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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ l o c a t e d
I D : : T o u c h
T Y P E: : R E C O L L E C T I V E
I do not like touching other people. I maybe would have, but Landamaeri culture has so many complicated stipulations around when and where it is okay to touch other people that it's something I've never been able to see as anything other than a nightmare.
It's something I don't get much, either. Why do we have such bizarrely strict rituals regarding when it is and isn't okay to touch other peoples' skin? I understand that part of it comes from the complicated ways we react to being touched; it is very much a whole thing, and there are a lot of both good and bad feelings that can come from it. But it's so peculiar when you really get into detail about it. Like, men are soooo scared of being perceived as gay, but grabbing another guy's balls in the locker room or making jokes about their tits is just a thing you expect to happen during gym class? It's downright bizarre.
My personal position is that I'm fairly sure landamaeris are meant to touch each other quite a lot. It's pretty well understood that our bodies release lots of feel-good chemicals when we do it, and research says that lots of physical contact is very clearly correlated to better mental and even physical wellbeing. The reason, I think, that it's become so heavily ritualised is because of how weird our culture is about sex. What few historical records we have left pertaining to our history before the
data loss suggest that we weren't always nearly this prudish about things. Apparently our species once actually had really elaborate courtship rituals with built-in lesbianism??? Seriously where the fuck did we go wrong to end up not having that any more god I hate modern society-
Trying to stay on point, though; it seems that a lot of our present prudishness is a modern invention, and our ancestors weren't nearly so like this. Lots of it seems to be rooted in homophobia, which is not so much of a modern invention but definitely wasn't always a thing.
For my part, though, I can't enjoy it at all because of how scared I am of having my body respond in the wrong way to being touched. I... I don't like the fact that there are
certain physiological responses it exhibits that I can't control, and one of them in particular is triggered by being touched almost anywhere. The thought of that happening at the wrong time is horrible, for different reasons depending on the person's gender. It's why I never really hugged people in high school, or college, or university.
Why does our species have to be like this? Why couldn't we just be more normal about this? We're the
only animals that are this weird about sex.
...Ugh, Inos. Fuck, I hate thinking about this.
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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ t e r m i n a t e d
