Why does he always want to touch my tits?
Why his hand goes straight there at the kitchen sink, why “not tonight” lands like a truck, and what the research on affective touch says about both.
Companion piece to my RSD post.
I’m sixty-seven and I have a massage most weeks. Somewhere in the middle of it, more often than I’d care to put in writing, my body decides that what’s happening is sexual.
It isn’t. The woman doing it is a professional doing her job, and I know that the way I know my own name. My body has never once asked my opinion on anything, and it isn’t about to start on a Tuesday afternoon with its face wedged in a towel hole. For about fifty years the word I used on myself afterwards was grub. Then I’d get dressed, go home, and not think about it again until the next time, which is the male emotional processing system working exactly as designed.
It turns out I had it wrong. Not wrong in the comforting way, where it stops being my problem. Wrong in the more interesting way, where the thing I’d been calling a character flaw was closer to a spelling mistake.
The question
Women ask this one to each other, sometimes to the man, and almost never expecting an answer that isn’t a joke. Why does he always want to touch my tits?
Not in bed. In bed it’s obvious. At the sink. While you’re on the phone to your mother. When you’ve just sat down after eleven hours on your feet and you would trade sex, gladly, for a cup of tea and forty minutes of nobody needing anything from you. He wanders past and his hand goes straight there like it has its own postcode.
And under the eye-roll is a question that isn’t funny at all: is that all I am to him?
No. Stay with me, because the first half of the answer sounds like an excuse and isn’t.
He has two sets of nerves and has only been told about one
The famous set is the one that finds your keys in a bag without looking. Fast, myelinated, extremely good at its job, and utterly incurious about how any of it makes you feel.
The second set is slower, stranger, and by any sensible engineering standard a bit useless. C-tactile afferents live only in hairy skin, and they can’t tell you what touched you or where. They have precisely one job, which is to have an opinion about how the touching is going. Håkan Olausson’s group traced them to the insula, the department that handles the state of your body rather than the facts of the world, which means the message they’re carrying isn’t ‘something is on your arm’, it’s ‘mmm…’ (Olausson et al., 2002).
They’re also fussy in a way that borders on the pedantic. They fire hardest for slow stroking, roughly one to ten centimetres a second, at ordinary skin temperature (Ackerley et al., 2014). Faster and they lose interest. Colder and they sulk.
That specificity sounds invented until you see what Ilona Croy’s team did with it. They asked people to stroke a fake arm, then their partner, then their baby, and clocked the speed (Croy et al., 2016). Everyone got the fake arm wrong, because nobody has ever loved a prosthetic. Everyone got the partner and the baby right: dead inside the window, every single one, with no instruction, no training, and no idea the window existed.
There is no module for this. Nobody sits you down. Every parent in that study was hitting a target they had never been shown, with an instrument they didn’t know they were holding, and not one of them missed.
Here’s the part that matters. This is the grooming system. It’s what a chimpanzee is doing for three hours a day with its hands in another chimpanzee’s fur, where the fleas are essentially a cover story. It runs on oxytocin and opioids and it says one thing only: you’re safe, you’re mine, I’m not going anywhere. It is not the sex system. It’s a much older piece of equipment, and its entire business is not being alone.
Where his went
Now mine, because I’m not going to make you take this from a stranger.
When I was small, everybody hugged me. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, the lot. Then I turned into a teenage boy and it stopped. Not tapered. Stopped. Nobody announced it, nobody explained it, and I didn’t ask, because I didn’t notice. From that point on, the only touch I got was from a woman I was sleeping with.
That’s not a sad story. Ask almost any bloke you know and you’ll get a version of it, and he’ll be just as unbothered as I was, because you can’t grieve something nobody gave you a word for.
It’s also measurable. Juulia Suvilehto’s team got 1,368 people across five countries to colour in a body outline marking where each person in their life was permitted to touch them (Suvilehto et al., 2015). Which is, when you picture it properly, 1,368 adults sitting down with a gingerbread man and a packet of coloured pencils to establish exactly how much of themselves their uncle is entitled to. Bond strength predicts area, almost in a straight line. Partner: nearly everywhere. Close family and friends: head and upper torso. Strangers: hands, and count yourself lucky.
