Noli me tangere!

The French-American contrast sounds broadly right, but there’s regional variation at least on the American side. Casual stranger-conversation is much more common in the south and the midwest than in, say, northern New England or NYC. Coming from northern New England, I’ve never managed to become comfortable with the “American” customs about conversation, even though I’ve easily adjusted to the French customs about touching.

Once while waiting for a bus in Boulder, Colorado, I had a conversation with a guy who had recently arrived there from Sri Lanka. The thing I noticed after about a minute was that his norm for how close to stand to somebody in a face-to-face conversation was much, much closer than mine, and we’d both been gradually inching along the sidewalk as a result. (It may have been more personal than cultural, since I haven’t had that experience in so striking a way since. But later I read somewhere that Americans have a larger bubble of intimate personal space than just about anyone else in the world.)

I have a German sister-in-law. Once on a family trip we overheard another vacationing family speaking German. I thought that in some sense my sister in law might want to say hi to her compatriots, but it turned out that, just because she was German, she could not do so. The rest of us might have been excused for our bad manners in doing so, but she wouldn’t be.

It’s been a while since I read the book and I don’t remember having any special reaction to this part, but it might be because an “unwanted touching” is a typical paradigm example of battery in the law, where a battery is an “offensive” or “harmful” application of force to another’s body. At common law no harm was required and any touching would suffice, if one hadn’t taken reasonable care to prevent it. This comes, of course, from the UK to both Canada and the US. Ripstein isn’t a lawyer, but he has a sort of legal studies degree from Yale law school and teaches in a law school, so I suspect that what he has in mind isn’t so much a cultural oddity but a typical legal example of battery. In most jurisdictions in the US (and probably elsewhere) some harm is required for a battery these days, but that’s to move away from the common law definition, which I strongly suspect is the sort of thing Ripstein has in mind.

On regional variation in the US: there’s definitely more touching in the (coastal) west than in the east – in many circles, anyway, the standard cross-gender and women-women greeting among even relatively casual acquaintances is a little hug; men hug less (though still more than in the east) but are more likely to shake hands/bump fists/etc. than in other regions. Conversational intimacy varies up and down the west coast – northwesterners are less likely to approach/talk to strangers than, say, californians (the ‘Seattle Chill’). I find that people in the east are more likely to strike up conversations than in the northwest, but that when they do, they tend to be markedly less polite/use less pleasantries.

Further to @1 and @9: in my experience, which is pretty much limited to middle and upper middle class Northeasterners, women generally hug and kiss friends of either sex when they meet, and men generally hug and kiss female friends. So Kuper is a little off as regards this set.

If you want to flirt, you can slightly up the level of eroticism in these encounters, but that applies to maybe in a thousand episodes.

I second Matt’s comment and want to note the unwanted or “unauthorized” touching is not only a battery in criminal law but in common law “is the tort of intentionally (or, in Australia, negligently) and voluntarily bringing about an unconsented harmful or offensive contact with a person or to something closely associated with them (e.g. a hat, a purse).” (Wikipedia) As Ripstein states, “touching is the SIMPLEST case for using a person for a purpose he or she has not authorized.” Ripstein’s discussion of the Kantian idea that each person be conceived as occupying a unique “space” is the metaphysical premise of the aforementioned notion: “each person is entitled to occupy whatever space is not occupied by any other.” Remove this metaphysical premise, and the whole “touching” thing seems–pardon the pun–a tad out of touch. (As an anecdotal aside, this discussion gives a new meaning to the ‘touching’ fights with my siblings on long car trips when we were children.)

@14: The same applies in parts of Central Africa, also (Congo, Burundi, etc…) . It’s also quite common to see men walking around holding hands there, in some of the most violently homophobic regions on earth.

A young winger recently published a piece about how wonderfully free France and Italy are, where men can grope women they’ve never met before in public places. On one thread American feminists and tourists were not amused. I doubt that American religious rightists would be either. No French or Italian women spoke up, to my knowledge.

Based on my recent reading, the French 19th century was a tidal wave of horniness. My conclusion was that the French were as fucked up as the puritanical Americans and British, but in a diametrically different way. The ideal French lover of that time seems to have been a tubercular waif with a life expectancy of two or three years (La Boheme, La Traviata, La Dame aux Camellias, three sentimental-erotic fantasies based on two actual tubercular women.)

After the Franco-Prussian war, the French started to reconsider their ways and decided that their defeat was to be blamed on courtesans and prostitutes, who admittedly had an untoward influence on the Second Empire’s policies.

