@baraqiel I was not suggesting in any way (and I’m sorry if my comment came across this way) that it is okay for any person to touch you without your consent and especially to continue doing so after they have been asked to stop.

What I was saying is that it can help us help children stop nonconsensual touch if we understand their reasons for doing it. If a blind person is touching something or someone because they’re trying to navigate and have gotten confused, the remedy is to help them re-orient themselves. If a child’s first impulse it to touch as a way of gaining understanding of something, we can help them learn other ways to gain understanding while making it clear that people don’t want to be touched without being asked first (and if they say “no” to respect that).

To me, these interactions are always about respecting the personhood of BOTH individuals — the adult as well as the child — and if the adult doesn’t want to be touched, they are completely within their rights to say “no.” It’s just that, personally, I find that it’s easier to respond to those sorts of encounters when I pause for a second and think about the reasons behind what’s going on for the other person as well as for myself.

So, onwards.

I’m not sure why you think that makes a huge difference. Obviously I don’t consider children to be, in general, a threat to my physical well-being — that’s not where my objection lies. Blind people often learn about the world through touch, too, but I’d still be very upset if a blind adult touched me without my consent and continued to do so after having been asked not to. I don’t care why children (or anyone else, really) thinks it’s okay to touch me without asking or what they get out of it. It’s not. End of story, as far as I’m concerned.

@renniejoy – I found the re-defining of the term “mama” in that thread to be really objectionable in a lot of ways, honestly, especially since a lot of people were saying that it felt exclusionary to them and the only response I saw was “well, then you don’t really understand”. In particular, I thought the comment in which someone argued that if someone is engaged in 24/7 parenting, they are *mothering* regardless of gender and *fathering* is something different was really beyond the pale. I understand the point that person was making but I strongly disagree with making it in that way and given Feministe’s moderation policies and some of the comments that they delete, I was really quite upset that they kept that one up.

…sorry, really needed to rant about that.

I don’t really have anything to add, just *applause*

Her philosophy/practice of “radical love” makes her position more reasonable, although I would still argue that not everyone in the village is capable of or willing to comfortably (for varying values of comfortable) interact with children at all times.

* I stopped reading that thread at ~300 comments. I agree that Maia explicitly stated that “mama” is not a title solely for “mothers”, but when I read the title of the post I “heard” “ain’t I a woman”; exchanging mama for woman implies (to me) an equivalence that seems to have been unintended.

I agree. And I think it’s also plain, old fear. If you don’t spend a lot of time with your kids, you don’t know who they are and how to talk to them. You don’t know HOW to get them to be reasonable human beings, and you’re probably kind of scared of them.