I read most of this thread while at lunch today, and when I came back, two different coworkers patted or slapped me on the back. Which neither had ever done before.
Not really a contribution to the discussion, but an odd coincidence.
well, when it’s a thread of people who don’t like to be touched, and you swoop in with your usual response of “here are some studies and research I’ve found” like we’re supposed to change how we feel because you found some studies, I hope you’ll excuse us.
a) Did you actually read the op? It’s a thread about
No. Not about those who don’t like to be touched. They were not disallowed from opining but it was about culture at large.
b) My response was specific to how monstro understood me to be asking for black-and-white rules. Nothing else.
c) Yes, awful usual habit of mine to bring in actual studies, evidence, and facts, from studies and research, into conversations here. Behavior very unbecoming for a SDMB forum I know. What am I thinking that such belongs in a conversation? Silly boy.
d) Feelings are not rational and rational discussion will not change them. But rational discussion is still possible. Indeed you may be excused if you are not interested in such. 
My whole life I’ve been led to believe that I am weird/rude/something because I’m not a touchy-feely person. So, I’ve always sorta assumed that more touching is appropriate than what makes me comfortable. So, all of this has been enlightening.
Though, TBH, IMHO, I think the majority of people posting here also are less “touchy” and more reserved than what I’ve observed in other people.
No better than I expected. You’d like people to respect your personal gives-me-the-jeebies boundaries, but when someone else’s are pointed out to you, you mock them.
Again, kind of what I expected, and a sign you don’t have anything worthwhile to say on the topic.
A mention upthread of different cultures is interesting to me. I live in the South; maybe casual touch among co-workers is a larger part of the culture here?
Except my wife says it would wig her out if any of her co-workers touched her. Is it gender?
Except the biggest touchers at my workplace are women (at least from my perspective–it’s possible women get touched more by the few men at my workplace).
Yesterday, I was commiserating with a co-worker about events of the day. I told a wry anecdote, and she laughed and punched my arm–more of a light fist-bump against my arm, not really a punch. She’s from Vermont. Does that matter?
The idea that she should face a reprimand from HR for this is ludicrous to me. If I objected to the touch enough to do something about it, what I should do is to say, “Actually, I don’t like to be touched, do you mind not doing that?”
To forestall the obvious objections: yes, if she’d been a biker and I’d been a cop and we’d been in the middle of a riot and her fist had been glowing adamantium, I would have responded differently. Different social dynamics lead to different acceptable behavior, apparently.
The problem would be your inability to adjust your behavior in response to the feedback of thirty passengers in a row telling you to fuck off and/or punching you in the face. If you’re old enough to be riding the metro alone and you haven’t yet figured out that this is inappropriate, then you have major cognitive deficits and this discussion isn’t for you.
The other problem is that it goes against what I was suggesting regarding non-verbal consent, which is easily sought/understood for certain kinds of contact, especially hugs: you stand with arms outstretched to offer a hug, and if the other person reciprocates, then you approach and embrace. If the other person (in this case, probably nearly every passenger on the metro) does not reciprocate, then you do not approach and embrace. You’ll get a few weird looks, but you probably won’t get punched or told to fuck off if you keep to a policy like that.
You struck my ire in this thread with your dogged insistence that any kind of touch, initiated without some kind of prior verbal or kinesthetic consent, constitutes bullying, predation, taking advantage of, fondling. Dseid and I keep focusing on the specific case of touch given in an attempt to convey empathy and comfort to a distraught touchee for the benefit of the touchee, yet you continue to lump us in with predators and bullies. Despite my repeated references to “a hand on the shoulder,” even now you’re calling it a “shoulder rub,” which for most people conjures mental images of standing behind a person with both hands on the touchee’s shoulders, providing a sensual massage.
I fully acknowledge that such contact may be unwanted. If I touch or attempt to touch a distraught person’s shoulder as a gesture of comfort/empathy without prior consent of any kind, and they pull away or say “please don’t touch me,” I’ll offer an earnest apology and refrain from doing so in the future, but I’ll stick around to see if there’s anything else I can do to help. OTOH, if they start screaming and yelling about predatory or bullying behavior and accuse me of taking advantage of them, then it’ll be a curt apology followed by a prompt exit.
OTOH, if you can suggest some form of nonverbal communication by which one may obtain consent to place a hand on a distraught person’s shoulder, that would be helpful. Absent that, an acknowledgement that it is difficult to communicate nonverbal consent for such contact would suffice. It would also be nice if you’d stop misrepresenting that kind of touch by putting it in the same category as Harvey Weinstein grabbing a handful of ass.
