“Since any human touch can change you.”

That’s a line from James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work. It  hit me like a ton of bricks who  had invited a ton of cinderblocks to the me-hitting party. The quote is on page 69 near the bottom of the page, housed in a paragraph about homosexuality, attitudes and fears about homosexuality in America, and masculinity. The first part of that line, “…simply involves a terror of human touch…” also struck me as being this immense and powerful thing.

We fear touch. In America, especially, this is true. We call it respecting personal space, though I know this is not true. I know it is not true because if it was, why would so many strange men maneuver themselves into my proverbial bubble and then call me a bitch when I tell them to back off. So it is not respecting personal space, or maybe it is, with people they deem worthy of it, with whom they do not try to assert dominance. Maybe that terror is justified for some.

Part of the American fear of being touched has to do with the space we occupy. Last year in one of my anthropology classes I interviewed a woman from Trinidad and she told me they didn’t have the personal space we do, part of it coming from the sense that they are trapped on that island together, that no matter where you go, everyone knows you and your family and has known you and your family for a long time. The United States is bigger and people pick up and move around it constantly. Here you have the option of distance from others, both emotionally and physically.

Human touch is basal. There were experiments conducted in the 40s where no one would ever touch the babies in the study to see what would happen to them if they grew up without touch. Not being touched changes you. It makes you hard. Being touched changes you too. And that’s the thing we fear. Any human touch means they have gotten close enough to hurt us, both physically and emotionally. We have a visceral reaction to touch.