loving-touch-avant-garde

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GIVE 👏🏻 BOYS 👏🏻 ROMANTIC 👏🏻 PHYSICAL 👏🏻 AFFECTION 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 I DONT EVEN KNOW HOW MANY GUYS I HAVE BEEN WITH OR TALKED TO THAT SAY THEY HAVE NEVER HAD SOMEONE HOLD THEM OR KISS THEIR FOREHEADS OR PLAY WITH THEIR HAIR. I HAVE HAD A BOY BREAK DOWN IN FRONT OF ME BECAUSE I HELD HIM TO MY CHEST AS HE GOT SLEEPY AND HE HADNT EVER HAD SOMEONE HOLD HIM LIKE THAT !!!!! THIS IS NOT RIGHT !!!!! BOYS DESERVE PHYSICAL AFFECTION JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE AND NOT JUST IN A SEXUAL WAY !!!!!!!!!!! THEY DESERVE TO FEEL LOVED AND CARED FOR JUST LIKE THE LADIES !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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just ran my fingers up and down my own back :/ it’s lonely out here

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IT’S SO HARD WHEN YOU’RE IN A CUDDLY MOOD AND DON’T HAVE ANYONE TO CUDDLE WITH THIS IS AN OUTRAGE

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I could go for some caresses and some light chaotic tapping, now

skin hunger is complicated

there’s very little conversation about skin hunger at all, but also, what little conversation there is treats it as if it’s a simple and uniform and easily quantifiable

skin hunger is as complicated as food hunger, for instance just because something’s there doesn’t mean it’s what you’re hungry for, or maybe even if it would feed you it’s also wrong somehow, different things are hard to take at various times for various reasons

[loving-touch-avant-garde]

I’ve been saying “non-sexual touch” is what I’m interested in, and I don’t think that’s communicating what I mean very well. 

People seem to respond by thinking of a spectrum with sexual touch on one side, and since we’re talking about the opposite of that, the archetype of what kind of touch I mean must be somewhere far to the other side, far away from sexual touch– like I’m heard as if I’d said “anti-sexual touch.” 

What I’m interested in is a type of touch that’s not mostly sexual, but not particularly distant from sex and sexual touching either. I’m interested in playing with bodies, playing with various sensations all over bodies, not just a few particular safe sensations that can be isolated and clearly marked as non-sexual by broad taboos that resonate with the wider culture. 

One way this is different from touch that’s able to be very clearly distanced from sexual touch is that it requires a different kind of negotiation. If you’re being non-sexual by staying miles away from anything that you assume could be sexual (I mean BTW shouldn’t this seem absurd and impossible anyway if you’ve heard of fetishes, but I digress) then you can make do with broad rules and aesthetics, just take everything hard in the anti-sexual direction. If you’re doing something that’s not about sex but it’s not especially distant from it either, then you need detailed communication about how each thing feels to each participant, to tiptoe around sensations you’re not intending to create. 

So for instance if clothing that obscures sight and touch of your body feels very anti-sexual to you, which is how clothing is normally understood by modern society, and clothing doesn’t obstruct what you’re wanting from touch, then you can make the touch more anti-sexual by just saying, everyone must be very clothed! Everyone wear all the clothes!! Phew. You don’t even have to mention what nudity is exactly or how it makes you feel, you can just talk about it in terms of mandating lots of clothing, and that will make everything feel safe (apparently, not speaking for myself, I find clothes sexy). 

But if the non-sexual touch you want involves lots of skin touching lots of skin, now you have to get into details. Which parts being uncovered when makes you feel sexy how, and how does it feel to everyone affected if we go through or very near those sexy feelings because that’s the only or easiest route to somewhere non-sexy we’re trying to get to?? It might not be obvious that keeping touch non-sexual when it gets close to sexual feelings can require detailed conversations about what turns everybody on so that you know what to avoid. 

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Something that stood out to me about my local cuddle party instructions is that they specifically say that you shouldn’t wear tank tops because it isn’t a sexual event. Isn’t that interesting?? Because I mean like this is a liberal lefty hippie little city where all of the participants would presumably be horrified by the opinion for instance that young women shouldn’t wear tank tops to social events because that would be too sexual. And I don’t think it’s authentically their opinion at all that shoulders and armpits are really so inherently sexual that exposing them sexualizes contexts. So I don’t think they’re quite really saying what they’re saying.

