We as animals, and no I don't mean that derogatorily, thrive on touching and being touched and I don't mean 'touch' in a sexual sense. It is part of social grooming that many animals engage in. Many people enjoy petting cats and dogs and other animals or hugging other humans, a hand shake starts a business relationship or closes a deal. Touch is fundamental to us as human beings. Human babies need it for development. Research shows that teams that touch the most win more often, waitresses that casually touch customers get bigger tips, touch can give us confidence, makes us feel better, calm us... These articles all recommend we touch, or hug loved ones several times a day. Indeed, we should touch each other way more often than we do.

Again I need to reiterate that this is non-sexual touching.

There are safe places on unfamiliar people's bodies we can touch them socially which is non-sexual, such as hands, arms, shoulders and upper back. Any where else is unwanted touching unless there is appropriate intimacy, such as with an adult partner you consensually engage in sex with.

Despite all the benefits of non-sexual touching, we need to be reminded to do it, kind of like being reminded to eat our vegetables I suppose. But one of the things humans are very good at is confusing sensory signals, or, one thing for another.

For example, most of what makes food delicious is its smell. We anthropomorphize rocks and volcanoes into gods, we develop systems of rules and artificial structures and call them laws in religion, superstition, alchemy, language, law, and even algebra. We even lie to ourselves and call it rationalization. Sorting our way through the mess of mental constructions and coming to a truth will probably only make us eventually come to new realization of more self-deception. This is how knowledge evolves, and this is also another blog entry entirely.

Anyway this is where I come to the hypothesis that people who inappropriately touch others are doing so because they have confused the need for human touch with the adult activity of sex. Part of the delusion of the male stereotype is that men cannot need anything from others, yet they still need to touch and be touched. It is manly to have sex. It is not manly to need affection, or the need for the touch of another person's hand.

Another example is the lie (or rationalization) someone was 'asking for it'.

Also the male stereotype dictates men cannot touch each other yet there are these male bonding rituals of gang raping women, in other words, the woman/women being raped is a/are surrogate/s for these men being intimate with each other. We are fortunate more men don't feel the need to engage in such bonding rituals.

It is also manly to be violent. It is not manly to need to be hugged by your wife and kids. But how do you get your wife and kids to hug you after you've beaten them?

It may also be possible that men need to touch and be touched more than women do.

Touch is important, but is best kept to the safe zones. And all of us should remember to touch each other more often, and let's hope feminism can get the message out that it is safe for men to touch each other.

The Blue Manakin is this bird where the alpha male bird makes other male blue manakins dance so he can 'score' with the female bird, but only if the female is sufficiently impressed by their dance. In this video we see the males performing a complicated dance all so one male bird can potentially mate with the female which is sitting there watching the display. (Originally sourced from the BBC, David Attenborough's The Life of Birds)

I think we are seeing a similar display in human society: men work in concert with each other to make sure any one man can mate by minimizing  women's access to money. Men keep women out of jobs, preferentially promote men, ensure women are paid less for the same job, and go about destroying the planet so men can show off and attract a mate.

In our society, nothing makes raising children easier than a plentiful source of money. So women are selecting for men who are rich and have a good earning capacity. As we see, the female blue manakin is bland in comparison to the male, as women tend to be in our society. Women tend to make themselves bland in our society to maximize their chances of mating - they strive for mediocrity. For instance, women strive for a generically small size, generic intelligence, generic accomplishments, and society is always downplaying the accomplishments of women. The only thing society prizes about women is their appearance and they strive to make themselves relatively indistinguishable from each other.

On the other hand, it is men who perform the great deeds and have all the great accomplishments and all of society plays along so men can stand out from each other to woo and impress women. A man who stands out maximizes his chances of attracting a female mate for breeding opportunities.

However, these days the planet doesn't need population growth and science has helped us overcome many of the illnesses that afflicted previous generations. It is ridiculous devoting half the population to the dangerous and often boring activity of bearing and raising children.

Our society should be striving for quality of life and options for everyone, not just for one gender. And while many of us still want a partner to share (part of) our life with, it doesn't necessarily need to result in or be because of reproduction.

One of the problems I am starting to see over and over again is the inability to recognize when someone has heard you.

When someone communicates something that they consider a contentious piece of information to another, there is doubt that the information was even heard so there is a tendency to repeat the information ad nauseum until someone manages to communicate back that they've heard the original message and sometimes the original messenger never hears what they consider acknowledgement that the message was heard.

Let me give an example. Consider two individuals A and B. A has a bad habit, or believes something that B doesn't like. So B will try to let A know that A's belief or behavior is wrong/bad. So A may indeed suffer from cognitive dissonance and simply doesn't believe or denies A's opinion and continues as per normal for A.

B witnesses no change in A's behavior or beliefs so B repeats the message. A may start to hear B's message but displays no visible change and B may not observe what B considers an acknowledgement of hearing the information.

So B continues to repeat the message over and over again.

A may get sick of hearing the message and start tuning B out because the noise is overwhelming, heard the message and disagrees on their position or their assumptions, may have tried to tell A this message but B didn't get their message so continues to reiterate B's message.

B may or may not have a valid and useful message for A. A may actually hear the message and agreed and decided to change their belief or behavior but B may never receive the acknowledgment from A that A agrees, and hence B is deaf to A now and assumes A is universally deaf to B. Or A may be embarrassed about this message and may not want to acknowledge they were wrong or their behavior was bad.

I think it is fair to say that you may have to repeat a message several times before the recipient of the message can possibly hear you, but there has to be a point when you stop repeating the message because there is no way for you to hear them acknowledge your message, you are now deaf to them yourself.

You have to remember that no one will hear your message unless they want to hear it. And as Einstein said to have said: Insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It is possible you yourself are deaf.