TOUCH

I wrote this some time ago. It may not be totally a men's issue, but as men have more trouble touching people spontaneously and are more shamed for 'inappropriate' behavior in this area, it may be interesting for this sub.

TOUCH
When I was a teenager, once a year a rather peculiar man called Arthur Hesselbach visited my Dutch home town, Assen, with a just as peculiar project called Xoelapepel. It was based on the experiences he had had when temporarily blind, when he had to recognize people by touching them. It all happened on an evening in a gym. After a few relaxation exercises, the people present were required to crawl around on hands and knees with closed eyes. When they crawled into someone else, it was the idea they touched eachother’s face, and often not just the face, to more or less get a picture of who was opposite them. It was definitely not meant in a sexual or even erotic way, and that was not the way it worked out either.

And I absolutely loved it. More people – among whom quite a lot of other teenagers - apparently liked or loved it, for they came back every year. The notion you could touch other humans, feel their skin and body warmth, without any official ‘justification’, without talking to them or even seeing them, felt wildly liberating and uniting at the same time, almost hallucinating. It may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but in that hippy-like aera of humankind (first half of the ’70s) there was not much of a notion that there were also people who hated touch. But although quite a few people participated without knowing what to expect (for it wasn’t told), I never experienced any emotional breakdowns around me, nor heard about any complaints. It may not have been a totally normal project even then, but it was totally acceptable.

When I was a student, I led several youth camps, mainly together with a group of friends from Amsterdam. The teenagers, boys and girls, attending the camps, didn’t know eachother yet, so we spent the first afternoon after they’d arrived with games to build up trust. Half of these games consisted of ways to exchange – sometimes rather personal – information; the other half of, again, touching eachother. This could vary from a game where lots of hugs were involved, to touching somebody’s face while blindfolded and guessing who it was. The games were built up gradually, so everybody could get used to them. We did not make up those games ourselves, we learned them on weekends for camp leaders, where all kinds of things were learned to be applied in the camps, and played them together with other people our age. And in the camps, we not just let the boys and girls play those games, we also participated in them wholeheartedly. And again: never a complaint. Whole lots of reactions by teenagers of both sexes, who thought our camps were so much more fun than any other they ever attended. Not just because of the things mentioned above, no doubt, but still.

About six or seven years ago, I was a member of an improvisation theater group. The actual improvised scenes filled always only the second half of the training evening. First, we did a lot of other exercises, and quite a few were about, or involved, physical closeness. This was important, because to improvise well, you had to know and trust the other members thoroughly. What’s more: sometimes you could get spontaneous instructions to play a love scene, a night in a bride’s suit or whatever, and you shouldn’t be too inhibited then. There were exercises where you had to get past eachother on a narrow bench. Another one involved lying in a circle with heads on eachothers bellies and reacting to the movements you felt.

All the mentioned ‘touching’ projects may have had a practical goal or have been just fun. But for many people involved, there was also a social, even ideological side to it. In our puritanical western society, was the idea, people are divided and estranged from eachother because there is a taboo on touching. One thing necessary for really changing the way we interact is getting rid of that taboo. There was also a feminist version of this idea, stating that women often ended up having sex, when what they really wanted was just physical intimacy. What should happen to change that was more touching, which would lead to less unintended sex. This whole idea may have been naive, but I refuse to think it was total nonsense.

Nowadays, where there is any social analysis of touching at all, the word ‘touch’ is virtually always accompanied by ‘inappropriate’. Even questioning this association may be considered creepy. For a progressive person traveling with a time machine from, say, 1975, this would be nothing short of astonishing. No longer is the physical distance between people part of the problem, but the ones breaking through it perpetuate some kind of ‘oppression’. The idea the world would be a better place if we could touch eachother more spontaneously is dead, buried, burned and evaporated. How on earth could this happen?

As I already said: since then it has become clear that not everybody has the hippy-like love of touching others, that there are people more or less allergic to it. Fair enough. But should we adjust every behaviour, or everything else for that matter, to the most sensitive people? Like: what people say, the noises that are made in general (from radios to dogs to machines), the way people and things look, or smell? Impossible, and not the way we should want it. Being careful with those things, but without the illusion we can avoid every unpleasant feeling, of course is something else. Should we ask first then, every time before we touch someone? I know people, especially women, who say: I must not even think about people asking that every time. And let us be straight about it. There can be no clear conversation about touch as long as ‘inappropriate touch’ is used as a political phrase to prove we live in a ‘patriarchy’ or even a ‘rape culture’. The people stating that will do their best to characterize as much touching as possible as ‘inappropriate’. Those people care less about interhuman relationships than about fighting ‘oppression’ wherever they see it, or even don’t really see it.