Intimate Behaviour by Morris Desmond

Author:Morris, Desmond [Morris, Desmond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthropology, retail, social science, sociology, culture, biology, gender studies
ISBN: 9781473522787
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

5

Specialized Intimacy

BY STUDYING THE behaviour of infants and lovers, it becomes clear that the degree of physical intimacy that exists between two human animals relates to the degree of trust between them. The crowded conditions of modern life surround us with strangers whom we do not trust, at least not fully, and we go to great pains to keep our distance from them. The intricate avoidance patterns of any busy street bear witness to this. But the frenzy of urban living creates stress, and stress breeds anxiety and feelings of insecurity. Intimacy calms these feelings, and so, paradoxically, the more we are forced to keep apart, the more we need to make body contact. If our loved ones are loving enough, then the supply of intimacy they offer will suffice, and we can go out to face the world at arm’s length. But supposing they are not; supposing we have failed as adults to form close bonds with either friends or lovers, and have no children; what do we do then? Or supposing we have formed these bonds successfully, but then they have broken down, or become fossilized into the remoteness of indifference, with the ‘loving’ embrace and kiss becoming as formalized as a public handshake; what then? The answer for many is simply to grouse and bear it, but there are solutions, and one of these is the device of employing professional touchers, a measure which helps to some extent to compensate for the shortcomings of the amateur and amatory touchers who are failing to supply us with our much-needed quota of body intimacy.

Who are these professional touchers? The answer is that they are virtually any strangers or semi-strangers who, under the pretext of providing us with some specialist service, are required to touch our bodies. This pretext is necessary because, of course, we do not like to admit that we are insecure and need the comforting touch of another human body. That would be ‘soft’, immature, regressive; it would assail our image of ourselves as self-controlled, independent adults. And so we must get our dose of intimacy in some disguised form.

One of the most popular and widespread methods is being ill. Nothing serious, of course, merely some mild sickness that will stimulate in others the urge to perform comforting acts in intimacy. The majority of people imagine that when they fall prey to some minor ailment, they have simply been unlucky in accidentally encountering a hostile virus, bacterium, or some other form of parasite. If they come down with a nasty bout of influenza, for instance, they feel it could have happened to anyone – anyone who, like them, has been shopping in busy stores, standing on tightly packed buses, or jamming themselves into stuffy corners at overcrowded parties, where coughs and sneezes can be heard incessantly wafting their eager pathogens through the air. The facts, however, do not support this view. Even at the height of a flu epidemic, there are still many people – equally exposed to the infection – who do not succumb.

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