Lack of touch, my comment and the reactions to it

In Vrij Nederland (Free Netherlands, a liberal weekly) was an article about the importance of touch and closeness for people’s health, and how single people coped with it. It was linked on facebook.

My comment was that ten years ago, there was quite a rich hugging culture in alternative circles. But since the rule was made up that everyone should ask for permission, this petered out, for this explicitness and lack of spontaneity made it too complicated for many people. Naturally, this had consequences for the amount of physical closeness, and as a result for the health of many singles. (I didn’t explicitly judge this rule as such.)

My comment got seven likes, six of which by women. One woman even reacted with: good point.

Seven of course isn’t much. But even more striking: nobody called what I wrote typically the opinion of a cishet white man or an incel or an harasser. Apparently open talk about dilemmas like this, even on the fb page of a liberal weekly, isn’t that outrageous anymore. Of course this is partly due to outright rightist people invading them, but we’d better profit from that than let those rightist take over all opposition against woke feminism.