Is The Ick Real?

An investigation of female primatological filters

Welcome to The Ick, Season 4: DISGUST. This season I’ve invited a brilliant cast of writers and friends to explore what makes us recoil and why.

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

Now, over to etirabys:

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Last year, I ran a Twitter Space titled "I interview people (you, maybe) about the ick". I defined the ick as:

A sudden drop in regard or attraction based on something seemingly trivial the other person did. It might happen on a date, in the early stages of a relationship, or when your cute coworker does something at work.

Then I asked:

• What's the first time you can remember getting the ick?

• When did you last get the ick?

• Do you know of a time someone found you icky?

• What's the most memorable tweet you've seen about the ick?

What ick tweets are memorable? (according to various terminally online people, three quarters of them men)

• I got the ick when I saw a guy running into a screen door

• I got the ick at the beach when I saw a man in the ocean getting knocked down by a wave

• ...when he took his wallet out of his pocket and a bunch of coins fell out

• ...because he couldn't find a parking space

• ...because he's trying to change lanes and he can't because the cars won't give him a gap

• ...because he kept rolling his dice off the table during a board game

And what icks did my interviewees actually have?

I interviewed 14 straight(-ish) men, five straight(-ish) women, and one gay guy. About half the men reported ever having gotten the ick. All the women did.

The women's icks centered around shirking work—a man acting helpless about a task that belonged to him, or foisting the task off implicitly by ignoring it. The men who described times they'd given a woman the ick also often listed times when the women (in one case, mistakenly) thought he was unwilling to learn.

Men's icks about women felt more diverse—drinking too much, cruel gossip, poor hygiene, and failure at a really basic cooking task (that the man himself knew how to do).

I came away feeling like the women were describing a tighter, more coherent cluster of experiences than the men were. In the rest of this post I'll mostly talk about the female ick.

Types of ick

Is the ick "real"? Or rather, is the ick worth crystallizing into a concept? I was pretty skeptical about this going into the Twitter Space. My answer depends on the category. Here are the categories into which the icks I read about online and those my interviewees described fall:

1. Raw fitness

   1. Manual dexterity, physical awareness, poor tool use (rolling dice off table, running into screen door)

   2. Cognitive inability (bad at spelling)

2. Distance from a masculine archetype (that no real human being meets?)

   1. Femininity or neoteny (lip balm, sippy yogurt, doggy paddling)

   2. Physical fragility (standing there naked waiting for the shower to get hot, blowing on food to cool it down, can't walk on pebble beaches)

3. Shirking work

I'm not going to discuss number two—my interviewees mostly didn't bring it up and I haven't experienced it, so I don't feel qualified to write about it.

I ended up feeling like number one, especially 1a, is the most interesting and the most “real” category of the ick. It immediately leapt out to me as an obvious, low-level evolutionary module to be installed in the gestating sex of a tool-using species.

I liked the "I got the ick when he ran into a screen door" example. It's a very primitive ick. You could see a bird rejecting someone for that. Same with "he kept rolling his dice off the table". I laughed when I heard those two on the Twitter Space, but they stuck in my head more than anything else people cited that day.

Intellectually, I got why repeatedly rolling dice off a table is unsexy. Tool use isn't just our specialty as a species—we've gone so hard on it that stronger, faster animals with more sensory acuity will eat the fuck out of members who are bad at tool use. The meta in hunter gatherer warfare is the night ambush, because the difference between a human with a weapon and a human caught without one dwarfs the difference between humans of different raw fitness.

Before articulating this, I felt confused and bad about getting the ick when e.g. someone's shoelaces came untied multiple times per walk (indicating first that they were tying them wrong, and second that they lacked the agency to learn a better tie or buy different laces). It seemed like a shallow thing for my attraction to dip so much about.

Shouldn't I care much more about their kindness, intellect, sense of humor, etc?

Sorry, physical reality is still a very demanding place

In the middle of writing this post, my husband's friend visited us. She seemed delighted to see our eight-week-old, so I asked if she wanted to hold the baby.

"No, I'm too scared," she said seriously. "I have a friend who dropped his baby and it was really bad. The baby is paralyzed from the neck down."

"Ah," I said. The conversation moved on. I went to do some chores. Meanwhile, my background mental process was trying to decide how much this anecdote bothered me. It settled on “a lot”. I went back and said abruptly, "How exactly did your friend drop the baby?"

I wanted to know more: Is permanent damage from dropping a baby rare? (Probably, although I've failed to find exact stats.) Because it might have happened in my family, come to think of it. I have an intellectually disabled cousin who caused his family financial stress because of his gambling addiction. I remember hearing he'd been dropped by his father as a child. I apologize if I'm making my newfound maternal neuroticism too salient in this post—it doesn't seem that rational a thing to emphasize—but I really feel differently about the dice tweet now.

Whatever process makes my vag dry up when I watch a potential co-parent fail to keep his dice on the table, I now appreciate that I have it. Not only do I want my children to be good tool-users, I want a partner who shows practically perfect reliability in motor skills they'll perform daily.

The horror of the almost impossible

And yet. Shirking duties were much more central an ick to the women I interviewed than walking into screen doors. But they don't go viral. "I got the ick when he tried to fob off preparing food he wanted to eat" is not a tweet that gets attention. Why?

First, obviously: it's a sentiment everyone has already priced in. Everyone knows laziness is unattractive. And from the straight female side, it's not as cathartic to read and write about. Certainly before I read motor skill ick tweets, I thought my reaction sprang from a mean-spiritedness unique to my bad character. But my dislike of men who shirk work never felt idiosyncratic.

Second: it's threatening to be ruled out for something that is so...not part of who you are. No one identifies as someone who rolls dice off the table or walks into a screen door. People might admit that, yes, they're sometimes the sort of person who tries to get others to make food or take the trash out for them; it's not great, they're trying to improve...but is anyone the sort of person to walk into a screen door? Come on, for chrissakes, it was just the once...wait, you're rejecting me for that? But that has so little to do with, well, me as a person!

Third: compared to shirking icks, motor skill icks are threatening in an unthreatening way.

The thing about shirking work is that it's almost an impossible problem to solve—at least, that's how I feel about the work I shirk. I'd rather have an impossible problem than an almost impossible one.

I'm terrified by the notion that I could be liked by people and get further in life if I put in an absurd amount of effort into changing my habits. I don’t want to contemplate how much additional flourishing is gated behind setting my own task reminders, unloading cargo without being asked, or noticing and aiding overwhelmed hosts of social events—that is, taking the no-shortcuts route to being a reproductively fit member of a social species.

It's much more comfortable to think that being desired and respected is gated behind a dexterity I've never shown in my life.

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etirabys is a writer, coder, and painter. Find her on Twitter/X and Tumblr.