Please excuse the title, it's a pun worthy of a hairdresser's shop I admit but, for some reason, the best I could come up with.
Back in September I wrote a piece called Temple Tarts, and towards the end I suggested ways in which we could improve our attitudes to sex as a society. One of these was to promote nudism and the other to be more open to touch. The response from a couple of friends on Facebook was especially interesting.
Right or Wrong?
One of those friends has an uncle who was a schoolteacher who was falsely accused of child molestation. The case was proven to be total bullshit and thrown out of court, but not until after his life had been ruined. Many people who didn't know either him or his accusers were willing to believe entirely without proof and acted like vigilantes.
In yet another fit of synchronicity, I'm also working in a film at the moment about an innocent man who is accused of the inappropriate touching of a child. It ruins his life too.
Also, back in the early '90s a friend of mine was accused of child abuse. Again it was wrong and proven to be so, but many people believed it. In his case it was because he was male and a known Pagan. Most Pagans over 30 will have some recollection of the Rochdale and Orkney debacles and this was in their wake.
I have no answers here. I still believe that to touch a person who doesn't want you to, sexually or otherwise, is wrong but that the world will be a far better place if we allow more people to touch us. We really need to be open to intimacy and less distant from each other.
At the same time there is this amazing and ludicrous paranoia that anyone (or any man particularly) who is affectionate to a child is doing something sinister.
It's strange: When I was small teachers were distant, dominant dragons. You weren't supposed to like them, you were supposed to obey them. Now my children (aged 7 and 9) often hug their teachers or dinnertime staff. To my mind this is better. There is still some discipline, but the teachers are considered more as human beings in their own right.
Obviously this will happen less and less as they get older and develop personal space, but at the moment it's good and gives the children a sense of security.
In The Beginning
Not long ago I used to think that the primary human sense was sight. I got that one wrong!
Sight is exceptionally important to us. It's how we interact with the world, it's our advanced warning system, it's how we recognise each other. But it's not our first sense.
The first experiences of a newborn baby come through the skin during birth and the moments immediately after. The child doesn't see mum, she feels mum. She feels warmth and comfort.
Our skin is the largest sense-organ we have and we can't turn it off, like we can shut our eyes, and through it we experience everything around us. In other words we need to touch and be touched to fully experience the world as a whole and not just each other.
So why this paranoia over something we need so much? I think it's down to sex.
Touchy, Feely
To touch someone in certain ways is highly intimate and pleasurable, and to be touched like that is much the same. The point of crossover comes in the use of an unwilling person to acquire that pleasure. No longer loving or sexual it becomes a matter of power and dominance.
This is what makes it wrong, the imposition of one's will upon another without their consent. It is, in the words of Granny Weatherwax, "Treating people as things".
Such acts, quite rightly, upset and disgust people. But that's not the problem here. The problem comes in the willingness to believe the worst immediately.
Sex is a natural obsession. Once we've got ourselves sorted out with food and shelter our minds tend to turn that way. Advertisers know this - sex sells, and the manipulation of sexuality for profit is an amazingly effective way of making money. Newspapers know this very well.
Sensationalism feeds the human hunger for stimulation. We are incredibly intelligent beings, we've had to be to survive, but when it's no longer needed for survival that thirst for information can easily be perverted to sell magazines. It's just a more modern form of gossip.
Put the two together and what have you got? You've got a willingness to believe in the most unrealistic nonsense if it's novel enough. Sad but true and I don't think there's a cure. Misquoting William de Worde this time, "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on". This is no consolation to my friend's uncle, I know, but it appears to be what happens.
What Do We Do Now?
Well, one thing we shouldn't do is worry too much. The sensationalist newspapers notwithstanding, our society is not populated by rampant child-abusing maniacs. Sexual crimes are very rare in comparison with other crimes, and other crimes are going down.
Here's a link to the official figures.
