Here is an article by Andrew Reiner taken from the New York Times
I had thought about reaching for my father’s hand for weeks. He was slowly dying in a nursing home, and no one who visited him — from my mother, his wife of 42 years, to my three siblings — held his hand. How do you reach for something that, for so many decades, hinted at violence and, worse, dismissal?
In the flickering grey from the old black-and-white movies we watched together, I finally did it. I touched my father’s hand, which I hadn’t held since I was a young boy. His curled fingers opened, unhinging some long-sealed door within me, then lightly closed around mine. Before I left, I did something else none of the males in my family had ever done before. I leaned close to my father’s ear and whispered, “I love you.”
Since then, I have learned that many middle-aged American men share this discomfort with reaching for another man’s hand. But experts say that nonsexual touching contributes to greater well-being.
Touch is the first, and perhaps most profound, language we learn when we’re very young, says Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Touch might have a more immediate impact than words, Dr Field said in an email, “because it is physical and leads to a chain of bioelectric and chemical changes that basically relax the nervous system.”
The benefits of nonsexual touch read like a 19th-century tonic advertisement, except that the outcomes have been scientifically vetted. Touch has been found, among other things, to reduce stress, heart rate and blood pressure. Touch has even been found to lower the level of cortisol in the body (especially in women) which, when elevated, impedes our working memory and, most critically, the immune system’s resiliency.
It should be great news that something free, widely available and lacking in harmful side effects is so good for us, but it gets ignored in a touch-averse culture like ours. Yes, Americans are generally gregarious but, unlike, say, Italians, Greeks, the French or Latinos, that friendly intimacy is largely limited to our mouths. According to Jay Skidmore, former chairman of the psychology department of Seattle Pacific University, “social-cultural trends in America have focused for decades on reducing touch.”
Of course, it would not be surprising if recent allegations of sexual assault by public figures make people even more skittish about initiating or receiving physical contact.
Indeed, 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.
The psychologist Ofer Zur notes that for most 20th- 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.
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.”
A big part of the problem for men is how they handle that 21st-century scourge that kills men younger than it does women: stress. Women employ a tend-and-befriend approach that invites confidence in and cooperation with people who can help them externalize their struggles and find succour.
Not men. When faced with stressors, they tend to turn cowboy, growing stoic, emotionally withdrawn and, too often, isolated. (It’s true that, unlike men, women receive higher levels of oxytocin — the calming, bonding hormone and neurotransmitter — when they are stressed, which enhances their ability to cope. But research shows that men’s, as well as women’s, levels of oxytocin rise when they receive affectionate touch from their partner — and that with doses of oxytocin through the nose, fear is reduced and degrees of trust, generosity and empathy rise.)
If this cowboy approach strengthened men mentally and emotionally, it wouldn’t be a problem. But the weight of having to suppress stress and the resulting emotions that are perceived as unmanly — “gender role stress,” Dr. Zur calls it — doesn’t make men more resilient. It makes them more vulnerable, triggering anxiety and depression, he says. It also prevents them from feeling that they have permission to seek mental health help. A 2000 study by U.C.L.A. researchers finds that “Men are more likely than women to respond to stressful experiences by developing certain stress-related disorders,” such as hypertension, alcohol and drug abuse.
There’s a reason the majority of clients seeking private services from the nascent professional cuddling industry are overwhelmingly male, straight, educated, divorced and in their early 50s. Just as a crushing number of white working-class men are succumbing to opioid addiction and suicide, these men are also suffering emotionally.
They are a population Kory Floyd, a professor of communication at the University of Arizona, had in mind when he wrote about “affection deprivation” in a study of more than 500 participants, published in 2014. Dr Floyd studied the effects of what he calls “skin hunger,” discovering that people who experience this phenomenon were, among other things, more lonely, depressed, had less social support, experienced more mood and anxiety disorders and an inability to interpret and express emotions. This lack of affection correlated with a “fearful avoidant attachment style,” the same reaction so common in affection-deprived children from orphanages — and in many men. Dr Floyd said in an email that men are “more likely than women to report that they received less affection from others than they wanted.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that a 2011 study from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour, found that among more than 1,000 heterosexual middle-aged and older married couples in five countries, hugging and kissing were more central to the happiness of men than they were to women.
But some young British men are going back to the future. A study published in October in Men & Masculinities found that the 30 heterosexual undergraduate males interviewed felt safer cuddling, hugging and, especially, confiding in platonic male friends than they did with their girlfriends. These “bromances” provided less judgment and increased “emotional stability, enhanced emotional disclosure, social fulfilment, and better conflict resolution, compared to the emotional lives they shared with girlfriends.”
Recently, I had a few beers with a new friend. (My wife initiated this, knowing I’ve been feeling lonely since we moved to another city.) From the start we went deep, swapping stories about our fathers and the struggles of growing up in a culture that still holds male sensitivity in contempt. “Women have it right,” I said, talking over loud pounding on the nearby kitchen door that apparently had stuck. “They find friends or sisters to talk with when things are rough,” I said, as our server finally broke through the door.
When we got up to leave, I did something I rarely do with even close friends: I hugged him. For the second time that night, a stuck door opened.
By Andrew Reiner
Dec. 5, 2017
Andrew Reiner teaches at Towson University and is working on a book about masculinity.
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