The Over-Sexualization of Touch.

Two things that I cherish, value and am unconditionally grateful for in life is experiencing the feeling of intimacy and the sensation of touch.

As much as I enjoy sexual intimacy and touch, the kind I crave and yearn and find a lot harder to come by is the kind of intimacy and touch that has no sexual charge or undertone to it.

Touch is fundamental and intrinsic to the human condition. We are wired for touch in ways that are much deeper and intense than any empirical study on oxytocin razzmatazz or evidence of how hugs build immunity can begin to unravel.

We are tactile in a way that we don’t fully comprehend or understand. Touch has an organic, direct and linear relationship with empathy, for instance.

There is nothing inherently or intrinsically creepy or depraved or profane about touch. Deprivation of touch has dastardly physical and mental effects on kids and adults alike. You don’t have to look beyond your own lived experience to know how this is true.

A tap, pat, cuddle, hug or a caress or a rhythmic partner dance is the stuff of life itself.

One of the fondest memories of childhood is my bhua (paternal aunt) putting me to sleep in the night by stroking the head and running her fingers through my tousled hair. In the nineties and noughties, when I grew up, it was perfectly acceptable for men to hold hands together. God knows, I did.

At some point in the last decade - I don’t know when or why - this has become taboo for straight men. Even the hugs between me and my male friends - a few honourable exceptions notwithstanding - last barely for a few seconds, have a semblance of awkwardness and a bunch of body language cues that suggest that all is well but, err, all is not.

It is as if you either conform to social mores or be assumed to be gay. And as if being gay or assumed to be gay makes you less of a man.

It is true that nearly every woman I know has been touched, molested, assaulted and groped in frightening, startling and intimidating ways. It is true that it is incumbent on all men and women to listen without judgement or rationalisation or defensiveness the travails of any individual who has undergone the trauma and hold our fellow brethren accountable for it. It is true that touch is entirely a personal decision in that it is up to the individual to decide when, where, how much and from whom they would rather receive the physical attention from.

All of the above sits adjacent to another tragic truism and that is we have sanitized touch beyond measure. Non sexualised touch is only creepy if we categorise it as creepy. This is leading to more problems and not less. The meta irony is that by over-compensating and over-correcting this very real challenge, the one thing we are unwittingly ensuring is that all touch has a sexualised charge and undertone.

It is a little bit like when people everywhere congratulate themselves by saying that technology is helping us save all this time and money until they are brought back down to earth with the realisation that all that saved time and money is being reploughed into, well, technology.

We have arrived at a place where you are allowed to touch only if you are in a parenting or a romantic/sexual relationship. Without meaning to, we have elevated the importance of romance to an unrealistic and unsustainable ideal. That is way too much weight on one relationship for it to be healthy for anyone involved. This can lead to more misunderstanding, not less; more domestic abuse, not less; more stalking, not less.

We cannot solve the problem of unsafe touch by banishing touch altogether when it is the lack of touch that might be causing a lot of the present predicament to begin with.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved being in the company of kids wherever I go. Gardens, airports, hospitals, orphanages, you name it. It is a default natural instinct. I find that I come away temporarily smarter every time I connect with a kid. In the last few years, I have struggled with having to control what is a preternatural tendency. I am a wee bit more comfortable now with rejection or public embarrassment but suffice to say that I am conscious of just being me.

You may be right in thinking that lifting random kids and throwing them in the air while risking their safety is hardly practicing safe behaviour and the world is better off without it. And yet, it is what it is. A lost opportunity for intimacy and connection.

Another unintended side effect is that it is making us uncomfortable with intimacy in general. We don’t even know what we are missing out on. Just like absence of disease doesn’t signify health, this antiseptic approach to personal space and touch doesn’t signify freedom or some such.

In a workshop last week, we had people who had just met sit across one another and gaze into each other’s eyes - wordlessly - for a few minutes. The first time we did it, nearly everyone freaked out. They eventually built muscle for it by the second day, started enjoying it and requested that we should do practice for longer periods of time. Some even said that they felt ‘seen’ for the first time in years.

The point is that, given the current discourse and mindset, we may not even be willing to sign up for the period in the beginning when a process can be uncomfortable.

Earlier this year, I teared up watching a bunch of rhesus monkeys in bali involved in interactive tics and techniques between one another - a practice that is known as social grooming behaviour. It is a means by which animals who live in close proximity bond and reinforce social structures, family links and build companionships. Social grooming is also used as a means of conflict resolution, maternal behaviour and reconciliation in some species.

Consent is not just a wonderful thing, it is the very anchor and bedrock around which we fashion human relationships.

Maybe we just need to push the envelope on this conversation further where intimacy and spontaneity can co-exist alongside.

There are a hundred kinds of touching and only one of them is sexual.

When we deny ourselves and others all other forms of touching, we deny ourselves a hundred ways of healing.