The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing
March 14, 2025 at 12:57AMMy best friend’s son used to get very angry at his older sister when he could hear her eating. This caused no end of grief at the family dinner table, where his sudden rage over seemingly innocuous table noises made for stressful times. I never understood why the boy became so agitated—until now. Jake Eaton recounts developing misophonia at age 13, a sensitivity to the sounds of eating that drove him mad and made him alter his routines and behaviors, all to avoid the sound of other humans consuming food. For Asterisk Magazine, he reports on the history and scientific study of the condition.
It’s a teenage rite of passage to explode into rage at your parents. While the usual outburst is sparked by some combination of hormones, insecurity, and authority issues, for me it was a popping sound in my father’s jaw. I first noticed it at the dinner table. Every time he took a bite, the disc of cartilage that cushioned his jawbone would slip out of place and snap back. Chew, click, chew, click. Like a drum, his mouth reverberated the sound, which changed in pitch each time he opened to take a bite. Layered beneath all of this was the wet percussion of normal chewing. The trio — jaw pop, meat squish, fork scraping teeth — became inescapable. And it drove into me, first through my chest, a surprising shock of affront and disgust that then suffused through my whole body. It was the first time I ever got scared that I wasn’t in control of what was inside my own head.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/the-unbearable-loudness-of-chewing/
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