LFC @ 14
It is definitely not as common for young girls in the US to walk down the street holding their friends’ hands as in, say, Seoul, though especially for younger girls it wouldn’t be assumed to be sexual, as it would be for boys.

Some women hug pretty much everybody they meet, but this is pretty much restricted to New Yorkers.

In my little slice of Canada girls often hug both female and male friends hello. Men sometimes hug hello but usually only on a special occasion. Just for clarity I am a 27 year old government employing living in Ottawa.

In the last 10 years or so I’ve noticed a trend for people who disagree with you (me) and who are work acquaintances and almost strangers and who you (I) initially don’t like much will have a compulsion to have a hug of the all encompassing and over enveloping type. This seems to me to say something like “I’ve pretended to listen to your side, and accept the meeting consensus, but I’m going to go on thinking my way is right and working against it all”

My sense is it comes from USA, more precisely USA originating films and TV, but is now widespread in Australia.

The incident is on youtube

Chris,
I think there’s a class component to it (my parents, despite my dad’s eventual elevation, were solidly lower-middle in their habits and tastes) — I really noticed the difference between the habits of my working class schoolfriends and my upper class college mates. There is also the depression factor, no doubt. I have been working hard at it for 3 1/2 years, and especially since last summer, and it is only since last summer that I have found it pleasurable, one of numerous changes in my life.

The analogy seems to be in part to the common law of trespass, which does not require harm, merely an intentional entry onto the land of another. Common law battery would be an intentional harmful or offensive contact without consent. Harmful or offesive would be contextual and determined by what would offend a person of reasonable firmness.

I find myself wondering what Kant would have made of Mark 5, vv 27-34

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%205:21-43;&version=ESV;

He had been puzzled at first, he said, that American women didn’t flirt with him. In France, he explained, you always flirted whether you fancied someone or not. The flirting meant nothing. Only after longer acquaintance would you discover whether the woman actually liked you.”

I made the experience that American women (in the South) almost always smile on eye contact. Even strangers just passing by. I have been wondering how general a cultural characteristic that is?

But they, too, follow one ground rule shared by the French, Americans and British: they only get naked with people of the opposite gender in sexual situations.

The Latins may not get naked but women go bare-breasted at the beach, as do the Northern Europeans, but not Americans. Also, it’s not just an “opposite gender” thing. Americans often go to the sauna wearing clothes, even though the sauna is usually gender segregated.
Another American custom that appears weird at least to Northern Europeans is the habit of requiring even small children to wear swim suits at the beach. I’m not sure about Latin customs in this respect. Thomas Mann related (in Mario und der Zauberer) how Italians at a beach react with outrage to an 8 year old child being naked while washing her swimsuit. He found that unbelievably prude, and that was in 1929.

Some women hug pretty much everybody they meet, but this is pretty much restricted to New Yorkers.

This actually applies better to suburban Connecticut and New Jersey than NYC proper. I know girls in Connecticut high schools who’ve adopted the French habit of la bise.

Referring to the custom of kissing the cheek as a form of greeting.

“The Latins may not get naked but women go bare-breasted at the beach….”
Not in Ecuador or its environs!

Of course gropings are wrong, but that’s not at issue here. The issue is touchings without prior permission.

But isn’t “groping” just a specific form of touching to which the touchee is assumed to not consent because of the nature of the touch, presumed motivation, etc.? I’m not seeing a clear line (or rather, any particular culture may have a clear line between “culturally accepted casual touching” and “not culturally accepted as casual touching”, but there’s no reason to expect all those lines to coincide and in fact they don’t).

ISTM that if a member of Culture A expects a member of Culture B to be offended by a form of touch that is accepted in Culture B just because it’s *not* accepted in Culture A, there is something wrong with that reasoning: namely, the A-ite is subconsciously assuming that his/her own culture is secretly written in everyone’s DNA (or ordained by God or what have you), and therefore Culture B is just a bunch of people willfully violating the rights they all secretly know each other to have. That doesn’t seem like a particularly useful way of looking at Culture B.

…and no, I don’t have a good answer for how this translates to how French (or any other country’s) women generally react to being touched in ways that people from different cultures would describe as “groping”. Would the Frenchwomen themselves even describe it in the same way, let alone react to it in the same way?

P.S. I would however agree that *if* the Frenchwomen (etc.) don’t in fact consent to that form of touching but are told to shut up about it if they dare to complain, or some such, *then* their rights are being violated. But their nonconsent shouldn’t be presumed just on the basis of the cultural practices of a different culture.

Late to the party, but a case of “illegal touching”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLnT2-z9ujE&feature=related

Though perhaps not as Kant et alia might have intended or imagined it.