Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

50%
+0 −0
Q&A How can I portray body horror and still be sensitive to people with disabilities?

If you want to be PC, stick to symptoms of infectious diseases, where the sense of body horror would reinforce prevention and be justified as a mean towards avoiding contagion. As the OP suggests,...

posted 5y ago by _X_‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-18T21:34:23Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42346
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T10:55:40Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42346
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T10:55:40Z (almost 5 years ago)
### If you want to be PC, stick to symptoms of infectious diseases, where the sense of body horror would reinforce prevention and be justified as a mean towards avoiding contagion.

As the OP suggests, body horror is about body transformations that go in undesired directions. Thanks to evolution, and sometimes thanks to human activity, we have a very large pool of examples, for instance: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_congenital\_disorders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_congenital_disorders)

The list is even longer if we consider diseases that can be acquired during the course of life, and human interventions such as prosthetics from centuries past, and some plastic surgery.

Political correctness is aimed at avoiding forms of expression that exclude or marginalize certain groups of disadvantaged people. There are however some groups of people that are necessarily excluded from normal interactions with the rest of society. These are people with very contagious and lethal diseases. For the normal, medically untrained individual, to be able to recognize the symptoms of such diseases and avoid them is actually a desirable goal.

I think that body horror that would play on the physical symptoms of these diseases would not just be politically correct, but also desirable as a mean toward a form of contagion prevention. In addition, our mind is probably tuned to feel disgust and horror towards the most obvious of such symptoms. Even more so, it would be natural to feel very scared after finding such sings on one own's body. Play on them, exaggerate them, make sure that your readers can feel the horror, and in a sense you'll be even doing a service to mankind.

Some examples, not for the faint of heart:

> [black plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#Signs_and_symptoms), [Zygomycosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygomycosis), [Certain fungal infections](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onychomycosis), [Peruvian warts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrion%27s_disease), and [Syphilis, Smallpox & Co.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3XljIU-kq4)

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-02-19T19:43:53Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 10