Day 4: Touch

“When we tap into the senses, we invite the world in — especially when it comes to foreplay.”

Today's Exercise

Today’s exercise is all about exploring touch with our partner. How it soothes. How it’s pleasurable.
How it creates connection. You have two exercises below. Pick at least one and bring the explorer in
you.

Exercise 1

• Find five objects that you love to touch.

• Each partner takes turns describing to the other exactly how each of these objects feel on
your skin and what makes the sensation pleasurable.
• Variation: Move the object on their skin to share the experience.

Exercise 2

• This is another exercise to practice giving and receiving.

• Choose who will receive and who will give.
• Receiver: Hold your arm out with palm face up, exposing your forearm.
• Giver: Trace your index finger from the tip of your partner’s middle finger to the crease of
the elbow with a slow—even slower—circular motion.
• What’s the slowest you can go?
• Experiment with different types of touch. Fast and slow. Shallow and deep. Circular and
linear. One finger and a couple fingers. Fingernails or fingertips.
• Complete two rounds before switching roles. The first round, do it with your own pleasure
in mind. For the second round, do it with your partner’s pleasure in mind.
• Variations 1: Blindfold the receiver.
• Variation 2: Think about the other areas of your body you like to be touched. Invite your
partner to repeat this exercise on a new area of your body. Continue to take turns giving and
receiving touch in this way.
• Variation 3: Try this on yourself as a self-touch exercise.
How Our Sense of Touch Keeps Us Radically
Connected to Ourselves

We can live without sex, but we can't live without touch. When we are not touched, we become
irritable, aggressive, dysregulated, and depressed. We need touch to feel safe and to establish secure
attachment. We need touch because it signals trust and connection. We need touch because it
soothes and is pleasurable.
Pause for a moment. As you read that, did you immediately think of the touches you’ve shared with
another person? Read it again now and think about the sense of touch you share with yourself.
In the last twenty years—as we’ve transitioned to often connecting more with people online than in
person—have you felt a sense of touch hunger?
In the last year—as connection with a stranger has gone from an opportunity for spontaneous
engagement to an opportunity for spontaneous contamination—has that touch-hunger become
touch-starvation? For the foreseeable future, sharing touch with others comes with side-effects:
danger, paranoia, frustration when we accidentally trespass our new regulations, and defiance if and
when we make our own rules. But one of the hardest side-effects has been loneliness, especially
in the moments when we’ve needed touch the most.
Nothing can replace holding a loved one’s hand, a tight hug with an old friend, a first kiss, or sitting
next to a kind stranger. But this period of distance from others has given us an opportunity to
explore a type of physical intimacy we often neglect: that which lives inside of us. Not only can
self-touch help us through this moment, it can have lasting effects on the relationship we have with
ourselves. Self-touch, whether through massage, masturbation, or tuning in to the way the elements
feel on our skin, has always been about self-soothing. These days, it has also become our safest and
most powerful tool for self-care.

The Human Need for Touch

In the beginning of life, touch is the first sense that we develop. As babies, we suck our thumbs,
twirl our hair, and clutch a blankie. We seek softness because we like the way it feels on our skin.
Each of these self-touches are a baby’s search for self-soothing when skin-to-skin contact with
another isn’t available. In these moments, we learn to calm ourselves, lower our heart rate and
cortisol levels, and to release oxytocin. A baby doesn’t know the science, but is unmistaken for what
feels good and what feels bad. That dynamic follows us into adulthood. We know what we like
and don’t like even when we don’t have the words for it. That’s because touch itself is a language,
our first one, and it’s comprised of an intimate vocabulary that includes pain and pleasure.
When someone touches us and we recoil under their fingertips, we’re communicating that we’re
uncomfortable. When someone touches us and our muscles relax, we’re saying “I feel good. I feel
safe.” The same goes for when we touch ourselves. When we give ourselves a warm touch, gently
rubbing our belly or scratching our head, we calm our cardiovascular stress and activate the body's
Vagus nerve. This is intimately involved with our compassionate response—both giving and
receiving, to others and to ourselves. So when we touch ourselves kindly, we’re communicating
tenderness and care to our whole body. When we smack our palm to our forehead upon realizing a
mistake, we’re saying “I messed up.” When we masturbate, we’re reminding ourselves that we
deserve to feel good, to relax, to be turned on, to take time for our own pleasure.