What we need to do is be affectionate with our friends and loving with our children. We need to do our own will, in other words that which we truly believe to be right, rather than to have our wills controlled by the media.
It's the hundred-monkey syndrome again. If enough people behave in a certain way (eg. considering what the truth might be before believing in the guilt of an innocent schoolteacher), eventually the behaviour of the whole society will change.
We can make our society a better place by starting with ourselves.
Love,
Seán
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7 comments:
Another interesting and thought-provoking blog. I saw the 'free hugs' guy in Manchester this summer and I immediately felt happy. I went to claim my free hug and also to give him one back in gratitude but was horrified when I realised my first thought on hugging the guy was 'Hmmm - I hope he's not picking my pocket right now...'.
You're right - the media does have alot to answer for, like a relentless battle to destruct our faith in humanity for one. One of these days I'm gonna be the 'free hugs' guy for a day - I am adding it to my 'list of things to do before I die' right now! Thanks for the inspiration Sean! Hugs all round!!
Right back at you!
X
Excellent post, Sean! As ever.
How much of this do you think is a 'world' problem and how much to do with our uptight, post-Victorian British existence? Or, if you like, post-Puritan, Cromwellian existence? I mean how does the situation compare with places like Spain, France, Italy etc where sexual mores and hugging kids is much more the norm? Or in Scandinavia?
I suspect we are still not over that appalling 'love-in-a-cold-climate' sexual half-Nelson we put on ourselves during the 19th C. All the evidence suggests that pre the Industrial Revolution we were shagging with the best of them. Just look at Pepys Rochester & the Restoration. Without being classist about it, it was the rise of the mercantile classes and the protection of property and inheritance that created a lot of the Victorian mores we know and hate.
That and the fact that super-sexual societies were not always great for women pre-contraception. It may be that its only now when women are freer from the biological consequences of sex that we can truly find some kind of way of having a healthy, balanced sexual standard. Before contraception women of a lower class were basically preyed upon. Again, look at Pepys. He spends his time shagging chambermaids, working women and anyone else he can get his hands on. Great for him, not so great for them if they got pregnant. The Victorian period wasn't much better, as the enormous explosion of the sex industry shows... It would be nice to think we could at last get it right!
One of your readers wrote a little while back 'I blame the Victorians'. I think he is probably right. Everything that is still wrong with sexuality in our society - the puerile voyeurism, the sniggering, the wall-to-wall commidifying, the fantasy rather than practise - is so down to a hangover from the dishonest view of it the Vics had. We still haven't allowed it to be something that can happen between individuals in whatever way they want it to be. It is still invaded by our public neurosis!
As for hugs, well I 300% agree with you. Chinese medicine actually says hugs are medically good for you as they get the meridians flowing and the energy moving around your body. Thus not just hugs but stroking and carressing and the 'magic hug' which a friend of mine's kids used to refer to making love as. :-)
All loving physical contact is good for us. Even hugging a friend is good (yes! even a same-sex friend!) as it is a warm, life-giving merging and exchange of energies.
Thanks again, Sean!
I do have answers on this subject as I've been involved as both victim and expert for the past quarter century. To start, we should repeal the Child Abuse Prevention & Treatment Act (CAPTA) of 1974 but it probably will never happen under Obama's tenure. Secondly, child protection workers and police sex crimes detectives are in dire straits need of better education and training in this field and especially in false allegations complaints, and lastly the quality of defense attorneys representing persons falsely accused of abuse is largely despicable. All law schools should have a required course in litigating/trying false abuse cases for all wannabe lawyers.
Dean Tong
abuse-excuse.com
Thanks Dean. You've added an extra dimension there.
Being British, as are all the other people who commented, I've no idea of the American attitudes to personal intimacy. Are they more-or-less the same, is the child-abuse paranoia still rife, would I get beaten up for hugging a male friend in public?
Sometimes I forget that the internet is international and I'm likely to be read by anyone who can speak English.
