Touch
The massage therapy texts carry a particular observation that I have encountered in enough introductions to recognise it as something close to received wisdom in the field: that a child will die if not touched in the first moments after birth.
The observation is usually offered as the foundational case for the necessity of touch—the irreducible proof that physical contact is not optional for human beings but is, in fact, a condition of survival.
I want to examine the claim rather than accept it, because I think the examination reveals something that the received wisdom misses.
What the research more accurately describes is what happens when a newborn is held by the mother—the regulation of temperature, the initiation of feeding, the provision of the hydration that the first hours of life require. The holding delivers these things. The holding matters enormously.
But the mechanism is more specific than touch in the abstract, and the shorthand that reduces it to touch risks obscuring what is actually essential and what can be provided by different means. I note this not to diminish the importance of physical contact—I have spent decades thinking about it and I hold it to be significant—but because the imprecise version of the claim does something the precise version does not: it makes touch sound like it operates as an invisible nutrient, distributed through skin contact directly into the survival machinery. That is a more comfortable story than the accurate one. And comfortable stories tend to obscure the things worth looking at.
What I found in the work—consistently, across years and across a large number of men—was a different kind of evidence for the significance of touch, and it was evidence that arrived not from research but from hands.
Men arrived carrying bodies that had not been touched. Not in the medical sense of never having had physical contact with another person, but in the specific sense of never having had their whole body attended to—each part of it, with equal and unhurried care, by someone who was not using the touching to achieve something else.
Sex is touch, but it is touch directed toward a purpose, and the purpose organises what gets touched and what doesn’t, and leaves the rest unaddressed. A hand on a shoulder or a brief embrace—the hip-separated kind that signals how close is close enough—is touch of a sort, but it is touch bounded by its own social anxiety about the meaning of contact. What I offered was different from both: sustained, unhurried attention to the whole surface of a body, without agenda, without any part of it being designated as more significant than any other.
I noticed what this produced.
A man would say, at some point during the session, something along the lines of he hadn’t known his nipples were so sensitive. Or the back of his knees. Or his inner thigh. Or the back of his neck. Or his testicles, not as a sexual observation but as a genuinely new piece of information about his own body.
He said it with a quality of mild surprise that was consistent enough across different men that I stopped being surprised by the surprise. It was the expression of someone encountering territory he had always technically possessed but had never actually visited. The body part had been there the whole time. No one had ever touched it with this quality of attention, and without that quality of attention, it had not registered as part of the body’s sensory life.
I think this is the part that deserves the most attention. These were not men who had been deprived of all sensation. They functioned. They worked. They had sex, in many cases, and derived from it whatever sex delivered. They were physically present in the world. And yet a significant portion of their own physical selves was, from their own account, genuinely unknown to them. Not forgotten. Not lost. Simply never discovered, because no one had ever been there.
The parts of the body that receive attention over the course of an ordinary male life are limited. The parts involved in sex. The parts that ache or cause problems and get attended to medically. The face, because the world is encountered through the face and the face is encountered by the world. Hands and feet as tools. The rest—the back of the knee, the inner arm, the neck, the whole landscape of skin that lies between the functional zones—tends to receive nothing in the way of deliberate, caring contact. It receives the shower. It receives clothing. It exists, quietly, unexamined.
I encouraged the men who visited me to touch me in return, if they chose. I never pressed this, and a significant number didn’t, and their not touching was as informative as any touching. But the ones who did often moved with a quality of tentativeness that was not about inexperience with touch in general but about unfamiliarity with this specific kind—the touch that is not transactional, not seeking a response, not moving toward an objective. They touched the way someone touches something they have been told they can touch but are not yet sure they believe it. Cautiously. As though the permission might be withdrawn.
What I think says something important—and I hold back from saying what the something is, because I notice I want to turn it into a conclusion and the conclusion would be smaller than the observation—is that these men had persisted, in many cases for decades, without this kind of contact.
Not unhappily, always. Not in recognisable suffering, usually. But with a body that was less known to them than their car, or their home, or any of the objects in their daily life that received regular deliberate attention. The body had been given fuel and maintenance. It had not been attended to.
I found that the ordinary forms of touch available to many men became progressively narrower with age. Not as an explicit position, but as a structural assumption embedded in what is offered and what is withheld. The forms of physical contact available to a man in his ordinary life narrow considerably after early childhood, and continue narrowing as he ages.
What remains is largely functional—the medical examination, the contact that occurs during sex, the occasional brief embrace that takes pains to signal it is only that. The idea that he might want or benefit from touch of a different kind—sustained, attentive, offered to the whole body without purpose beyond the attending—does not tend to appear in the structure of what’s available to him. It is not that someone decided he doesn’t need it. It is more that the question of whether he does has not generally been thought to require an answer.
I found that the first extended massage a man received often produced a quality of response that was difficult for him to name. He would use words like relaxed, which was accurate but insufficient. He would say he hadn’t expected it to feel like that, which was more precise but still only pointed at the outside of the thing. Occasionally a man would go quiet for a long time after the physical work was done, and the quiet had a different quality from the quiet of a man who had nothing to say. It was the quiet of someone taking account of something that had happened and finding the account difficult to complete.
I noticed that touch—this particular kind, to this particular extent—seemed to produce for some men the first occasion on which their body had been present to them as the whole thing it was, rather than as a collection of parts with different levels of significance and different requirements. The nipple that had been there for forty-five years without ever registering as sensitive was suddenly part of the body’s sensory map. The back of the knee. The neck. Territory that had technically always been his but that had, until someone moved across it with unhurried care, remained unexplored.
Whether this constitutes loss I cannot say. Whether a man who lives decades without his body being attended to in this way is missing something he would otherwise have—whether the absence is experienced as an absence, or whether it is simply the shape of the life, invisible because it has always been that shape—I found I couldn’t determine from the outside.
What I could see was the response when the attending happened. The expression on a man’s face when some part of him that had never been touched was touched with care. The quality of quiet that followed. The tentative, surprised comment about the back of his knee.
I am left with the observation and not its conclusion. The observation is the hands, and the body under the hands, and the fact of the discovery. What to make of the decades that preceded it I will leave up to you to explore.
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