Hey Deservant listeners, as many of you know, as I often will rant about, mainstream American culture, and maybe even particularly here at the Pacific Northwest,

we have a culture where it denies human touch, which is a needed thing for us to feel at balance, for us to

feel attuned to, for us to feel attached, for us to feel normalized, for us to feel okay.

And we, some people will go for months without ever touching a single human being

except for like incidental touching,

maybe like bumping into someone on the bus

or maybe a handshake here and there.

And even those people who I would consider

to be quite touchy probably maybe hug someone once a day,

which I think is not natural.

If we look to our primate cousins, they're all over each other all the time because they don't have society telling them

that touching is gross or creepy or dependent or childish or something or you're

going to catch a disease or whatever it is that prevents us all from

getting us what we need.

And so there are movements afoot in our society

to try to change this, one of which is what I'm just going to call the

cuddling movement, if you will. I first started to hear about this in the 90s,

maybe the odds. These organizations that people would get together either like a support group,

like a peer support group, or they're like, hey, we need human touch and we're going to

cuddle and it's not sexual and if there's there's nothing sexual

about it it's just human touch and it's you know voluntary and consensual and

there's rules around it and you know all the personalities are there trying to

...