Would you refrain from doing that to ANYBODY in the future, or just that person? Similar to the subway hugging incident, how many times would you need to hear “please don’t touch me” from different people before you decided it was a good idea to not do that to anybody without their permission?
I’d like people not to touch me in the workplace. It doesn’t seem like such a burden to me. I’m mocking people who say “Of course there can be touching in the workplace, I like to rub an arm when talking, or console a grieving coworker, what’s wrong with that?”
What’s wrong with that is they may not WANT that, and you don’t give them a choice BEFORE you do it. Only afterward if they say “Please don’t touch me” do you consider apologizing for your actions. But then go right on doing that to other people. Seems strange to me.
Like my subway story. Would you go up to a crying person on the subway and start consoling them by rubbing their shoulder or a hug? Why would you do that to a person in the office? I honestly don’t understand why people would want to complicate their lives so much with all these different rules, when one “Don’t touch people without their permission” rule works in every setting, every time.
And handshakes? Offering your hand for a handshake is fine. Grabbing the other person’s hand and shaking it? Not fine.
If your give-me-the-jeebies boundaries don’t include light touching or hugs or whatever, then good for you. But so what? Everybody else is NOT you and they may not like touching in the workplace by colleagues. You shouldn’t use your own acceptance of touching to try to show how touching people in the workplace is no big deal.
As DSeid points out, there aren’t going to be black-and-white rules about this, unless you push it all the way to “no touch of any kind, ever, under any circumstances, without explicit verbal permission.”
If a person said “please don’t touch me” (whether via words or body language) OK, I won’t be touching that person again in the future. I’ll also take it as one point of feedback for my future decision-making. If it happens a few times, then obviously I need to reassess how I make those decisions - maybe restrict it to people I know better, for example. If it happens fairly consistently, then OK, I need to accept that this is simply the culture: no touching, ever, without prior permission. This of course rules out the kind of touch I’ve been referring to (a hand placed on the shoulder), for which it is difficult to communicate prior nonverbal consent, and awkward to request prior verbal consent.
You are again conflating a hand placed on the shoulder with “rubbing their shoulder” (considerably more intrusive) and hugging (an action for which prior nonverbal consent is easily communicated). Please stop this.
And in the case of a complete stranger on the subway, consideration of social context means I would think twice about placing a hand unbidden on their shoulder. In the case of a coworker with whom I have some years of familiarity, I might be more willing to take the chance that such a gesture would be appreciated rather than reviled (while also being wiling to admit having been mistaken if so informed).
FWIW, the circumstances under which I might consider placing a hand on a distraught person’s shoulder are extremely rare; I’m in my 40s and have never yet actually encountered a coworker or stranger so shaken up that I would consider delivering physical reassurance like that without their prior consent.
I don’t know what you mean by a ‘reprimand’, would a note in their personnel file that they did X and manager gave them a verbal warning not to do X again count as a reprimand by the way you’re using it? Because I’d call that a verbal reprimand, and it’s pretty standard usage. If that wouldn’t count, then I have no idea what you mean by a reprimand. If it would count as a reprimand that you oppose, how would you ever be able to class someone as a ‘repeat offender’, since you’re not actually recording the incidents as they happen, or that the person was told not to do it again?
Also the idea that the employee handbook needs to spell out every possible offence in great detail or you can’t reprimand someone is at odds with every working environment I’ve ever been in. Either the employee handbook lists things in broad terms such that unwanted touching of any sort would always be forbidden, or there isn’t even a handbook in the first place. No one even thinks of attempting to classify every single thing someone might say or do and create a 5068 page document to allow them to say that ‘this is explicitly forbidden’. Typically a healthy process does something like ‘person does thing, give them verbal warning to let them know it’s not OK and document it, if they do it again give a written warning and have them sign it, if they do more then escalate’.
I’d like people not to twist my words on the messageboard. It doesn’t seem like such a burden to me.
Now, I know that not everyone minds having their words twisted, so I don’t fault you for twisting my words before I told you that I minded; a simple apology and promise not to do it anymore to me would have sufficed.
Similarly, you know that not everyone minds being touched, so I don’t think you should fault people who touch you; a simple apology and promise not to do it anymore to you would have sufficed.
Yesterday, my co-worker laughed and bumped my arm with her fist in response to a story. She could have laughed, said, “Is it okay if I bump your arm with my fist?” and then done it. But that, in my culture, would have been far less appropriate: it would have turned a reasonable, innocuous, quotidian encounter into something strange. It would have made the event weird for both of us, to nobody’s benefit.
I don’t buy that, by not asking for permission to do the fist-arm-bump, she was bullying me, overstepping boundaries, or engaging in any sort of social faux pas whatsoever.
