Cuddly

 

Sunday night thoughts

 I'm thinking tonight about how we change over time.  A friend gave me a letter I'd written to her 42 years ago, and I was amazed at how full of energy and optimism and sheer joie de vivre it was.  What happened since then?  

Partly, life.  Things have gone wrong; the high hopes I had then have been dashed.  Partly, a growing cynicism about life and mankind.  I was an optimist, then.  Partly just being worn out.  Confectus aetate, the Romans called it--worn out by age.  Loneliness.   I've lost touch with dear friends, and some of them have died.  I miss them.  Making new close friends at my age is hard.   

To me, now, the vibrant enthusiasm for life of me forty years ago seems both tiresome and absurd.  How to regain that youthful liveliness?  Is it possible?  Can I go back to the mental state I enjoyed then?  My body has aged, and I know that can't be reversed.  But my mind and my character remain.  Somehow I must regain the full-on optimism and hope that I had then.  But how?

Friends or lovers? Who cares?

 

Innocent

Haircut

Bud sex

When Did Touch Between Male Friends Become Taboo? (Source)

The original of this article was in Spanish, but I have attempted to translate it.

What is "bud sex"?  Heterosexual men having sex with each other for pleasure.

A somewhat unconventional way to enjoy sex.

Each person experiences their sexuality how they want to and in the most pleasurable form possible.  With the sexual revolution, this terrain is in every case much broader where there is more space for experimentation.

In that framework, for some time now the term "bud sex" has begun to be used.  This expression refers to sex between male friends.  It is used for those heterosexual men who have intimate relations with another male with the sole objective of getting pleasure.

These men are not bisexual, nor homosexual, nor are they even confused in their sexual orientation: they are simply heterosexual guys who look to get pleasure without emotional or sentimental ties with people of the same sex.

The men taking part in "bud sex" can be married and even have children.  The practice is seen as obtaining sexual relief, caused sometimes by circumstances, for example in prisons, where there is no opportunity to share intimate moments with a woman.

Since these are heterosexual males, pre-agreed rules are set up before coitus so that there is no confusion.  Among those: no kissing, caresses, or any other manifestation of affection, nor to meet up with the other person (too) frequently.

I've been banging on about this for years, just like I've been talking about toxic masculinity: when being gay ceases to carry any stigma, then lots of men will have sex with other men.  "Bud sex" is at the extreme end of impersonal sex.  It's just fucking.

But it is equally possible to have what the French call une amitié amoureuse, a loving friendship, where you are not in love but nevertheless are fond of your sparring partner.  After all, how often does one fall in love?  Yet one may be attracted to someone, and what makes them attractive isn't just their bodies but their smile, their sense of fun, their integrity--those thousand things that draw us to other people, whether sexually or not.  In a world where male-to-male sex is no more noteworthy than male-to-female sex, it will be very likely that there will be buddies who do find each other in some sense attractive, and act on that perception.  And I try and show that in my writing.

We're mates, mate!

I loves ya

Mates

Unos amigos

Meh. Too much trouble

Have ever had that thing with someone who was once a friend when you just start thinking this is too much trouble?  I used to have a friend I really loved--not "in love", just love.  But although he professed to care for me, he didn't really.   As the months went by I eventually stopped caring for him, too.  A few weeks ago we had a disagreement and I considered discussing it with him.  But decided it wasn't worth it.  I didn't care enough to waste time and emotional effort in trying any more. When that happens, you know the relationship is finished.  It's sad in a way.  I thought we'd connected.  But connection is a two-way process, yes?

Mates

Dark House

Tennyson wrote In Memoriam to his very dear friend Arthur Hallam who died suddenly.  Modern readers might see their deep friendship as 'gay',  but it seems clear enough that it was a 'romantic friendship'  Whatever.  It was love.  This poem below is just one from In Memoriam.


DARK house, by which once more I stand
    Here in the long unlovely street,
    Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more—      
    Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
    And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
    The noise of life begins again,      
    And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

*        *        *        *        *

O days and hours, your work is this,
    To hold me from my proper place,
    A little while from his embrace,      
For fuller gain of after bliss:

That out of distance might ensue
    Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
    And unto meeting when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,      

For every grain of sand that runs,
    And every span of shade that steals,
    And every kiss of toothèd wheels,
And all the courses of the suns.

Mates tangle

Why Friends Can Make Men Live Longer

An intriguing article

A single good friend can make as much as a 10-year difference in life expectancy.

I first heard about the male deficit model, the sociological theory that men are lousy at friendship, a few months after my friend Matt moved to Seattle.

The male deficit model holds that men tend to drift apart whenever the activity they share ends. Matt and I, for instance, spent hours and hours surfing together in San Francisco. But then I became a father and no longer had much time to spend in the water, and we began to see less of each other. Our friendship rekindled only after Matt and his wife bought a fixer-upper in my neighbourhood, and we had a blast demolishing the walls of his old kitchen. Then, when he had a kid, we’d push our strollers around the neighbourhood.

I thought it was a great friendship, if I thought about it at all. But then Matt’s wife, Jodi, accepted a job offer in Seattle. Matt and I told ourselves nothing would change. Jodi and Liz even arranged a surprise ‘‘bromantic’’ (their word) surf trip to Baja that winter. When Liz told me, I had to laugh: it was like Matt and I were little boys, depending on our mums to plan a play date.

