I would do a lot right now for the chance to be cuddled lovingly at this very moment, for as long as I desired. No feeling of being rushed, no feeling like the person just hates every second, no feeling like if I don’t keep a tight hold, they’ll simply walk away. Just to be held and my forehead…
Thanks for expressing this feeling, Sherlock Cat!
secret touching
I always wonder why I can find so few pictures or videos of affectionate situations on the internet, but then again when I do find one I always think: Wait, did they get anyone’s consent to film this?! Are these people even comfortable with being in that video?! That’s yet another reason why so often the people in the things I do find are drunk. They’re drunk enough to touch each other, and even drunk enough to film it and upload it.
It makes me wonder about all the secret touching that’s happening. Logically there must be more situations than just those that are openly described or depicted, but I often get the feeling that it’s far far more, that most or almost all of the affectionate situations are somewhat secretive. There’s a lot of the population that would perceive any group touch as a sexual orgy (and, further, think of that as immoral). So it would be natural for people to want to be secretive when they’re ignoring those taboos and exploring touch anyway.
And even if it so happens that everyone involved in a situation would theoretically be comfortable with filming it, a lot of times it would be impractical or wouldn’t fit the vibe to get everyone’s consent to film and upload it. It would be very difficult to get a genuine serious consent anyway, since if you asked everyone in order if they were OK with it would be difficult for the last person to be the one to say “no.”
One solution of course would be to organize an event and plan from the beginning to film it, so everyone is consenting by choosing to attend. It seems there have been a number of Cuddle Parties filmed under that sort of arrangement, mostly because of the media attention to that phenomenon. I’d be more inclined to describe it as art, to invite people to help make an artistic video, where the content of the video is group affection. That would both ensure consent to share what happened, and also create a frame people can enter to explain and justify why out-of-the-ordinary activities are taking place.
Couple of weeks ago, me and a good friend of mine were talking about relationship issues… her issues that is, and I brought up a conversation about hugs. No not the diaper brand Hugs. I’m talking about the other kind of hugs, the kinds you give to people. The kind where you grab them towards you…
Yay thanks for thinking about these things.
It seems to me like hugs bear a lot of weight in our society. They’re one of the few affectionate rituals we have, one of the only ways that people know how to touch each other. So we think about hugging a lot and expect a lot of different things from it. We hug in slightly different ways and hang on that a lot of symbolism about our relationships and emotions.
As an affectionate person I’ve always been bothered a lot by the fact that long hugs— even just more than a few seconds— are discouraged or assumed to have a sexual meaning. I really enjoy long hugs, the longer the better, from friends or even from strangers, and I’ve felt like I don’t get that experience as much as I want because that’s the meaning we’ve given it.
It seems to me like if you want to symbolize sexual interest through hugging it’s easy enough to do it by the way you hug. So I wish that we could learn to allow a longer hug to just mean that you still want to be hugging. Hugging feels good, there’s no need to take it in such small doses!
inventing new kinds of touch
To create an affectionate society, we’ll need to invent a lot of new ways of touching. That’s a large part of why I’d like to find people who want to talk about touch, so we can work together to create in our culture spaces and traditions for people to touch in new ways.
Giving a name to a way of touching, to the boundaries and symbolism and implications of a ritual of touching, makes it practical to invite someone to participate in it. It’s easy to say “would you like a hug”, but it’s rarely possible socially to say something like “hey, I have an idea, how about we do a thing where we put our arms around each other and squeeze each other as a friendly affectionate gesture”!
So I’ll be posting here touch rituals of my own invention, as well as any obscure or forgotten ones that I discover. And I’d by very interested to hear and support anyone else’s ideas. Let’s imagine something new.
I think the popularity of this image represents an important point in awareness about affectionate touch in the United States. Of course the main reason it’s popular is because people love to make fun of W, and so people were amused by seeing him do anything that seemed unusual to them. But I have to imagine that as a result of this image entering the public mind a lot of people became a lot more aware of the fact that men holding hands has different connotations in different parts of the world. On it’s own it’s not nearly enough to make men here start holding hands. But it does plant a seed; it raises the question.
I know what you mean. I sometimes want to cuddle with my friends in a non-sexual way. (Even though I question the absolute dichotomy of ‘sexual’ vs. ‘non-sexual’. I think there has to be some physical attraction, however mild, repressed or ‘non-sexual’, for cuddling to be interesting.)
Well attraction like any emotion doesn’t come in absolutes. But I’d disagree that there’s necessarily any connection between cuddlability and attractedness, for instance many people like to cuddle with their own children (not that that absolutely precludes attraction either, but that’s about enough of that line of thought).
What I mean usually when I talk about non-sexual affection isn’t that sexuality is absolutely excluded. I don’t mean to talk about it in negatives at all, but I feel like the positive term that I’d like to use is missing. What I mean by saying non-sexual affection is just that kind of affection other than the sexual kind.
However, I haven’t yet found a way of asking that doesn’t make people uncomfortable. I’ve tried saying “I want to cuddle!” That doesn’t work. So I usually go for non-explicit imperatives: “Come here!” But just as you say, most people just cannot do cuddling or touching in a relaxed, non-sexual way.
It’s something missing from our culture, so you can’t make it happen without first establishing a ground for it. The word “cuddle” isn’t nearly enough to establish the character and boundaries of what you’re proposing. If anything it’ll confuse people about what you’re looking for because it often has sexual connotations.
In a culture or situation where kinds of touching other than sex are already established, you can invite people to them by referring to an existing norm. For instance in rave culture (from what little I understand of it) there’s an established tradition of “cuddle puddles”, and you can create that situation by inviting people to that cultural ritual. At a Rainbow Gathering, hugging strangers is common, so you can easily ask a stranger for a hug without stepping outside the bounds of normal social interaction.
If what you want to do doesn’t exist already as a shared concept, you need to slowly introduce it to someone, to invent it together.
Back rubs are easier. If you ask someone to give you a back rub, most people will actually do it. I guess because it’s seen as a favor, rather than as a mutual thing. Perhaps mutual physical enjoyment equates sex, to most people?
I think at least at a superficial level it’s less any quality of the affection itself and more about established norms. If there wasn’t already a concept in our collective mind of giving a friendly back rub, it would be just as difficult to invite someone into as any other kind of friendly affection. Inviting someone to be massaged on another part of their body, their face or their hands or their ears, still opens up the same awkward uncertainty. I don’t think it’s because the back is an especially unsexy place to touch; it’s that a non-sexual back rub exists as a concept with certain dimensions and meaning. If you offer to massage someone’s ear they don’t know exactly what the character and boundaries of an ear massage are, or more importantly what exactly it means.
