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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Just how far can hugging go?
Message-ID: <1279@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 20:40:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1279
Posted: Fri Aug 16 20:40:01 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 06:39:37 EDT
References: <359@azure.UUCP> <2433@sun.uucp>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 34

In article <2433@sun.uucp> sunny@sun.uucp (Ms. Sunny Kirsten) writes:

[about a man who admits a cetain reluctance to hug other men]

>	Can you say "homophobia", boys and girls?  ...  I knew you could.

>	You may hug someone with whom you're experiencing sexual relations,
>	but that doesn't mean that hugs are, per se, sexual in nature.

It's not sex, it's intimacy, something we get back to later...

>	"SEX" is the most intimate of sharing experiences,
>	"HUGs" are a less intimate    sharing experience...

I've got news for you, Sunny: for many men (maybe even most) hugs are
pretty far up on the intimacy scale.  I'd also hazard a guess that most men
aren't willing to have that kind of intimacy with any but a few other men.

There's also the problem that in our culture the intimacy signals are rather
confused with the sexual signals.

>What I'm alluding to is spiritual union.  When you get close enough to 
>another person to hug them, your auras "hug" each other as much as your
>bodies do.  The melting and merging of auras, the positive feedback of
>love, life force, chi-energy, spirit, is the kind of experience which
>truly meets your minimum adult daily requirements of "love".

Not that I have anything against yoga (or any other eastern religious
discipline), but I think the psychological assignments of intimacy are
sufficient to explain the phenomena, as best they can be explained.

C Wingate

  "I'm your density."