Blog/article - Regulating Intimacy
Across the landscape now, ordinary souls trade warm glares and bizarre, imitative ‘air-hugs’, where once private and tender embraces embodied the bonding rituals between friends and families. Those that defy the ban on hugs and kisses with their loved ones, confess like guilty school children to each other, that ‘they shouldn’t be doing it’, but all is well because they are very sure that they do not harbour the virus. Never in human history has a state apparatus successfully mounted itself as a valid authority on intimacy between loved ones. In a culture that turns ever-increasingly more hostile to private life and stable family units, it’s no surprise that there isn’t much outrage about this short-sighted assault on our freedoms to manage who we can and cannot hug. Not so long ago, people would have found it insulting, patronizing and infantile to abide unquestioning...