Some people are uncomfortable with touchers like Biden. Should they set the rules?
The unwritten rule can be as indelible as any chiseled into a tablet. That’s its genius and its curse. But because norms recalibrate, and today’s are still sorting themselves out, not everyone got the invisible memo that says a person shall not hug, pat, brush, graze, stroke, clasp, rub, squeeze or nuzzle another without first obtaining or at least intuiting consent.
Joe Biden certainly didn’t get that memo. He has operated on his own tactile terms for years, and now he faces an unexpected hurdle as he ponders a twilight run for the White House. Several women have said that when Biden’s exuberant greetings or gestures of support involved touching them, they felt uncomfortable, leading some progressives to hint that he should sit this one out.
Manhandling, assault, uninvited sexual touching — that sort of contact has long violated social norms (as well as laws). But the move to regulate behavior that makes people “uncomfortable”? This treads on newer turf. Life presents “uncomfortable” moments daily, after all, and they differ from person to person. Should rejecting discomfort be the new norm? Should it be what makes me uncomfortable? Which comfort level should dictate? Good luck finding the line of demarcation. Even if we could, such a taboo would set up a Blakeian battle pitting innocence against experience. “Someone should put the bloody brakes on it,” says Francis McGlone, a neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University and an evangelist for social touch.
Norms governing touch are headed to a place where they can cause harm, says McGlone, who studies C-tactile afferents, the nerve fibers that respond to gentle touch. C-tactile afferents are “beautifully, exquisitely evolved,” McGlone says, and without the touch that they respond to, babies have weaker neural responses and longer hospital stays, do not gain as much weight and are more at risk for autism. But the benefits derived from this nerve fiber — he’s fond of calling it “the Higgs boson of the social brain” — don’t end in infancy. McGlone points to higher rates of mortality among lonely people, who make up a large proportion of the elderly. What do the lonely elderly have in common? They don’t get touched, he says. “Don’t piss around with 3 million years of evolution,” McGlone admonishes. It “doesn’t make mistakes.” Social touch is “a biological necessity.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/some-people-are-uncomfortable-with-touchers-like-biden-should-they-set-the-rules/2019/04/12/9f8a49da-5bbb-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
