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There are two of the odder things I read recently:

Would You Cuddle With Strangers For A Sweet Fee? — About a woman in Portland that helps people with her ‘healing touch’ by cuddling with them, $60 for an hour or $35 for 30 minutes.  Completely non-sexual session.

I Gave Up My Son In An Open Adoption — A young white female writing about being a birth mother and how she is kind of proud of it, and ranting a little about how she has been “misunderstood” or “mistreated” by cultural tradition.

What do these articles reflect about our society and time?  What does it say about us?  These might not be completely novel, but from another angle, the fact that they are not written out, published, blogged, reflected another layer of our “new” world.

I don’t have one strong opinion about the first article, I can see it from many ways.  I do not condone nor condemn her.  I can say, “Good for her.  That’s the capitalistic spirit!”  Then in the same breath, I could detested her for her capitalistic intention.  Why wouldn’t someone get a massage for the human touch?  Why is this “new” or “clever,” don’t they already separate various “acts” in prostitution? You pay for how much you want to “access,” breaking cuddling out as a thing is not…well…all that new, or different.  I am not calling her a prostitute, I know her intentions/methods are different (not the money part, but maybe the sex part, she’s different).  But she hasn’t just “discovered” this.  Various books have written about prostitutes, various films were made on the lives of these women, many of them have told stories of men visiting them just to talk or lie together for the time they paid for, the sessions weren’t always about sex.  How does cuddling work without the emotional connection?  Even as child, I didn’t want to hug and play with someone else’s teddy bear, I wanted mine, the one that I have a bond with.  I just don’t get it, how does this even work?

Regarding the second article, are women starting to behave like stray dogs and cats, give birth to a litter and walk away?  Are we really that detached from morality?  Deteriorating of the human soul, which is the thing that suppose to distinguishes us from other animals?  She treated the pregnancy as if it was a flu she had.  Nine months later, “it” is out of her, so done and gone, until the next time she has unprotected sex and gets pregnant again.  Her detachment to the baby is a subject that book after book could be written about, women can argue about it for eternity.  But the fact that she treated it so causally, especially to herself, being irresponsibility for her own body that led to such consequences and outcome, that is pretty disturbing.

Everything is so transactional these days.  Look at the two stories above.  We live in our own little world with our smartphone, the rest of the world could go completely unnoticed.