Our Sense of Touch Develops in a World of Mixed Messages

When we think of touch as a language, we can go deeper than good versus bad touch, touch that
gets green light or red light. We can also look at the societal, cultural, and interpersonal
messages that inform the language of touch. We grow up and live in a world of mixed messages
about physical touch, and particularly self-touch.
The fundamental physiological, emotional, and psychological reasons for touch evolve as we do,
but we learn to suppress the need. In the western world as we enter school-age, we’re told that
masturbation, a natural self-soothing practice, is a no-no. In junior high, Sex-Ed tends to focus on
penetrative sex or no sex at all, cutting out the wide range of options in between or with oneself.
The concept of pleasure doesn’t even enter the equation. By the time young Americans begin
sexual activity, the vast language of touch—what sexologist Jaiya breaks down as affectionate
touch, healing touch, sexual touch, and erotic touch—has been collapsed into one big NO.
It’s not just sex-ed. From our teenage years into adulthood, our dominant sexual model focuses so
much on orgasm that many of us, when we don’t want to engage in the full production, block off the
basic pleasures of touch altogether. This dynamic often manifests as a disengagement from the
self-soothing tools with which we are born. The body begins to forget how natural and good it
feels to take care of itself. We forget the power we have to make ourselves feel valued, satisfied,
worthy—even loved. Unfortunately, certain sectors of society count on this, and not just to sell
beauty and wellness products.

Reclaiming Our Sense of Touch is a Radical Act

For all of human history, cultures have used the body as a vessel for social control. At a very
basic level, our internalization of negative messages about our bodies—and prohibitive instructions
surrounding our agency—block our ability to turn to ourselves for a sense of well-being. This is
particularly so for peoples whose boundaries have been infringed upon and violated, those whose
bodies have been radically changed by illness, and those for whom  society’s biased standards
reinforce unworthiness and shame.
Perpetuating the idea that pleasure, acceptance, value, and care can only come from an external
source keeps us dependent on people, companies, governments, and systems—not to mention loads
of products—that don’t serve us. When we take our pleasure into our own hands, so to speak, we’re
expanding the language of touch to include a declaration best explained by self-described “black,
lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-
preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
One such example is the work of Rafaella Fiallo and Dalychia Saah, the pleasure advocates,
educators, social workers, and creators behind Afrosexology. Their vision for a liberated Black
sexuality “is that reclaiming and having agency over our bodies will transfer to other aspects of our
lives and incite us to reclaim political, economic, and social agency.”
Go Ahead and Touch Yourself
It’s time. Turn the computer off. Put your phone out of reach. Declare to whomever that you’re
taking time for yourself.
Find five objects that you might love to touch. Maybe it’s a silk scarf, a stress ball, a leather-
bound book, a body oil, or a new favorite: slime (to play with). Try to describe exactly how each of
these objects feel on your skin and what makes the sensation pleasurable.
Now that you’ve tuned into how something else feels on your skin, explore how your own hands
feel. Experiment with different touch: fast and slow, shallow and deep, circular and linear, back
of palm, front of palm. Reverse your palm up and use your index finger to trace a path from the tip
of your middle finger to the crease of your elbow, with a slow—even slower—circular motion.
What is the slowest you can go until you reach your elbow? If you do this with your eyes closed,
you’ll think you’re there long before you are. See how many tries it takes to accurately sense it. 
As you engage in these exercises, think about the places on your face and body you never touch.
Explore them. Take note of how, when you touch yourself, you’re giving and receiving at the same
time. How does hedonic contact with yourself make you feel?