Tim Barrus On Being Touched: New York Times
Long before latin became a language, the politics of rape did not mean the translation we think we understand when someone says rape or writes it. Raped meant kidnapped because the Sabines were raped and kidnapped. There was no word for rape in the same way that today we still have no way to really describe the rape of boys.
I sound like a broken record. Boys get raped. Boys get raped. Anytime I even discuss the idea of touch, I take it to the shit hole of boys who are raped by men.
I deal with boys who have been raped.
The very idea of the “shit hole” is endemic to reality.
They really get how the culture around them wears blinders. The New York Times has a fetish for covering the trends of human interaction. That is not a criticism. More publications should do it.
This time, it’s about intimacy and being touched. Opinion by Courtney Maum. No one ever talks about how people (in my case boys) who have been raped handle intimacy and being touched.
Having written for the NYT Magazine, I had to chime in. The POV is too generic. The issue is not. The comment gatekeepers do not find much value in whatever I have to contribute. The issue of rape is a little too edgy for them. In fact, the comments gatekeepers are more reticent than the editors. Very weird. But the status quo is always that.
ON TOUCHING AND BEING TOUCHED
I hate being touched. It totally creeps me out. I don’t welcome anyone to invade my space. I haven’t had sex in years, and I do not miss it in any way. Being raped changed everything for me. It was a violent invasion. People take too many liberties, and assume touching is okay. It’s not.
I don’t hug. I don’t reciprocate. Any esteem I had for you vanishes when you touch me. I don’t shake hands. People think it is hostile. It is. Doctor are the worst. I will never, ever remove my pants or unbuckle my belt.
Assuming you have by virtue of your paternalistic authority, the permission to touch even when you have obtained no such permission, reflects exactly the sort of patriarchal hierarchy that is so utterly fundamental to western medicine.
Medical people have a real hard time with it. They always feel personally affronted if they can’t put their fingers inside of me. I walk out of hospitals. I walk out of doctor’s offices. I would rather die than submit. If you as a grand medical authority can’t handle it, that is not my problem.
One doctor tried pulling my pants down during an employee physical without consent. He wishes he had not done that. Me, too.
Touching is ubiquitous. We take it for granted. People who refuse to be touched are cast out. I have been touched enough for one lifetime. Enough. The readers of the New York Times are regurgitating the theory that touch can save your soul. The roots of this are found in the evolution of Christianity that heretically opposed anything pagan. The pagan world raped and plundered. The Christian world raped and plundered, too. It just left out the word rape which Christian etiquette insisted was a figment of imagination.
A priest cannot rape boys because he is a priest and boys can’t be raped because while custom welcomes it, the paradigms of religious rules, as skin-deep do not.
Enough with cuteness. According to other readers who responded to this touchy-feely fetish, what they need from it is a level of cuteness that the subtitle or sub-theme insinuates. That touch as a trend follows fashion, and not the fashion of clothing, but the fashion of behavior. Touch is cultural, too. Readers are trending toward how they were parented, and the cold, removed mother is usually the criminal.
And I had thought that the stereotype of this boxed frigidity was out of fashion. It was. But like most fashion, the thing goes deep, and deeper than skin deep which covers this baby when other fashions (like hovering helicopters) come around again and again. Readers respond to a psychological touching as fashion, and this is where cuteness always begins and is reborn as something new.
The writing is cute. But not so cute, I had to stop reading which is something I usually do when it comes to what is trendy and what is so yesterday.
I loathe touching which is why the Internet was made for me. Just me.
Why I hate this thing – being touched takes care of the person who instigated the touch but not always or necessarily the person being reached out to – is no one’s business, and if people ask why I recoil, I do not discuss the assault, the violence, or the rape. What is not your business is not your business. If you inquire, I turn around and calmly walk away. I will not be in contact with you in any way again. I am not obligated to touch you. I am not obligated to explain myself. Your curiosity is patently absurd and beneath contempt.
I work with boys at-risk.
They so get it.
We talk a lot about sex work and being touched. If you so want to invade our space, it’s quid pro quo. We might, I said might, tolerate and endure that, but it’s not really sex to us. It’s work.
Often, these boys kill themselves. This is the bottom line, this is what at-risk means. Being assaulted crushes you.
The New York Times will not publish this or any redacted version of it because 1.) It’s not cute. 2.) It’s not something a gatekeeper knows how to deal with. 3.) When you get an analysis you don’t actually understand, you ignore it. This is the publishing black hole of a gravitas that sucks thought up, but beyond the event horizon, there is no original response. There are no thoughts, ideas, or light to release. Only mass. Comments are not supposed to think.
4.) Rape is still touching no matter how you look at it. And, yes. I do mean emotionally. What if you become haunted with the idea you liked it even for a fraction of a second. Someone is going inside of you, and will ejaculate inside of you, and inside of you, your brain is burning with a fire that cannot be contained by a gatekeeper, a comment, a firetruck, the New York Times, cuteness, or a touch.