Guys, you’ll feel better for the occasional hug

I’ll never forget the first time I went to a strip club. Not because of the dancers, rather for the elderly man at the back tables. He was on his own, his bottom sagged over the edges of the white plastic chair, and a couple of bags of shopping pooled around his feet. Out of the top spilled Pams $2 jam, flimsy white bread and a dozen pots of Jimbo’s cat food. Every so often he reached down to restack the Jimbo’s carefully.

He waited for almost 20 minutes, stirring his Coke anxiously, his eyes on the stage. Then she appeared, an effervescent blonde in a neon green G-string, and his whole face relaxed. As she bounced over to him, he held out his arms and scooped her up like a kitten.

I remember watching his hands wrap around her. It wasn’t a grope, a grab or a handful of ass. It was a cuddle. She laughed as he rocked her back and forth, tucking bills into her undies as she asked him about his day. After a few minutes, she hopped up, waved goodbye and scampered off. He sighed, got to his feet, repacked his Jimbo’s and shuffled out.

He’d paid maybe $80 for a cuddle.

I shouldn’t have been so shocked. In the United States, the fledgling professional cuddler business (where you can be non-sexually snuggled by a stranger) is most popular among straight, white, divorced men over 50.

We don’t really have professional cuddlers here yet, so a strip club is probably the closest place a straight, white divorced older man can go if he needs a hug.

And as it happens, many do need them. Recent studies done on heterosexual, older couples from America have shown that hugging and kissing in a relationship are more important to men than to women. Not only that, but men are more likely than women to say they received less affection than they wanted.

You don’t have to go far to see how men could feel starved of platonic, non-sexual touch.

I am a serial snuggler. I’ve cuddled everyone from partners, to friends, to family, passing cats, to workmates, to strangers I’ve met on trains, to women I’ve bonded with in toilets. My mum’s the same. She’s forever enveloping passing strangers in stewed-plums-and-fleece-jumpers scented hugs.

My dad and my brother, on the other hand, still haven’t mastered hugging. I started giving Dad stick for it about six years ago and they’ve since progressed to an adorably awkward handshake/ one-armed back-grab thing that looks somewhere between a sumo wrestle and a bad tango. Still, progress.

The point is that it’s just not seen as OK for men to touch and be touched unless it’s by their intimate partner. Potentially, if you’re dying of heart failure, then CPR is permitted. But most men just don’t really touch people. Especially not other men. Especially not between men over 40.

If they do, many immediately do a back-bend to avoid any threat of human contamination, or almost instantly sneer, ‘‘I’m not gay!’’

It’s one of those times when I’m glad to be female. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of shitty stuff comes with owning ovaries. But at least I’ve never lived in a world where I feel my sexuality and gender are called into question by occasionally feeling like a cuddle.

But Kiwi dudes live in a world where their sexuality is so rigidly policed that anything from a hug, to ordering a brightly coloured cocktail, to wearing anything more flamboyant than a bin bag means they’re at risk of looking effeminate or ‘‘a bit gay, mate’’. How exhausting.

More importantly, how lonely. With rates of loneliness on the rise in New Zealand, there’s never been more of a need for the intimacy and communication of basic touch. We know that physical, platonic touch with another person releases a powerful combination of oxytocin and other feel-good hormones. And studies have consistently shown that those starved of physical affection and touching show greater signs of depression, loneliness, anxiety and less social support.

This is where men’s touch starvation is so harmful. You can’t help but think if it was a little more acceptable for them to touch and be touched, we wouldn’t have such a crippling problem with our staggeringly high male loneliness, depression and suicide rates.

But instead, we have a world where male suicide rates are 21⁄2 times higher than those of females, and where men wait for cuddles in strip clubs.