Is a fear of spiders really irrational if you live in Australia, though? 
Anecdata to support your theory: I suspect my wife and I approximately exactly squicked out by spiders and most bugs. But my wife has no idea I’m afraid of them too. She thinks I’m the big fearless hero for calmly dispatching them all in our house. I just suck it up and show her there is nothing to be afraid of. One of us has to face the misery of killing it and if I can make my wife’s life better by taking on the burden, well so I shall. She makes my life better a million ways; I can do it for her at least this one way.
Ants and mice are different though. I’m fine with ants and I think mice are cute. My wife strongly disagrees.
Possibly. If these people don’t get treatment for their fear of spiders, then how would you get anything like an accurate count of who is arachnophobic? You can’t do a blood test for arachnophobia.
It almost certainly does exist on a continuum. Lots of other psychiatric disorders do. Other anxiety disorders do come in varying severity, so it’s not too surprising that phobias would, too.
This is me exactly. I have no fear of spiders. I will pick them up with my bare hands and deposit them outside. I have such an irrational fear of snakes that I cannot even look at pictures of snakes. Like you, I think mice are cute and once spent an hour peeling all the glue of a mouse’s foot after he was caught on a glue trap. I then put him outside. My husband never put down another glue trap after that.
Huh. Odd. I didn’t remember these pants being soaked with urine before.
Yes, about $300 an hour.
It can work both ways, too. One of my aunts used to be deathly afraid of snakes, until her own son, a snake enthusiast, cured her of it. I’m not sure how he came to become a snake enthusiast, raised by an ophidiophobe, but it happened.
Funny, I’m the opposite. I always said I was a “true” arachnophobic (despite not having an actual phobia) because, while insects – even the stinging sort – might be gross or creepy at times, everything on this page gives me serious nightmares. It’s not just spiders for me. I find something about the basic bodyplan of arachnids completely terrifying. I can’t explain it. Luckily it isn’t debilitating, though I will freak out more than a grown man should if one of these creatures is near me.
For me, spiders are no problem at all, but house centipedes give me the heebie-jeebies. Though they do so considerably less since about a year ago, when I accidentally handled one.
Fortunately for me, house centipedes are much rarer than spiders (or at least, show themselves less often, which is good enough for me).
I don’t have fear of spiders. That said, there’s a place called Matrimony Spring just North of Moab, Utah along the Colorado river. Cold drinkable water just flows out of the rock. There’s a big crack that runs directly above the spring. I looked up one time and that whole crack was full of Daddy Long legs. Like, maybe, a laundry basket of Daddy Long legs, suspended* right over your head*.
We’re still cool, right?
Alas; despite your commitment to feminism, it does not appear your hope there is no gender difference is supported by the literature.
“Total point prevalence of any specific phobia was 19.9% (26.5% for females and 12.4% for males). In total, 21.2% women and 10.9% men met criterias for any single specific phobia. Multiple phobias was reported by 5.4% of the females and 1.5% of the males. Animal phobia had a prevalence of 12.1% in women and 3.3% in men. Point prevalence of situational phobia was 17.4% in women and 8.5% in men.”
(Probably the men’s fault, though, that women are that way.)
Was visiting a friend at her new house when she SCREAMED and pointed. I nearly jumped out of my boots.
There was a spider on the wall about 6 feet away.
So I have a fear of people that are afraid of spiders.
I live in Australia, and I don’t fear spiders. I’m careful around them, in that I’ll kill or avoid anything that looks potentially harmful, but I welcome Huntsmans in my house because they kill and eat the nasty spiders. Huntsmans are your friends.
I have a large Huntsman that lives in my letter box, and I am always happy to see it in there. Letters don’t seem to bother it at all, and it must be finding plenty to eat in there because it’s large and healthy-looking. I regard that Huntsman, and the ones that I occasionally see in my house, as pets. I would be extremely unimpressed if anyone threatened to harm them.
God, the poor mailman. Must be a shock the first time something pulls the letter out of your hand and says “Thank you!”
I suppose: an example of the frequent phenomenon of children reacting, to the max, in the opposite direction of that which instilled by their parents – “Foolish old Mum is terrified of snakes: that must count as something in their favour…” and, as can sometimes be, positive resolution in the end, for both parties.
At risk of derailing the thread with “commercials” for one of my favourite authors: Dervla Murphy’s daughter (with whom she is on excellent terms, and the two do a lot of things together) grew up perfectly OK with spiders, and thinks her mother’s terror of them – well, strange. I get the picture that overall, Dervla’s daughter is boringly well-adjusted and normal, in contrast with her delightful but highly-oddball mother.
I have developed an amateur theory over the years to explain the fairly common spider, insect, and snake phobias.
Point #1–Humans have 2 legs.
Point #2–Most other mammals, while having 4 legs, are cute, useful, or both.
Point #3–Spiders and insects have even more legs than that. From a strictly human perspective, there is something fundamentally unnatural about having that many legs, or no legs at all.
Conclusion–Anything that unnatural is likely to be dangerous, and therefore should be feared.
I daresay the professionals will laugh at this theory, but I honestly believe that this goes a long way towards explaining those phobias.
Combine this issue with the issue of speed and unpredictability of movement, and there you go–one full-blown phobia.
Flyer: no… It doesn’t work to appeal solely to the number of legs.
I’m phobic about pictures of spiders…but not about pictures of scorpions, crickets, ants, bees, or most other critters with eight or six legs. I’m not even the slightest bit phobic about (fantasy) depictions of Odin’s eight-legged horse, or human figures with eight legs. A (fantasy) painting of an eight-legged dog or cat would not cause me distress.
It isn’t just the number of legs. It’s something in the arrangement of a spider’s legs, the angles that they stick out at, the way they bend, and the way the legs move independently.
A mime once did a really lovely job of moving his fingers in the way a spider’s legs move. Wigged me right out. It triggered the phobic reaction, something hands and fingers ordinarily never do.
Same with people with a phobia of snakes. If you show them a dog or cat that has no legs, they might feel sorrow or pity or even ordinary horror – “That poor animal!” – but it wouldn’t trigger a phobic reaction the way a real snake – or even a rubber snake – would.
Some people with a phobia of snakes also react badly to worms…but some do not. It isn’t a hard-and-fast rule.
Allegedly, there are two fears we are born with, the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises, everything else is learned. Some fears (like the fear of spiders and snakes) are learned easier than other fears, but if a baby sees a spider or a snake, it’s playtime unless a parent teaches the baby to be afraid or the spider/snake causes the baby distress.
Ref Flyer’s theory …
My competing theory is back when all mammals resembled modern shrews and scorpions were the size of modern alligators it made a lot of sense to really fear things that looked like that.
To me most insects, arachnids, crustaceans, etc. all resemble what I think of as very primitive life forms. And in fact some are all but unchanged from the very early days. They certainly don’t resemble primates.
So critters like that are both very different, and to our innermost primitive brain something to legitimately fear. As such, it’s plausible they’re sort of spring-loaded to be easy to develop irrational fears about which sometimes rise to phobias in some people.
Yes, research shows young infants don’t fear spiders or snakes. But their psyche is so unformed at that point its hard to say what’s going on in there. We can never run the experiment, but it’d be interesting to raise feral kids (e.g. treat them like farm animals: food, shelter, and that’s it) and test them periodically as they grow. My speculation is that even absent adverse experience with spiders or snakes we’d see a growing percentage of the feral kids developing such fears.
You’d probably do well fight ignorance about feminism. It’s not like there’s anything about feminism that would lead one to believe otherwise. And feminism does not teach that everything is the fault of men. There’s a lot of stuff about women contributing to the problem.