Do Puritans touch each other? Short answer: no.
In researching my topic, I’m realizing that so much of the present day can be linked back to the Puritans: emphasis on education, Protestant work ethic, demonization of physical touch/pleasure, sexualizing the neutral nude body (this ties into the colonial mindset of natives showing skin=an invitation for (often non consensual) intercourse), self reliance (reluctance to ask others for help/collaborate), and maybe the emphasis of self restraint/stopping ourselves from following our desires.
Human touch in American culture is often viewed as an invitation for something larger or something that infantilizes the other person, rather than something fundamental to platonic or familial connection. Parenting experts in the early nineteenth century warned mothers against kissing or hugging their children out of fear of sexualizing them. Weird, right?
But even today, holding hands in public is viewed as consummating the first stages of a romantic relationship and is not commonly done between friends. We do not hug each other as often as we should. When is the last time you hugged more than three people in one day?
James Baldwin has a quote on American intimacy that rings around in my mind often: “In this country, what we call homosexuality is a grotesque kind of waxworks. You know? Which is the other side of what we call heterosexuality here. Nobody makes any connections! So naturally, you get this truncated, de-balled, galvanized activity which thinks of itself as sex. It’s not sex at all. It’s pure desperation. It’s clinical. It comes out of the effort to tell one’s self a lie about what human life is like. It comes out of the attempt to cling to definitions which cannot contain anybody’s life… The only people who talk about homosexuality in this way are the Anglo-Saxons. And Englishmen and French and Germans. The Anglo-Saxons. The Puritans. In Italy, you know, the men kiss each other and go to bed with each other. And no one is marked for life… that’s the root of the whole American thing. It’s not fear of men going to bed with men. It’s a fear of anybody touching anybody! People wouldn’t have to send so much time being defensive — if they weren’t endlessly being condemned. That’s what it comes to. And that’s what’s so horrible about it… Because in Italy, they… understand that people were born to touch each other.”
Touch has a high degree of cultural relativity. People of Anglo-Saxon origin score low on the ‘touch spectrum’ while those of Latin, Mediterranean and third world ancestry score on the higher end. America’s emphasis on “autonomy, independence, separateness and privacy” have lowered interpersonal physical touch to the absolute bare minimum. America is a “low-touch culture.”
Baldwin believes that this fear of our own natural need to touch and be touched encourages Americans to assume the worst of ourselves. In believing that our honest impulses are ‘wrong’ and ‘sinful’, we are unable to properly connect. If we cannot connect deeply with those you generally love, being friends, family, or otherwise, we cannot truly connect with those we romantically love, despite our (rusty) attempts at establishing human contact and intimacy. If we don’t practice human touch in any other aspect of your life outside the bedroom, what makes us expect that we’d suddenly become such experts at human intimacy when we’re finally allowed to be?
He touches on exactly why I think people are afraid of homosexuality: that at their core, this stiff Anglo Saxon figure we’re all aspiring to be as Americans — the self-reliant rugged individualist, the frontiersman — is also afraid to admit and express his sensitivity, vulnerability, and capacity to care for his community. And as Fran Lebowitz has quipped in the past, it was the ‘secondhand nature’ of homosexuality that concerned people. People are afraid of their own impulses, and to see a minority of people confidently express their own desires is threatening. It’s harder to justify your own repression when others simply choose not to. I also think the fear of getting close also ties in with the Protestant work ethic in delaying (personal, and thus, physical?) gratification and self restraint.
Much has been made of long held Puritan attitudes towards sexuality, and the cultural legacy it left behind has been discussed broadly in academia and media (although ‘Puritan’ is often used as a pejorative). As I continue my research, I am realizing that the line drawn from Puritan Plymouth to modern day America has been colored and obscured by conservatism, racial tensions (demonizing the culture of the other), and well — just the long march of time in general. If it isn’t specifically Protestant influence that has contributed to the American fear of intimacy, what else has? Maybe religion was too easy of an answer. But I am also finding in the literature that the links between American morality and sexuality lean more conservative than not, and that this country is not known for being the most touchy-feely, emotionally intelligent, empathetic nation of them all. Perhaps one day we’ll cast aside our Puritan fears and like Harry Styles says, dedicate ourselves to touching.