If you can’t ask by nonverbal means, then you either use your words like an adult, or DON’T TOUCH. I’m not sure why you even need to ask this; if you can’t get consent to touch someone in your preferred way someone by one means, then you don’t get to whine that it’s too hard to ask and then do what you want. It’s really that simple; get consent or don’t touch.
If it’s someone you’re already on touching terms with, then you’re good to go. If you’re just some rando wanting to ‘comfort’ a co worker, then coming up to them and putting your hand on them is grossly invasive and presumptuous. Again, you don’t seem to get how creepy it is for a hot chick to get sad news, then every guy in the office starts placing a ‘comforting’ hand on her shoulder. Even if they are all individually following the ‘distraught person, hand on shoulder’ thought process consciously, the net effect is incredibly gross on it’s own. When you realize that ‘touch the hot chick’ does factor in subconsciously, as you can see by things like the ‘pretty new girl gets mobbed by dudes offering help, new guy barely gets noticed’ phenomenon, the problem becomes even clearer.
This might be part of the disconnect. I get on touching terms with people without ever having conversations about it. If I’ve visited someone at their house in a social context, or hung out with them at someone else’s house, or worked alongside them for a few years and talked about our personal lives–in other words, if my relationship with them has non-work-related characteristics–then I won’t find it at all odd to be touched by them in the ways I’ve talked about.
Even if I haven’t, I know that some people are touchers. If they’re not creeping about it or engaging in dominance displays, I see no reason why handling it needs to involve HR: if I don’t like it, a simple word to them will suffice.
What you’re saying is that I struck your ire by insisting that people in general have the right to decide who touched them and how.
It’s extremely, absurdly disturbing and manipulative when you do an action that YOU want to do that the other person has not consented to, but try to claim that you’re doing it for the benefit of the other person. You’re removing agency from the other person by claiming that you are a better judge of what is for their benefit than they are. Yeah, you don’t want to acknowledge it, but that’s what you’re doing.
If the person who’s shoulder you put your hand on freezes up to the point that ‘rubbing their shoulder’ is not an accurate description of events, that generally indicates that you’ve really badly messed up and the person you were trying to comfort has frozen in terror. If they don’t, then the general body motions in the situation make ‘rub’ an accurate description of what the hand on the shoulder is doing.
I’ve already acknowledged that, but just for clarity: Sometimes nonverbal consent is difficult to obtain. In which case your options are to either obtain verbal consent, or to refrain from touching the person. Touching the person nonconsensually because it’s too much bother to get consent is not actually a valid option.
I’m not misrepresenting it, it’s most definitely in the same category, much the same way that a light punch on the shoulder is in the same category as a heavy beating. They are of different severity, but they are both the same category of offense.
If this is the case, I really don’t understand why you’re arguing so vehemently that it’s completely unreasonable to think that you actually need consent to touch people.
I don’t see anything remotely unreasonable in the idea that she might face a reprimand from HR for punching someone on the job, even if it’s light and she intended it as a joke. In these specific circumstance she’s not going to get a reprimand because you weren’t bothered enough by it to make a formal complaint, but if you were bothered enough that you felt the need to complain, and especially if you didn’t feel you could ask her to stop without consequences, is it really unreasonable for HR to do nothing at all?
Do you really consider “if you punch someone on the job you will get in trouble for it if they complain” an unreasonable policy?
And to put to rest this “Twisting my words on a message board” business, because I don’t like to do that, and of course you don’t like when people do that, here is the chain of posts to which I was responding:
First:
DSeid seems to be saying that revulsion to being touched in the workplace is not normal. Which is strange position to take IMHO, but okay.
And your response:
You are saying that it is easy for you distinguish between different types of touches. What is your point in saying this? Who cares if YOU can do it? In my experience, if someone is posting how easy it is to do something, they are implying that it’s easy for everyone to do it. Or else, what? You are bragging about how you can do something? I didn’t see any other possibility on why you would post declaring how easy it was for you to distinguish different types of touches.
And I responded with this:
Because as I said, it seemed to me you were stating how easy it was to distinguish types of touches, implying that everyone could or should be doing that. That it didn’t bother you when the coworker puts her hand on your arm because you know it isn’t “putting a hand on my knee and licking their lips” type of touching. Again, I say, so what? Good for you.
Now, if that is twisting your words, I welcome being told what you meant. I don’t want some strange “You are twisting my words” vibe to inhibit my real words of “Don’t touch people without their permission”
Know what else she could have done? Not punch your arm.
Not at all; I agree with this position. The entire issue here revolves around whether prior consent is an absolute requirement.
I would agree with this, if my policy was to persist with physical contact after it was made clear that such contact was not wanted. But it ain’t.