20181212.0430

On 9 December 2018, Glenda Wolin's "More Thoughts on that 'Simple' Hug" appeared in the online version of the San Antonio Express-News. The piece is a response to another bit of commentary that had been contributed to the newspaper, and it lays out some of the fraught context in which women in the US have experienced hugging, context that underlies some of the reactions to being hugged even by those who mean to express honest affection. She notes the repeated incidence of assault on women and girls, even and especially by persons whom they should instead have been able to trust; the tragedies of familial abuse and Larry Nasser's perfidy are discussed, as are the purportedly natural inclinations of pubescent boys to fondle those towards whom they find themselves attracted. The lack of ready instruction against such tendencies is also discussed before the piece closes on a note that some women have, indeed, experienced hugs as preludes to horror--and that even those who have not have to think about it.
The piece reads as a gentle explanation of something that should not be so but, being, and being all too obviously so, should damned well not be something that should be attacked. And in central Texas, steeped as it is in the mythos of the Old West, it should not be a difficult concept that touching someone who doesn't want to be touched is a bad idea. Time was, it was a good way to end up dead; today, in purportedly too-sensitive times, it merely earns rebuke, while no few of those who offer that rebuke fail to do so at their own demonstrable and perhaps endured peril. I admit that I've not read the piece to which Wolin responds, and perhaps I should, but I hear as I read Wolin the resigned tone of a woman who is explaining to yet another man that, no, women have reason to feel as they do. And I know that there will be some who will decry such things as feeling and therefore inferior, who will make claims about logic and the notion that past performance is no guarantee of present action--but I somehow doubt that those same people would put their hands into Fenrir's mouth after Tyr did so or their heads into the lion's mouth after it had eaten the faces of the five who went before.
Reading the article, I am once again in mind of ways I know that I have offended and the likelihood if not certainty that I have offended in ways of which I am not aware. I was raised as I was raised, and such concerns were not necessarily noted in great detail as I was brought up. And I have done things that I knew even as I did them were other than they ought to have been. As I have learned more, I have been better about my actions, but I know that I have erred--and if I have, it is likely if not certain that others have erred similarly. I and others like me have made such explanations necessary--not because we have made others stupid, but because we were stupid, as well as evil in the banal way that works some of the longest ruin in the world because it persists for so long without attracting attention to itself. As such, I and others like me should be ashamed of ourselves--as should they who, at this point, can only be ignorant of matters by choice and who would place their own desire to express affection over others' deserving to feel safe.