Touchy feely

Here's a column on what I think is an interesting topic:   men touching men (nonsexually, Jason:  nonsexually.)

I can't say that I've ever regretted the matter of not hugging another male since - well, since forever - but the way in which things changed culturally in America over a 100 years or so (not sure about Australia) is at least interesting.  And I have thought that the fear of homosexuality from casual contact of any kind - a pat on the shoulder even - was ridiculous:

...many men self-police their hands around each other. In younger men this manifests in the ubiquitous “No homo!” response if they accidentally touch another guy, and in older men it translates into the same awkward discomfort (read: fear) that I, and many men, experience when faced with reaching out to another male, even an intimate. Yet these reactions are a relatively modern phenomena. Men shared the same bed with strangers in early American taverns, and scholarship is unearthing letters — including ones from Abraham Lincoln — revealing how men sometimes nurtured same-sex friendships that were more emotionally and physically intimate in nonsexual ways than the relationships they shared with women. Some 19th-century tintypes, such as those collected in the book “Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection,” illustrate this.

I thought the way it's put in this paragraph is funny:

The psychologist Ofer Zur notes that for most 20^th- and 21st-century American men, physical contact is restricted to violence or sex. As the sociologist Michael Kimmel, who studies masculinity, said in an email, touch between straight men can occur only when physical contact “magically loses its association with homosexuality” — as happens in sports.

As for contact with children, some claim it is very significant:

The fear that girds the lack of platonic touch among American men also fuels the destructive force of their hands, a 2002 study in the journal Adolescence found. Dr. Field was the lead author of the study, which looked at 49 cultures. “The cultures that exhibited minimal physical affection toward their young children had significantly higher rates of adult violence,” she said. But “those cultures that showed significant amounts of physical affection toward their young children had virtually no adult violence.”

 I wonder how Japan figures into that.  It's a country famous for not kissing children, but perhaps there is a lot of physical intimacy made up in the much more likely scenario of sleeping in the same room with parents until a quite advanced age.

Mind you, if that study was accurate, you would imagine that some European countries - perhaps Italy in particular? - where parents seem very affectionate to children and even men seem much more physically affectionate with other men, should be the least violent places on the planet.  But I'm not sure that holds true.

Update:  speaking of the situation with male friendship in the 19th century, I think I failed to note at the time the somewhat interesting article by Frank Moorhouse a month or so ago in which he discussed the intense male friendship that Henry Lawson had, and also his somewhat effeminate characteristics which were commented on at the time.   A bit of a surprise, given the physical look of the guy and the content of his fiction, I think.  But Moorhouse (himself gay or at least bisexual?)   seems to make a decent argument that Lawson's alcoholism was to do with unresolved sexuality.  Or is it a case of overenthusiastic claiming of someone to the gay clubhouse, as modern gays are sometimes inclined to do?