What I think they’re trying to say without having the words for it is that this is an AFFECTIONATE event as opposed to a SENSUAL event. if you add to the frame sensual touch as a possibility as well as sexual touch then a lot of their messaging makes more sense. What it seems to me to really say is: Some people read sensual touches as affectionate, while others read those same touches as sexual. This ambiguity is likely to cause both unintentional boundary violations because people have different perspectives on the same touches, and also intentional pushing at the edge of what’s acceptable social behavior in the context because if people are trying to satisfy sensual rather than affection needs they’ll be too interested in too many areas and aspects of their bodies which will make them push towards areas that will seem sexual to willing or unwilling participants or observers and cause further confusions and tensions. 

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reblog if u need a hug

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Fuck I like this so much... Need this

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Idk I might be broken but I don’t think of sex as intimate or romantic. there’s nothing intimate about sex, it’s animalistic and dirty. if you want to show you love me, scratch my head to help me fall asleep, rub my back as im breaking down, kiss my forehead when im so overwhelmed with joy that i squeal a little bit. don’t shove your hand down my pants to try to convince me you love me. just because you’re slowly thrusting in and out of my vagina doesn’t make me feel loved or connected to you. anyone can fuck me, not everyone can take the time out of their day to acknowledge my feelings or my soul

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kitten needs constant attention

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Touch deprivation feels like...

Part of being touch starved is that you both really really want to be touched with affection, but you also really don’t want anyone to fucking touch you; mostly because you don’t think you’re deserving or worthy of that affection. 

So when someone does touch you, all you want is to lean into that feeling and cherish it, and hope that they touch you more. Even though you pull away quickly and think they have made a mistake.

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i’ve been thinking a lot about compliments, since that seems to be one of the most popular forms of verbal affection

well, that’s something i’ve been thinking: is there verbal affection that isn’t implicitly a compliment? is it the same thing? it’s at least almost the same thing (in this culture?? how to get any distance??), but, why?? that doesn’t feel like the implicit message of physical touch affection, always or as often, physical touch is just like me give you soft nice feeling.. shouldn’t there be ways to give that verbally other than saying you’re good, does it depend what people want to hear, could you change it

anyway understanding compliments through the touch lens has been really helpful to me because there’s endless parallels, like the way rape culture fucks around with boundaries, the withholding and love bombing in the various social manipulation strategies, um probably something positive too

one thing i’ve started to think the past week or so is to relate how i feel about compliments to how i feel about eye contact: in both cases it’s this awkwardness and like wtf is this and it bounces off of me, and what i realized longer ago about eye contact, oh and also like that brief upper arm caress gesture for another instance, is that what feels wrong about them to me is that they’re too short, it’s not enough for me to enjoy it, and so i just started to think about that in terms of compliments also and maybe that’s the same thing, the standard complimenting is less than i’d enjoy

i’ve been imagining getting more intense compliments and that seems more right to me, it feels most sensible if i imagine streams of hyberbolic silliness, in one imagining i imagined someone telling me i’m the best person in the universe and that seemed reasonable, and then i imagined them telling someone else the same thing and i felt compersion, but then i imagined being play jealous anyway, anyway, hyperbole seems to work for me, i just imagined someone saying to me how it’s awesome how i’m a million miles tall and that also feels very reasonable

i’m vaguely reminded of some concept of compliments where they’re supposed to actually be critiques of your real-life activities which seems invasive somehow

what is it about the compliment that makes it like a touch? what other words are like touches? is it like a touch at all? does it just play a similar social role maybe?

a compliment says “you’re included”, because it’s in the context of violently rejecting everyone inadequate to whatever violent standards, if you’re in a situation where everyone’s always included and supported then you can say the same thing by making reference to that shared context, “ahh, look at our shared context” you can say and everyone feels safe and included because that’s the context

idk maybe like make up weird complimenting cultures and try them for a week and see what about it you can change, i can’t tell what about it can change

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oh my goddd. I thought it was great from the beginning but it only gets better

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hello this is my hug application

u should give me a hug because

I am a warm human

I need one

I am generally comfortable?

Hugs are pretty cool

Hugs make me feel secure

Nothing says I care like a hug

I can do bro hugs too!

I need one

I really need one

U get a little bit of rainbow when u hug me bc my gayness is strong

I can hold out long hugs

Yes thank u for ur time

[loving-touch-avant-garde]

HUUGGS

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I love those hugs where you completely smother the other person into your chest and vice versa.