Yes, yes and double yes! The sun arrived with a bang this weekend… I am guessing that there are many people with red backs and glowing foreheads at work this morning! The hottest couple of days of the year this weekend in the UK. I loved it.
Of course, as a result, more people are out in the world, which gives us the chance to watch far more people and see how they behave! 😉
These days it is far more acceptable to wear far less clothing… There seems to be an incredible amount of affection between people and I think it is wonderful to behold.
Two dragonflies connected at the nether regions needed to be ushered out of the house this weekend, birds seemed to be jumping on each other, my sweet peas are all wrapping themselves around each other, even our cat seems to have befriended another cat! There is a lot of affection around… These are natural examples, but just how natural is it for us human beings to be affectionate?
Let me discuss this further…
If anyone watched the finale of Britain’s Got Talent, you got a slice of how modern Western world has changed… Those competitors on and off the show all hug each other, their families, their friends and so on… Something that has not always been as prevalent. Is TV and modern media relaxing the norms of public affection and our personal boundaries?
School children hug each other much more these days… Something my friends and I only ever did if we were celebrating a goal scored in our Sunday league… Until the 90s and the emergence of rave culture, anyway!
Scientists studying this increased occurrence of hugging and open affection apparently view this as an outgrowth of the evolution of the Western way of greeting.
Just recently, in this thoroughly enjoyable article at the New York Times, Amy Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, told the New York Times that:
“Without question, the boundaries of touch have changed in American culture. We display bodies more readily, there are fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more permissible access to other people’s bodies.”
Is that all it took, I wonder? For us to get teenagers to move from rarely touching (a handshake was the norm until the 70s) to hugging for long enough that school districts had to pass laws against it (the article states that a school in the US has had to ban hugging for longer than 3 seconds! Hahahaha), was for it to become the norm on telly over a period of 30 years, I wonder what on earth would would happen if we relaxed all those norms.
Would we all become naturalists? Would ‘free love’ become the norm? I am exaggerating, of course…
Is it only the media that has shifted this… I mean without the media, what would our usual levels of open and public affection be like I wonder?
Would we be as affectionate? Would you be?
