I remember the first time I held hands with a man, and I’m not referring to touching hands, or brushing hands, I mean holding hands, intertwined fingers, palm to palm. It was in Mali, West Africa. His name was Bakari. I’d just arrived in the village where I would spend two and a half years learning about myself, separated as I was, from Light People culture. My first man-hand moment happened as I was standing stiff on a dusty clay road near the village I would call home. I stood mouth open, watching as my ride, a nifty Peace Corps van, now drove off into the setting sun, bouncing along beneath the sheer cliffs of the Manding mountains. It was right then that Bakari, a one-eyed, shirtless Mandingo farmer, took my hand.
And didn’t let go. Even a little.
We snaked through the village with our fingers intertwined and my palms all sweaty. People came out of their mud-walled compounds to watch. I couldn’t speak Bambarra, the local language, and none of them spoke French or English. I felt like a gay superstar minus the star part. Everyone just kept pointing at me. Some laughed. One woman held her baby real close to my face and the baby cried. All the other ladies thought that was just the best. This was a perp walk without the crime. Eventually we got to my hut, my new home, where I started an immersion I’d one day call an awakening. But above all, the thing I remember about that day, was Bakari’s hand, in mine. A certain embarrassment. An awkwardness.
And that story is funny, but not really. Men holding hands happens all around the world. East Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caucuses. Men holding hands happens a lot. Men kissing men happens a lot too, and no, not the romantic man to man Hollywood kiss that shows up in every production these days. I’m talking big Slav-man kisses, Italian-man kisses, South American-man kisses. You get the idea; affection between men in the Old World is just different. New Worlders, modern westernized men, don’t really man-touch. Man touching is gay. And I think this divide can help us understand ourselves in 2024. It’s a great way to identify a problem. So, let’s look at the Law of Sex Physics and how we Light People have lost our way when it comes to affection.
To understand the male affection divide, I think we have to understand sex, or maybe better put, the idea of when sexy things are okay, and how sex is present, even when it appears to be absent. First, sex isn’t a complicated idea. It’s a very, very simple thing for most of recorded history. Sex is what happens at the end of the “put a man and a woman in a bed together and watch what happens” experiment. Sex is the outcome of being intimate.
That is the first Law of Sex Physics. In the Old World, challenging this law is akin to challenging the law of gravity, and it’s dumb to fight gravity. If you stop and accept this premise, even against your New World will, you’ll see right away that this Law of Sex Physics explains the history of the entire pre-Enlightenment world, as if in a flash. Why are there no women at that cool hookah bar in Dubai? Why are there no women at this Ethiopian music joint? Where are all the men at the baby shower in the Georgian Republic? Why are there no men in the delivery room? Why do the men stand on one side in an Orthodox church, and the women on the other? At a mosque? At the ashram? The whole story of life before Francis Bacon makes sense when you imbibe the Law of Sex Physics. Understand it and… Voila.
In the New World of Light People this Law of Sex Physics has taken a backseat to a different law. For the sake of this article I’ll call it the Law of Equality Physics. And that law is probably the most important law in the world of Light People. You can find allusions to it in documents directing the Glorious Revolution circa 1688 in England. That revolution embedded within the legal code a series of liberties that became known as “the rights of Englishmen”. These codes would later be used by American Revolutionaries to argue for the Bill of Rights found in their United States Constitution. These ideas would then be used by some wilding Frenchmen during the French Revolution circa 1792, a revolution that had as its slogan, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”.
It doesn’t stop there. The 20th Century witnessed whole societies upended in the name of economic equality and the rights of the working class. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was, purportedly anyway, about one big slab of equalness. Twentieth century American history is a series of equality movements starting with women and moving to racial minorities and then sexual minorities and well, you name it.
Equality. It’s a big thing for us Light People.
But what does this have to do with men holding hands?
Well, it seems that the Law of Sex Physics just won’t die. A hundred years of equality movements and still, affection happens. Affection is the most human of all human natures. It is, in fact, divine. In the Orthodox East, affection is understood as the point of existence. Old timey Orthodox Christians tell us that God creates because He is generous and affectionate, He is love, and love overflows and becomes creation. Trees exist because God is love. Nails exist for the same reason. Creation is the outcome of affection, of the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To be affected is to approach the doorway to the divine. We humans affect. We must. To show affection is our destiny. But if the Law of Sex Physics is real (and it may not be, I’m just letting you know how it is understood in the Old World), and social life needs to be segregated so as to honor reality (the Law of Sex Physics), how shall those in the Old World show affection? How were Old Worlders meant to do the most human of all human things?
Voila. Men holding hands.
Listen to an Arab scholar, Musa Shutaywee at the University of Jordan: “Arab culture has historically been segregated, so emotions and feelings are channeled to the same sex… Men spend a lot of time together, and these customs grew out of that.”
And here’s a tidbit from an article in African Digest. “Men holding hands was not just something that we did; women also walked hand in hand, and at times clung to each other as they walked. It was a demonstration of closeness, friendship and trust. It symbolized so many things that cannot be put into words. It was so natural that we were never even aware that we were doing it. But we have lost it now.”
This West African is bemoaning the loss of same sex affection. The article goes on to say that they are losing this type of affection because they are losing their culture. They are becoming Light People.
But why would the modern world, the world of equality, of science and enlightenment, be a threat to same sex displays of affection?
The answer is in the mingling.
It seems that once you adopt the Law of Equality Physics and intermingle males and females in schools and churches and ball teams, in changing rooms and everywhere, something very interesting happens: Men and women try really hard to treat each other the same. We imagine, and are actually taught to imagine, that a woman likes what a man likes, and that a man likes what a woman likes. We imagine that women get fat the same way men do, that boys do kindergarten the way girls do. And then, leaning on that essential Law of Equality Physics, we root for sameness as evidence of equality.
But all of this is making us afraid, and gray and unsure of ourselves. We don’t know where and with whom to discharge affection. We don’t know how to apply the divine instinct to love affectionately, hospitably. If all of us are seen as the same, then none of our affections can be seen as unique. And here unique must mean, at least at times, sexual.
When the Law of Equality Physics is asserted as the social norm, the Law of Sex Physics does not go away. It goes underground. That underground looks like porn for teenagers, and LUGs and GUGs for college kids. Think incels. In a world without the Law of Sex Physics there will either be lots of non-affectionate sex, or lots of non-sexual relationships.
In the Old World, most societies just gave up on the Law of Equality Physics. That giving up deeply marred the human image. It laid waste the notion of agape and a universal brotherhood. Equality is essential to beauty, though it is not the same thing. Today we have gone very far the other way. We have crowned as king the Law of Equality, but we will pay a price for this.
Is this all to say the time has come for the Hijab and all male sitting parlors? I don’t think so. A time has come however, and that coming is an ending. A new, or at least, a new to us gender ontology is needed. The radical nature of Light People genderism tells us the center is dead and cannot hold. Once it breaks down we need to be ready to assert the beauty in naming man and women as masculine and feminine. When we do this, we have a chance to recover the divine image in all of us. And when that happens men holding hands looks a lot less like sex, and a lot more like heaven.
Beautifully described, John. Like living in a warm cloud of connection , encompassing both men and women , old and young, throughout your life. One of the most appealing descriptions of the Old World way of life I've heard so far!
Very interesting...does this removal of intimacy create more boundaries between same sex groups, because they're more hyper aware of the lack of it? And then try to replace the satisfaction with chasing meaningless sexual relationships?