But then, in perfect accordance with the male deficit model, reality set in. First, Matt cancelled our farewell beers-and-barbecue session; he was too busy packing. Then, a month after the move, Matt came back to town on a three-day work trip but was too busy to drop by. A month later, he came down for a friend’s 50th birthday party, and I saw him for all of 10 minutes - at the party.

Feeling stung and sensing our friendship was toast, I told Liz I was thinking about cancelling the Baja trip.

The male deficit model is based on 30 years of research into friendship and relationships - most of which shows that male friendships are less intimate, more competitive, and less satisfying than female ones. ‘‘The older we get, the more we accept our essential friendlessness,’’ writes psychologist Stuart Miller in Men and Friendship.

So your social life could be better. Big deal, right? Actually, it’s a bigger deal than you might know.

That’s because nearly all research into healthy aging has found that the key to a long, happy life is not diet or exercise but strong social connections - that is, friendships. Loneliness accelerates age-related declines in cognition and motor function, while a single good friend has been shown to make as much as a 10-year difference in overall life expectancy. A huge meta-study performed in part at Brigham Young University, which reviewed 148 studies with a combined 308,849 subject participants, found that loneliness is just as harmful to health as not exercising, smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and alcoholism, and fully twice as bad as being obese. Still more startling is a 2010 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that looked at 2230 cancer patients in China. Social wellbeing, including friendship, turned out to be the number one predictor of survival.

Some of this stems from the fact that isolated people tend to exercise less, eat poorly, and drink too much. But some researchers believe that loneliness has a negative health impact all on its own. In numerous studies over the past 30 years, John Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and the pioneer of the biological study of loneliness, has found that lonely people have chronically elevated levels of the stress and fear hormones cortisol and epinephrine. In a 2007 paper published in Genome Biology, he even demonstrated a correlation between loneliness and the activity of certain genes associated with systemic inflammation, elevating risk for viral invasion and cardiovascular disease.

And yet the capacity of men to combat loneliness - and improve their health - by building strong friendships seems to be steadily eroding. Cambridge professors Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, writing in The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century, point to a current tendency among adults to build stronger, more intimate marriages at the expense of almost all other social connections. In a study of contemporary childcare arrangements,  they found a deep sense of loneliness among many parents, especially men. ‘‘Almost every father we spoke with explained that he had lost contact with most of his male friends,’’ they write. And lest you believe family is company enough, the 2005 Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing showed that family relationships have almost no impact on longevity. Friendships, by contrast, boosted life span as much as 22 per cent.

And don’t think you’re immune because of the great relationship you have with your wife. A team of researchers from around the world analysed a vast mobile phone database - 2 billion calls and 500 million text messages - and found that by the time married women hit 45 or so, they demote their husbands from first to second place among their most important relationships, typically in favour of a daughter or a younger female friend. It turns out our wives are going to dump us without even leaving the marriage.

Read more here

See also Straight Guys Loving

Friendship

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." - C. S. Lewis

Connection

Male bonding

One of the tragedies of society's hostility to gayness is that straight men are afraid to get "too close" to other straight men.  After all, loving another man is gay, right?  And being gay is a very dreadful thing, God wot.  I don't need to point out that you can love another man very deeply without wanting to have sex with him.  I adored my father, and I love my sons more than I can say.  But because of these absurd and horrible taboos against being close to another man, too many men never really  bond with other man.

A Finnish study, reported in The Guardian, shows how being stroked in a non-sexual way bonds people closer.

Researchers have shed light on the chemistry that bonds one person to another by taking brain scans of men being stroked while in their underpants.

The Finnish study found that gentle stroking – which was not in sexually arousing areas – changed levels of opioid brain chemicals which work behind the scenes to form lasting bonds in animals.

The findings suggest that opioids might be the critical chemicals that enables human brains to distinguish between strangers and people who are closer to us, such as friends, families and lovers.

"We know this is hugely important for humans because we have these strong, lasting bondings with friends and relatives and so on. But what kind of system maintains these bonds, and makes them last?" said Lauri Nummenmaa who studies the neural circuitry of emotions at Aalto University in Finland.

Studies in animals have shown that opioids can play a crucial role in pairing up. Prairie voles are monogamous in the wild, but when given a drug that blocks opioid in their brains, they seek out other partners. If opioids are blocked in monkeys, they groom others less and neglect their babies.

To see whether opioids were important in human bonding, the researchers invited nine couples into the lab. The men stripped off to their underpants and lay under a blanket in a PET scanner. The first scan was taken while the men were alone. For the second, their partners touched them gently all over, but avoided anywhere likely to arouse them sexually.

[Read more here]

Lost friends

Why do I care so much?  Ah well.

Mates

An acquaintance once said to me that love has to involve "body", by which he meant that you can't fall in love with someone on line.  Well, that's not true: I did and he did, too.
But it is true that if we love someone, we want to touch them and hold them and caress them.

No doubt these blokes are "straight".  But they still, casually, and without fuss, connect, physically.  It's rather nice.