Society

Touch isolation is creating an epidemic of sexual scarcity thinking among American men. *** In American culture, we simply don’t trust male touch. We believe that men always have a sexual agenda. We believe that, given the opportunity, men will collapse into the sexual at a moment’s notice. That men don’t know how to physically connect otherwise. That men can’t control themselves. That men are dogs. There is no corresponding narrative about the sexuality of women. This distrust of male touch applies not only in mens’ daily interactions with women, but also with other men and even with children. A stranger at the park is first and foremost a potential predator. A man who touches a woman at work, wedding ring on his finger or not, is seeking sex. A man who puts his arm around another man for longer than a few moments triggers homophobic suspicions. No matter what the…

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast Excerpt America's Cult of Ignorance—And the Death of Expertise More people are better educated than ever before, and knowledge is easier to come by. So why do we so often scorn those who plainly know more than we do? Tom Nichols 04.01.17 12:01 AM ET “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” —Isaac Asimov In the early ’90s, a small group of “AIDS denialists,” including a University of California professor named Peter Duesberg, argued against virtually the entire medical establishment’s consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Science thrives on such…