shock the monkey

I was having a discussion the other day about how bodywork feels good emotionally as well as physically. Of course, as a massage therapist, when someone makes a statement like that to you, your first reaction is "well, yeah." You tend to forget that it's not that apparent to the average person. But I said, "Yeah, people need to be touched. You know what happens to the baby monkeys that get the wire mommy instead of a real one, doncha?" (Everyone took Psych 101 in college, right? If not, you can look it up.)

But, yeah, we're primates. I think that we're really supposed to be sitting around in the forest picking lice off each other and occasionally having sex, not existing in this touchless culture that we have here in the U.S. of A. I don't know how we've reached this point, but I've often thought about it and, how in certain ways, it definitely has negative effects on our society.

How much teenage and random college-age sexuality is due to, apart from rampaging hormones and/or drunken lack of judgment, a simple need to touch and be touched? I mean, when you're a little kid, your parents carry you in their arms, hug and kiss you, you sit on their laps or cuddle next to them on the sofa, like all the time. (If yours didn't, chill. I'm not accusing them of being bad parents. Well, okay, maybe a little.) But then right around puberty or just before, all the touching comes to a screeching halt, if only because the kids in their normal need to separate pull away from it. But then, who's touching you when you're 12 or 14 or 16 or even 19? You sure aren't getting bodywork. If you're a teenage girl, you're maybe getting some hugs from your friends; if you're a boy, and lucky enough to have some female friends, you might get some from them. Otherwise, it's whatever grudging hugs or kisses you allow from your family, and the touch you get from your romantic/sexual partners. If you don't have any romantic/sexual partners, you're starved for touch and probably more lonely and depressed than you otherwise should be. If you do, there's the chance that you're doing things with people who you otherwise wouldn't be just because the human contact feels so good. Now, I am definitely not discounting the raging hormones. But, face it, masturbation takes care of the worst of sexual frustration, but you can't really hug, kiss, or lovingly stroke yourself.

I don't know what the solution to this is. I just think it's a failure of our culture. Yeah, I know. One of many.

xoxo