How to tell body-disgust from aesthetic taste: it's death-fear. 'The prison of one's character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one's creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror.' Disgust at the body — its smells, fluids, decay — is not taste; it's the mind recoiling from the evidence that we are mortal animals. When someone (or a whole culture) is obsessed with cleanliness, purity, or bodily shame, look for the death-fear underneath the hygiene.

— In our words · Source: The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)