = Homo sapiens

An autoimmune skin condition damn near ruined my life, so I agree with your conclusions.

I was somewhat fortunate that it didn't hit me until my mid-20s after a viral infection. Never gets better and will never go away. Treatments? Nothing but a cat and mouse game, and generally a waste of time, unless I want to subjugate my body and future to some truly heinous treatments.

Still, I have a lot to be thankful for e.g., it could be worse, a different disease, etc..

I think the hardest part for me to overcome is the envy I feel when I see other people. I sometimes actually feel like I am a lesser person because of the disease. Despite it being a skin disease, the mental toll has been far worse than the physical toll.

Have you tried helminth therapy (assuming it's applicable)?

Never even heard of it. Thank you though, I'll Google what it is.

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