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.

We are animals and as much as like to think we aren't,  we are.  If you think there was some designer, then that designer did a hell of a lot of cheating, because we not only share a lot of our DNA with monkeys,  we also share much of it with other mammals all the way down to our skeleton which we share with invertebrates. Even trees share much of our DNA. There are modifications here and there but the similarity is unmistakable, even and including how women give birth, just like other mammals.

We are animals because we need to do things other animals do, like sleep, eat, we have a powerful urge to mate and reproduce to pass our genes on. We need sunlight and nature and use the bathroom.

Because we depend on our environment we must care for the environment as a means of caring for ourselves. We depend on our atmosphere to protect us from radiation and to breathe. We depend on plants to produce oxygen and recycle our carbon dioxide. We must live in a symbiotic relationship with the environment but we don't. We pretend it is purely at our disposal.

This is because our brain is so powerful.  We have developed stories that are fantasies about our origins, such as believing we were created distinct from other animals because we somehow think we are special and thus these stories a tapestry of superstitions that are religion.

We depend on each other completely for our understanding of reality that we need contact with other human beings for our sanity and these stories we tell each other shape us into who we are.

We are clever animals who have evolved hands to be able to craft and utilize tools. We have also learned the value of communicating, storing and sharing information.  Indeed, some of our landmark discoveries has been the storing and transmission of information,  cave paintings,  the Gutenberg press, math, telegraph, cinema, radio, television, computers and the Internet. 

But our experience of reality depends largely on who and what we believe.  And knowing what is fiction can be difficult if we believe it. It's nearly impossible to find the flaws in our own thinking (or believing) and this can make it difficult to communicate with others who don't believe what we believe. It's nearly impossible to be objective enough to see our own hypocrisy, even when we are aware we may have flaws in our own thinking. Since we attach so much importance to sanity it can be deeply distressing to find out our beliefs are wrong.

I used to know a born again Christian who delighted in telling me about her favorite t-shirt which said: Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven. She didn't realize this was her license to be completely immoral.