How a healthy Victorian-era adaptation to disgust got rewired during Covid into maladaptive shaming
When we think of Victorian etiquette—the elaborate rules about which fork to use, how to make introductions, or the proper way to leave a calling card—we tend to dismiss it as stuffy social performance. But what if these seemingly arbitrary rules served a deeper biological purpose? What if the Victorian obsession with manners was actually an evolved response to one of humanity’s oldest problems: disease?
Disgust as a defense mechanism
Health researcher Valerie Curtis argues in her book Don’t Look, Don’t Touch that manners evolved as a way of managing our feelings of disgust—what she calls one of our “shadow emotions.” Disgust, she contends, evolved as a universal reaction to dangerous or toxic substances. Body products like feces, vomit, and blood trigger it, as do bodily odors and visible signs of ill health such as pustules or bacterial infections.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Our ancestors who felt revulsion toward rotting meat or contaminated water were more likely to survive than those who cheerfully consumed whatever was available.
But here’s where it gets interesting: disgust isn’t limited to obviously dangerous substances. We also feel disgusted when social norms are violated. The person who chews with their mouth open or shows up to dinner with dirt under their fingernails triggers the same neural circuitry as spoiled food. Our brains evolved to treat social transgressions as potential disease vectors—because, in ancestral environments, they often were.
Darwin’s dinner party revelation
Charles Darwin explored this connection as early as 1872. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he noted how disgust manifests universally through facial cues—a wrinkled nose, lowered eyebrows, squinting eyes—triggered not only by toxic substances but by anything signaling potential contamination.
Darwin offered a telling anecdote from Tierra del Fuego. A native man touched some cold preserved meat Darwin was eating and showed visible disgust at its texture. Meanwhile, Darwin felt equally revolted that his food had been touched by what he described as a “naked savage”—even though the man’s hands appeared clean. As Darwin observed, “A smear of soup on a man’s beard looks disgusting, though there is of course nothing disgusting in the soup itself.”
What Darwin captured was the arbitrary yet powerful way cultures amplify disgust responses. The same substance becomes revolting simply by being in the wrong place. And crucially, these triggers can be learned and manipulated.
Etiquette as costly signal
This is precisely what Victorian etiquette manuals accomplished. They codified disgust-avoidance behaviors into elaborate social rituals that became what evolutionary psychologists call “costly signals”—displays so expensive to maintain that only genuinely committed individuals would undertake them.
Consider what it actually took to be a Victorian gentleman. You had to eat soup without dripping on your beard, maintain fresh breath despite primitive dentistry, and keep immaculate fingernails despite urban filth. You needed multiple daily clothing changes, elaborate morning bathroom rituals, and obsessive attention to body odor.
These weren’t arbitrary rules—they were survival advertisements. In disease-ridden nineteenth-century cities, surrounded by cholera outbreaks and open sewers, the ability to maintain impeccable hygiene signaled something important: this person has the resources, self-discipline, and health awareness to stay alive.
Crucially, these signals couldn’t be faked. You might borrow a fine coat for an evening, but you couldn’t fake years of hygienic habits over extended social interaction.
Why women care more
Recent research reveals another layer: women are significantly more disgust-sensitive than men. This too makes evolutionary sense. Infectious diseases pose greater threats to pregnant women, whose immune systems are partially suppressed to avoid attacking the developing embryo. Studies show that disgust sensitivity actually rises after conception, driven by increases in progesterone.
In medieval times, nearly one-third of women died during their childbearing years due to infections. In the mid-1800s, maternal mortality was as high as ten percent—until Ignaz Semmelweis discovered the connection between hygiene and puerperal fever. Given these stakes, women who reacted strongly to potential pathogen cues were more likely to protect themselves and their offspring.
This means male displays of cleanliness became particularly potent courtship signals. A bachelor who demonstrated meticulous hygiene wasn’t just showing good breeding—he was directly addressing an evolved female preference for pathogen-free mates. The etiquette manuals instructing men to rinse their mouths after dinner were responding to this ancient preference filter.
When disease made manners matter
The cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 1840s transformed hygiene from preference to survival imperative. In cities where contaminated water pumps could kill entire neighborhoods, a gentleman who could afford better-drained districts and clean water for daily bathing possessed genuinely scarce resources.
The industrial revolution amplified these signals through consumer goods. Brands like Pears Soap and Rowland’s Odonto tooth powder weren’t just functional—they were expensive markers of modernity and scientific awareness. Etiquette manuals of the era included advertisements for these products, revealing how consumer capitalism created new layers of costly signaling. Now you needed not just time for elaborate grooming but also money for the “correct” products.
When adaptation becomes maladaptation: the Covid-era “Karen”
The same disgust system that rewarded Victorian gentlemen for spotless gloves remained adaptive through most of human history. In crowded, sewage-filled nineteenth-century cities, women who aggressively policed hygiene norms increased survival odds for themselves and their families.
But what happens when this ancient circuitry gets triggered in a radically different environment?
The Covid-19 pandemic offered a troubling answer. Wall-to-wall media coverage created perceived threat levels orders of magnitude higher than even the worst Victorian cholera years, yet actual mortality risk for most reproductively aged adults was comparatively low. The result was massive over-activation of disgust sensitivity—public shaming, mask enforcement, and moral condemnation of perceived norm violators.
This crystallized in the internet archetype of the “Karen”: the woman loudly confronting strangers over masks or vaccination status. Far from the ancestral context where a sharp reaction to contamination might save a child from typhoid, these displays had become detached from realistic pathogen threat. Studies confirmed that women were far more likely than men to confront strangers over pandemic protocols—the same sex-typical pattern that made sense when childbirth killed one in ten mothers.
But in a world of abundant resources, effective medicine, and a virus posing minimal risk to healthy adults of childbearing age, this adaptive module had been hijacked. What evolved as pathogen protection became a weapon for signaling moral purity and coalition membership. The same mechanism that once made Victorian chivalry sexually attractive reappeared as lockdown-era public scolding—proof that our evolved psychology doesn’t disappear when environments change, it simply finds new targets.
For more on how evolutionary psychology has shaped dating advice from the Victorian era to the present day, check out my book Costly Signals: The Evolution of Dating Advice.
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