Handshakes, etc.
Around, I guess, a decade back, Wil Wheaton got a lot of hatred for instituting a policy of no handshakes and generally no touching him at cons. He did so because he has a compromised immune system and had gotten extremely sick from such contact at a previous con.
I searched for his name and the word "handshake" and I got some kind of secret handshake meme which sort of gives me the impression he possibly paid someone to tell him how to put the hatred behind him and move on. But I did manage to find a couple of old mentions of him doing this.
From a post on his site dated August 2012:
In my youth, I was very touchy-feely in the physical sense of that term. This likely helped contribute to my health issues and I have completely reversed my policy on that in recent years. These days, I actively try to avoid casual physical contact with people because it has a track record of being a problem for me, health-wise.
This was a challenging thing to figure out how to do. I sort of inadvertently learned that being very warm and smiley actively encourages people to touch me and I learned that in part because my health issues have cost me a lot of teeth and this has resulted in nerve damage to one side of my face.
So for some years, I really couldn't make myself smile. I could smile if it was a genuine reaction to something funny or whatever, but TRYING to smile ended up kind of like that scene in Addams Family Values where Wednesday smiles and everyone takes a step back in horror.
This is possibly a bigger issue for women than for men. Women are generally more smiley and actively get TOLD by people to "smile!" if they aren't and men tend to initiate touching, which is problematic if you are a woman with a compromised immune system who is expected to simply tolerate the decisions of men inclined to touch you for some damn reason.
It's especially problematic if you want to protect your privacy. If you know me online, odds are good you know I have a serious medical condition, but I don't tend to announce that when I meet people in person.
It's not any of their damn business and I shouldn't NEED an excuse or justification to expect people I barely know to simply NOT touch me, thanks.
Older cultures tend to have no contact greeting rituals, such as bowing and using honorifics in speech. I suspect this is because historically there simply wasn't good sanitation available, so touching people was probably even more risky than it is in a modern culture with good sanitation infrastructure widely available.
So I think most likely your culture survived long enough to become an old culture by adopting practices that limited the spread of germs and this is one of them. Another seems to be that older cultures seem to have very spicy diets, from what I gather, and spices have medicinal properties a la the expression "Let your food be your medicine."
I think it is a shame that Wil Wheaton apparently tucked tail and ran from this fight. It was no doubt the correct thing to do for his own welfare but perhaps the pandemic would have been less awful if he had somehow managed to find a way to successfully promote the idea that "Handshakes spread germs and, if you value your health, you should avoid them."
I searched for his name and the word "handshake" and I got some kind of secret handshake meme which sort of gives me the impression he possibly paid someone to tell him how to put the hatred behind him and move on. But I did manage to find a couple of old mentions of him doing this.
From a post on his site dated August 2012:
tl;dr: I'm not going to touch people at the con. I know it seems weird, but I hope you understand why. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm trying not to get sick.See also: Gen Con: No Touching Wil Wheaton
In my youth, I was very touchy-feely in the physical sense of that term. This likely helped contribute to my health issues and I have completely reversed my policy on that in recent years. These days, I actively try to avoid casual physical contact with people because it has a track record of being a problem for me, health-wise.
This was a challenging thing to figure out how to do. I sort of inadvertently learned that being very warm and smiley actively encourages people to touch me and I learned that in part because my health issues have cost me a lot of teeth and this has resulted in nerve damage to one side of my face.
So for some years, I really couldn't make myself smile. I could smile if it was a genuine reaction to something funny or whatever, but TRYING to smile ended up kind of like that scene in Addams Family Values where Wednesday smiles and everyone takes a step back in horror.
"She's scaring me!"
This is possibly a bigger issue for women than for men. Women are generally more smiley and actively get TOLD by people to "smile!" if they aren't and men tend to initiate touching, which is problematic if you are a woman with a compromised immune system who is expected to simply tolerate the decisions of men inclined to touch you for some damn reason.
It's especially problematic if you want to protect your privacy. If you know me online, odds are good you know I have a serious medical condition, but I don't tend to announce that when I meet people in person.
It's not any of their damn business and I shouldn't NEED an excuse or justification to expect people I barely know to simply NOT touch me, thanks.
Older cultures tend to have no contact greeting rituals, such as bowing and using honorifics in speech. I suspect this is because historically there simply wasn't good sanitation available, so touching people was probably even more risky than it is in a modern culture with good sanitation infrastructure widely available.
So I think most likely your culture survived long enough to become an old culture by adopting practices that limited the spread of germs and this is one of them. Another seems to be that older cultures seem to have very spicy diets, from what I gather, and spices have medicinal properties a la the expression "Let your food be your medicine."
I think it is a shame that Wil Wheaton apparently tucked tail and ran from this fight. It was no doubt the correct thing to do for his own welfare but perhaps the pandemic would have been less awful if he had somehow managed to find a way to successfully promote the idea that "Handshakes spread germs and, if you value your health, you should avoid them."
