Extra notes about Chapter 5: About Touch and Sex
in the book, The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent.
Other notes are found here.
Books
Touch, by David Linden
Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, by Ashely Montague
Other resources
An absolutely stunning list of resources on sexuality, of all kinds: Barbara Carrellas resources
A humorous article about touch-vs-sex, by Bradlee Bryant: My Therapist Told Me My Blowjobs Were Selfishly Motivated
Cuddle Party: a non-sexual touch event for learning connection, boundaries and consent.
Quotes
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
– C.S. Lewis
There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Awareness of what you’re actually experiencing – not an idealized notion of perfection – is the essence of all bodily enjoyment.
– Jack Morin
The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.
– Eduardo Galleano
It is not words so much as acts communicating affection and involvement that children, and, indeed, adults, require.
… In the final analysis we do not believe in the reality of anything unless we can touch it. … What we perceive through the other senses as reality we actually take to be nothing more than a good hypothesis, subject to the confirmation of touch.
– Ashley Montague
Withholding pleasurable touch is a kind of punishment. Our bodies have developed to seek out that which sustains us (pleasure) and avoid that which threatens us (pain). We are a population of touch starved individuals, trying not to look desperate and trying to achieve some quality of life in spite of ourselves. Touch needs are often confused with sex drive – and many people find that when they are receiving loving touch their desperate need for sex is minimized and they can make healthier sexual choices.
– Chester Mainard
[About children] We somehow have the belief that no touch is good touch. No touch does not teach anything. If we want our children safe we need to teach them good touch… We know now that the two most important things for cognitive development of young children (I’m not talking about social or emotional stuff, I’m talking about cognition) are touch and movement.
– Fred Donaldson
The skin represents around 16 percent of the weight of our body and covers more than one and a half square meters. It is our most sensitive organ, the one that ‘nourishes’ us most. The health of a newborn who is not touched, even if fed, will rapidly decline; she will develop cerebral problems and can even die. Adults who do not touch and are not touched become pale and sickly, drained of life. Sometimes physical touch gives life back to the ill; certain nurses know this well. Massages are one of the most efficient ways to stay in good health and to maintain a well-balanced nervous system in the continual rediscovery of our body. African and Asian women massage their babies a lot to get all the branches of the nervous systems working. They readily tell us, to use a common expression that they ‘finish’ their babies, because they deeply believe that the process of entering the world is not completed with the physical birth. Today we know that brain circuits that are not stimulated during the first few month of life automatically self-destruct.
A simple caress starts our whole sensory system working. Tantrikas practice massage their whole lives because, for them, the Kashmiri art of touching is considered a wholly unique yoga unto itself. It is the gateway to our sensorality and stimulates a person to constant creativity.
The Kashmiri masters speak of the preeminence of the sense of touch. For them, a human being naturally recovers his unity when he is touched deeply – that is, when contact is no longer a sexual strategy. When nothing is ‘wanted’. This kind of contact is established within a sort of grace, because it gives back to anyone being touched this way a sense of his own spatiality. The master’s touch is spoken of in numerous poems: it restores this marvelous sensation of receiving a selfless gesture, stripped of all projection.
… To be touched in this way restores to the body its sacred vibration and will sometimes render it intolerably sensitive to all the ‘programmed’ contact of unaware partners. From that moment on, the body will insist on being approached with veneration and true presence.
– Daniel Odier (Desire, The Tantric Path to Awakening)
A video about this
Some context – this is part of an introduction to the lessons of the Three Minute Game and the Wheel of Consent, found here: schoolofconsent.org/videos