A well stated blog on Cuddle Parties at [
angermanagement.mu.nu] :
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CUDDLE CORRUPTION
This gave me pause:
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It's not about sex and all about the touchy-feely experience of snuggling up to perfect strangers wearing pajamas. The grab fests are called cuddle parties, and since they started in New York in February, hundreds of people have paid $30 each to touch and embrace others in intimate gatherings. Everyone needs to be cuddled, especially in lonely New York, say creators Reid Mihalko and Marcia Baczynski who say it's a good way to meet new and interesting people. But the rules are clear. The PJs stay on the whole time and participants are reminded of Rule No. 7: "No dry humping!"
I know what you’re thinking: “An orgy with training wheels.” But that aside, how would you evaluate gatherings such as these? After all, touching and being touched are legitimate human needs.
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A repeat customer who called herself a born-again Christian said it was good to cuddle up to another person, albeit a perfect stranger, after a hectic week. "I felt good. I had a particularly stressful week," said the woman, who did not wish to be named. Friends had warned her that the parties would be nothing more than thinly disguised preludes to sex, but she dismissed those worries as alarmist and unfounded, saying, "It's not about sex."
And now we get to the importance of this article. Notice the implication of the above paragraph: there is nothing with indiscriminately obtaining pleasure from the body of another person so long as it is not sexual pleasure. And you thought libertines couldn’t also be Puritans? Consider: If there is nothing wrong with sex, then the only thing wrong with a cuddle party being a prelude to sex is the indiscriminate nature of such sex. But since being indiscriminate is obviously not a problem for these people, the only conclusion is – it’s sex as such that is dirty.
Now, you could argue that there is a difference between indiscriminate sex and indiscriminate cuddling. But what is that difference? Neither cuddling nor sex are primarily physical pleasures. After all, a pillow or a pet can be even more comfortable to snuggle with than a human being, and more than a few girls have told me that, on a purely physical level, they prefer masturbation to being with a man (of course, none of these girls had slept with me, so I suppose they weren’t fully informed).
No, the major value of physical contact with another person lies chiefly in the meaning that contact implicitly conveys: you matter to me. The problem with indiscriminate sex, then, is not that sex is bad, it’s that faking is bad – to express in action that which is not so is dishonest, empty, and self-destructive. And if that’s why indiscriminate sex is bad, then the same has to go for any other form of physical contact, when the person one is touching is a complete stranger.
But this is even worse than not knowing the character of those with whom one is cuddling – these cuddling parties are attacks on making any such discriminations.
Of course, this particular phenomenon is not very important. What is important is that it highlights how utterly confused most people are when it comes to sex.
Last night I got into a short discussion with a girl who was shocked when I told her I thought it was, in a normal context, immoral for two people who are romantically involved to not have sex. She expressed disbelief, saying she didn’t think sex was essential to a romantic relationship, that sex was not the highest expression of love, that there was no important difference between friendship and romantic love.
Now, I’m not going to go into why all that is not just wrong, but horrifically so. The important thing is that this girl was not all that unordinary in her views.
America has for a long time (at least since the twenties), been torn between two views of sex: the libertine and Puritan. But those are only two sides of the same error – they are forms of the mind-body dichotomy. That’s why it’s not surprising that, in this particular case, we see both sides integrated into a single perspective.
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