When women are aroused, they overlook certain “disgust elicitors” associated with sex, enabling them to go ahead with the deed, according to a paper published by Dutch clinical psychologists.

According to the study, published in the journal PLoS, humans have somehow managed to strike a successful balance between two important evolutionary functions — sex and disgust. The latter is considered by some psychologists to be a natural defence mechanism against disease — other people’s mouths, for instance, pose a higher risk of contamination and are therefore considered an external threat perceived as highly disgusting. When it comes to the nitty gritty of sex, there are plenty of “disgust elicitors” that we relate to contamination says the paper, namely saliva, sweat and semen.

In making this link, the paper’s authors’ decided to tackle a rather interesting question: how do people have pleasurable sex at all?

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