Simeon Simian

WARNING: This post takes a somewhat raunchy turn a few paragraphs in.

I saw this tweet this weekend, and replied to it:

It's possible, I suppose, that Mr. Hussain was being sarcastic; the lighthearted tone of some other commenters on his tweet suggests that they might have taken it that way.  On the other hand, 408 likes and 80 retweets suggest that many people took it literally, and no one mocked me for having missed the joke, so I'll presume it was meant seriously.

We're already seeing the necessity of avoiding physical contact in this pandemic, and people have been exploring alternative greetings online and probably elsewhere.  Someone under Mr. Hussain's tweet posted a GIF of a black woman making the "Wakanda forever" salutation from the movie Black Panther.  The trouble with this one is that many African-Americans were dismayed when white fans began making the gesture, seeing it as cultural appropriation, though the fuss died down after awhile as people moved on to the next big Phenomenon.  But that raises the question of whether non-Muslims should put our hands over our hearts in a dignified manner and slightly bow, or non-Hindus make the Namaste sign, or any other salutation borrowed -- appropriated! -- from other cultures.  No matter in the long run, as far as I'm concerned; people will sort out what they're going to do.

The obnoxious thing about Mr. Hussain's tweet was his petty glee at the prospect of people being forced by the pandemic to give up a gesture that is meaningful to them, just to suit his personal hangup.  If shaking hands is unsanitary, so is copulation, so is a non-copulatory embrace, so are mothers using spit to clean their children's faces, so is human society generally.  Keeping six feet apart may be a necessary strategy in a pandemic, but it's not something human beings can live with forever.  Even now we have to find situations and people we can get closer to than that.

This reply was mildly funny, though:

I suppose English isn't this person's first language.  By "foreign" I suppose he meant "non-Muslim." When I pointed out that Islam isn't a nationality, he replied "Islam for us extends beyond national boundaries and nation states. We are first Muslims and then citizens of different lands."  That's true, and different lands have different customs about greetings.  Embracing, holding hands, and kisses, though "simian," are not unknown in Muslim lands, as in many others.

I also couldn't help thinking of what the historian Richard Trexler wrote in his Sex and Conquest (Polity Press, 1995, p. 109: 

Various cultures have used sexual signs and gestures of subordination to express reverence toward their gods and lords. Indeed, only those ready to avoid the topic will be surprised that some corporal expressions of religious reverence, such as kneeling, bowing and prostration, remain formally close to certain sexual postures.

When I see Muslim men prostrated for prayer, I always think of this passage, and I'm not even an ass man.  Those postures are part of our simian heritage, along with kissing and holding hands.

A day or so later, someone posted this tweet, with a more obviously lighthearted tone.

 
Many of the comments were also playful, but they made clear how little people had thought through what COVID-19 is going to mean.  One person wrote:

Nope.  More like arranged marriages.  Courting involves prolonged physical proximity, and that leaves aside where you meet your love interest (church, dancin' parties, school - all unsafe; and what are you going to do when church, dancing venues, and schools are closed?).  Other people wrote about the erotic excitement of brushing elbows, holding hands, and the like, all of which are verboten under the six-feet-apart rule.  There was romanticization of the days when "ankles were sexy," forgetting how repressive those days were; I think we can guess that they'd been watching too many period films, and forget that people nevertheless broke the rules, with considerable human cost.  (Unwanted pregnancies, social ostracization, sexual harassment and rape, among others.... I forgot to add what used to be euphemistically called "social diseases.")  Also they're forgetting the terrible sanitation of those days, with resultant outbreaks of disease.

Probably this is mostly whistling in the shadow of a catastrophe.  Nobody knows how long we're going to have to stay apart from one another, so of course people joke nervously.  I'm probably taking these comments too seriously, but I don't know.  In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, brave people held hands, hugged, cuddled anyway, even before it was known that such behavior was safe, because they knew and felt how important physical comfort is to human beings.  Besides, from what I know of human nature, most of the people gloating over the end of unsanctified sexual practices are certainly eating ass right now.

One other thing: what bothers me most is the suspicion that I'm seeing the germs of a new erotic prohibitionism being spread.  I don't think it comes from religion, I think it goes into and motivates religion.  I doubt that Rachel Sennett, for example, is a Christian fundamentalist, nor are the people who commented on her tweet, but she's ready to fall back to a sex-negative stance far too easily.  Someone tweeted elsewhere that he already flinches when he sees characters in pre-COVID-19 films or TV casually leaning in for a kiss.  That can be a useful habit to form, but it won't just go away when the virus is no longer a threat.

Damn - this took way too long to write.

P.S. The World Health Organization currently recommends keeping at least a three-foot distance from others, which is certainly easier than six.