All You Need Is Touch (and water, and maybe food)
The most primitive sense
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, in her book Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters has one of the best answers I've seen to the question you ask about why touch (and the other "lower" senses) and basically anything related to our materiality, our physicality, our animality is coded as female, especially by the Western intellectual tradition. Of course, you're picking up on the conversation we had yesterday on the last day of our Independent study. Touch I think is so powerful, and in a sense, the most sensual of the senses (as it were) because it's the most _connecting_ of the senses. The senses are all about connecting us to our natural environment and all those who inhabit it, and vice versa. But folks like Plato want to disconnect us from the material world to the "purer", more "perfect" world of pure intellect, ideas. But women, through their obvious role in gestation and birth, implicate us in more deeply in this material world of mere appearances - that Plato and his ilk are trying so hard to extricate us from. But males, who can engage in sex with one another without producing more human offspring, are thus "better", potentially less implicated and implicating in this material world. So yes, blame patriarchy, but a very particular sort of patriarchy, one that despises bodies, especially those capable of producing other bodies. As if males had no role in that process. Mary-Jane Rubenstein shows how and why pantheism is so threatening to this worldview, because it suggests we are all the same MATERIAL, and that material is divine, God. There is no world, no God separate from the material world in which we're embedded. Note the philological connection between mater (mother) and material!
ReplyDeleteI feel that the motherly touch that you described before is large contributor to our relation with "touch" to femininity. Our first feeling and experience with touch and taste is related to our mother straight from birth. Clearly motherly affection through touch is a crucial part of our development I feel that it affects the way we interact with the world through the rest of our life. I would like to think that because mothers are considered our creators and first sensory experiences, as well as the earth which we consider a mother as well is the reasoning behind our association with touch as feminine, but I feel like it's more likely that it started that way, and then the patriarchy ran with it in a sexual direction. Ew.
ReplyDeleteAlso after more thoroughly reading JBK's comment it makes sense to me that the certain type of patriarchy that hates bodies would be responsible for this because they clearly only see touch, and skin to skin contact as a sexual thing for whatever reason from their past with touch and the physical world.
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