When did physical approach become scary? By “physical approach” I mean what used to happen constantly on the street, in restaurants, in bars, in between classes of all kinds: a person approaching another person to flirt with them or ask them out. There was etiquette, and many gross breaches thereof, but, just by itself, it wasn’t considered rude or a “performance of masculinity”.
My impression is that this is no longer true, that approach, while it still happens, is now much more fraught.
I first thought about this in 2014 when I was in a dance class and there was a woman maybe 20 years younger than me who I really liked as a dancer (great sense of humour, super expressive). We’d talked in the dressing room and one day she turned around on the dance floor and spontaneously hugged me. So one day after class I asked her if she’d like to get a drink sometime. She looked startled, so much so that, even though we exchanged numbers, I wondered if I’d done something mysteriously but definitely wrong.
I told a younger friend about it and she said: “She’s probably just not used to someone asking her in person. That usually happens on Facebook if you don’t know the person.” We went out several times, we became casual friends, but I still remembered that first strange moment. I don’t know if my friend’s take was right, but it means something that she even had that take in the first place.
Five years later, I thought about it again when I was doing a phone interview with novelist Rebecca Watson (author of Little Scratch) in connection to a story I’d written about a man cut down to size #MeToo- style (This Is Pleasure). In our complicated conversation about #MeToo was another complicated conversation about tech and how it has changed the way people relate to each other. I had told her that I hate the new normal of making an appointment to call a friend — that while I have become used to constant texting, it can feel like a false connection, a fragmentation of my experience, both of the texting friend and of my own life.
I had separately told Watson that I think part of #MeToo has been that women and girls are now so used to being approached through electronic mediums that physical approaches, especially by strangers, feel vaguely threatening even when they’re not. That didn’t sit right with her and after our Zoom call she emailed me to say that being approached on the street by a stranger was to her as fragmenting and false as getting texts is to me because “it picks at our time alone… it can feel uneasy, like a performed powerplay that disrupts and takes you out of your own head”.
I found this a puzzling analogy. A text is an abstract electronic message that you can get when you really are alone, say, in the bathroom or getting ready for sleep. It’s enough stimulation to take you slightly out of your private environment and your bodily response to it, yet it doesn’t give anything comparable; it’s disembodied. If you’re out on the street, you’re not in your private environment and, really, you shouldn’t be “in your own head” because you have to be at least minimally aware of what is happening around you. If someone comes up to you for any reason, it’s a full human experience and you have to make the effort to deal with the reality of this other person, even if the effort is to ignore them. To me this was a natural socialisation process.
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