Cuddling

The moment we touch someone, we touch the whole history of touching. And our history of touching is a painful one, full of possession, domination and hurt. That is what makes touching others, finding oneself at the boundaries of someone's body, very serious business, necessarily ethical and political. We are never alone with someone, we are always negotiating the symbolic order activated by our touching.

Cuddling has fortunately been left alone by our deadly serious Platonic, Christian and Freudian friends, as it looks suspiciously like some kind of foreplay for sex. It is therefore still possible to conceptualise cuddling as pure reciprocity and something one does with someone (and not on a dehumanised human object), with the recognition of the other as a complete, unique and unrepeatable individual, beyond any comparison. You know, all those things which are so hard to maintain in the present sex discourse of fucking, receiving and it_feels_so_good.

Cuddling enables us to appriciate the unique body we are exposed to, to go beyong the preferences from the catalogue and experience the relentless intensity of unique human presence.

And what about sex? I don't know. It will have to find its way into the new paradigm. I believe it is possible to derive sex from cuddling, but I admit it takes a lot of creativity to do that. Genitals have the dangerous tendency to turn the whole proces into a subject-object relationship. But genitals are parts of the body and they do need to get integrated. I have learned that genitals are as serious as we take them, that genital excitement is no obligation to the rest of the body and that it is important to see it come and go away in order to "decentralise" the body.

Cuddling dates

Cuddling dates are SF's response to sex dates.  Caressing bodies which have been turn into commodities for too long, without possessing them, is a political act and an act of opening new and interesting futures beyond the coded and predictable. 

I tried it.