Touch Me
This weekend I went to the NewSpace art gallery for the Positive Contact opening. No goatse statue in this gallery, but there was a beautiful drawing of a couple embracing. One piece had me mesmerized; it was a replica of the very gallery room we were standing in, but empty and inverted.
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Walking side-by-side with my classmates in the Philippines, I had to get used to a frequent sense of touch. I had to get used to Dorothy's hand in the crook of my arm or Malou's fingers clasped around mine. Beyond the salutatory and farewell hugs, here in the US, we don't touch each other as much - a sort of culturally imposed sensory deprivation.
Most of my classmates are First-Generation Filipinos, so my women classmates happily returned to their old hand holding habits. "Don't worry we're not lesbians!", they protested. Frequent hand holding with friends isn't something I was accustomed to since I grew up in the US, but I was readily initiated. I thought there was a palpable sense of relief, in that they could fall into familiar gestures of female companionship. It's normal to see many women walking hand-in-hand in the streets and in the malls.
Once I remember reading a study where someone watched American and European teenagers hanging out in their peer groups, and counted how many times they touched each other. They found that the European teens touched each other at least 9 times more often. Which I guess is kind of sad for us here, this lack of social touch and contact comfort. We live in a nontactile society. Another worldwide study by psychologist Sidney Jourard found the rate of casual touch in couples to be 180 times per hour in Puerto Rico (the highest) and 2 times per hour in Florida (one of the lowest). I remember hearing about babies in a Romanian orphanage who were wasting away, and it wasn't due to the lack of nutrition, but the lack of touch.
It's easy to forget the power of touch, how comforting it can feel to strengthen our social bonds by simply leaning your head on your friend's shoulder or squeezing their hand. So reach out and touch someone!