Thanks for the wake-up call.
Love,
Seán
P.S. Pegasus, I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but I used to work for an Italian gardener and his mate. They were a lot more physical than most of the Brits I've worked with and for.
I'm inclined to believe (this could be rubbish!) that warm climates make people more relaxed and friendly. I'm thinking of ancient Greek/Roman attitudes to sex compared to Norse ones.
Touch, is as you say, a touchy subject. How much of a person's attitude to things like hugs and kisses is down to nationality? Eskimos rub noses. Would the English ever do that? The Japanese are very formal. Certain Europeans do the kissing on each cheek thing. How much of a person's attitude is down to their sex? Are women generally speaking more physically affectionate than men? Do men still fear hugging their mates lest they are accused of being gay? And how much of a person's attitude is simply down to how they were raised? If your parents were not of a huggy, kissy nature does that automatically mean you will never be that way either?
I am not a huggy, kissy person. Is that because I was raised by parents who likewise were not huggy, kissy people? Is it anything to do with being English or would it have made little difference where I was born and who raised me? Is it in my DNA? Nature or nurture?
I think that perhaps the world would be a little better if we were all a bit more affectionate with each other but on the other hand I think there is a danger of pressurising people into something they don't want. I've recieved unwanted hugs in the past. Certain people just assume that if you are in a particular frame of mind that a hug will cheer you up but they don't ask you beforehand if you would in fact like that hug. Once someone holds out their arms to you you have to make a choice. Maybe you'd welcome the hug and in which case there's no problem but if you don't you either have to grit your teeth, allow that other person to invade your personal space for a few seconds or you have to refuse the hug and be immediately labelled as some sort of cold fish with a personality problem.
Perhaps how you view hugs and kisses depends on the person who offers them. Personally I wouldn't go around the streets offering hugs and kisses to absolute strangers. I certainly wouldn't want a hug from a teacher. Maybe it's a trust issue. If you are generally speaking a trusting person you are more likely to enjoy giving and recieving hugs. If you don't...if like sallyinlancs your first thought on being hugged is to wonder if your pocket is being picked...that leads onto another very interesting question. Where does trust come from? Can you really ever trust another human being?
Some good points and questions there, and I may be able to answer a couple of them.
Our attitudes to physical contact are definitely cultural, and due to upbringing.
Firstly, the British are rather more physically reserved than most other Europeans, so we've got that as a background. The tendency to shake hands rather than kiss on both cheeks, for instance. It's then modified by our upbringing (allowing for rarities like particular illnesses or childhood trauma) which basically means that we tend to be a lot like our parents.
The same thing happens with personal space. A person brought up in a crowded city has a smaller personal space than a country person. Australian aboriginals have a huge personal space, the Japanese hardly appear to have one at all.
Funnily enough, my own parents aren't particularly physical either but - and this is what the whole concept of "The Dionysian" is all about - once we are self-aware we can choose what is the right way for ourselves rather than being an unwitting slave to circumstances such as our upbringing.
I believe that, on the whole, our society would be better for more physical affection and less British reserve, but not because I was brought up by especially emotional and huggy parents.
The choosing whether to allow a hug or not is, of course, highly personal. There are many people I don't particularly want to touch, and rare times I'm simply not in the mood. I've found that a polite refusal doesn't offend MOST people. Some folk are no-hopers, though, and we've got to live with that.
As for the trust thing, that's tricky.
Here's a simple fact, though - 19 out of every 20 people are honest and trustworthy. They are not going to pick your pocket or stab you in the back. They may be dumb, or thoughtless, or emotionally clumsy but actual deliberate malice is pretty rare.
The sad fact is that we're kept frightened and paranoid by our media, who use it to sell stuff, and our governments, who use it to retain power. It takes a serious effort of will to break that brainwashing and most of us (me included) never fully succeed.
But we can keep trying!
Love,
Seán
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