Then the finding that stopped me. Take any matched pair in someone’s life (mother and father, sister and brother, aunt and uncle, female friend and male friend) and the woman is allowed more of that person’s body than the man. Every single pair. Men allow less overall, too. The researchers weren’t prosecuting a culture war; they were studying bonding, which is exactly what makes their conclusion land. Social touch, they wrote, works as “a predominantly feminine-appropriate behavior”.
And Kory Floyd has the receipts on what it costs. Men report significantly more affection deprivation than women, and it climbs alongside loneliness, depression, alexithymia and a run of immune problems (Floyd, 2014). Both halves of the bill in one paper, which is efficient of it.
One drawer
So here is your husband, standing in the kitchen. Somewhere inside him a very old system is filing a request for grooming. Not sex. Grooming. Come here. I’ve had a day. Tell me I’m not on my own.
He goes looking for somewhere to put that request, and he finds one drawer. One relationship in his entire life has ever licensed prolonged, affectionate, skin-on-skin contact. It’s you. And the label on the drawer says SEX.
So his hand goes to your breast. Not because that’s all you are, but because it’s the only word he has for come here, and he’s deploying it the way a man with fifteen words of French orders dinner: by pointing confidently at the thing he can name and hoping it’s adjacent to what he wanted.
He’s not lying when he says he just wanted a cuddle. He’s not lying when his body says otherwise either. Both are true at once, and he can’t tell you which is which, because he genuinely doesn’t know. There is no instrument on the dashboard for this. There’s a light that comes on, and it’s the same light for everything.
The experiment that should have worked
Here’s where the standard story does the most dangerous thing a story can do. It makes a prediction.
If he reaches for your breast because he’s a bag of appetite with a mortgage, then the appetite is the problem, and appetite has an obvious solution. Buy the thing. Discharge the system. Come home lighter and better company.
I’ve run that experiment. I’d rather not itemise it and I don’t have to, because every man reading this either knows the result or has heard it described in a car park. It works for about eleven minutes. Then you’re sitting on the end of a bed putting your socks on, and the thing that turns up isn’t satisfaction, it’s that was bloody awful, and a loneliness meaner than the one you walked in with.
Meanwhile: a woman who is paid to knead my back for an hour, who has no sexual interest in me of any kind, who is quite possibly thinking about her lunch, lights me up like a fruit machine.
Take the standard story seriously and those two results are the wrong way round. The explicitly sexual thing should have satisfied and didn’t. The explicitly non-sexual thing shouldn’t have registered and nearly took the roof off. A theory with a gap in it is one thing. A theory that gets it backwards twice, in opposite directions, is the sort of result that ought to finish an argument.
The mechanism gets both right, and it takes two findings.
The first: your brain is scoring who, not what. Suvilehto’s team went back with a scanner and asked whether the identity of the toucher was recoverable from brain activity (Suvilehto et al., 2021). It was. Pattern analysis could classify which person was doing the touching, and it did that best from primary somatosensory cortex and insula. Not from some judicious region upstairs weighing things up. From the first place the signal lands. And the pleasantness of touch tracks who you believe is delivering it independently of the kinematics: same speed, same pressure, same stroke, different person, different event.
So, a professional’s expert hands and a familiar woman’s ordinary ones were never competing on technique. Your sensory cortex is running a background check before the pleasure gets assembled.
The second: the two systems drag the hormone in opposite directions. Sari van Anders splits intimacy down the middle into sexual and nurturant (van Anders et al., 2011). Both raise oxytocin, which is why both feel like closeness. But sexual intimacy raises testosterone and nurturant intimacy lowers it. Two systems, opposite signatures, one bloke.
Which means the sexual channel cannot feed the grooming hunger even in principle. It doesn’t fail because you did it wrong or didn’t pay enough. It drives the hormone the wrong way. You cannot eat your way out of thirst.
Now, both results make sense. Stranger, transactional, sexual: kinematically expert, relationally nil. The cortex files stranger before you’ve had a chance to argue, testosterone climbs, and the system that was actually starving is never once addressed. You get the discharge and you keep the hunger, which is precisely why the socks bit is so bleak.
The massage: kinematically unremarkable, relationally loaded. Prolonged contact, at grooming speed, on hairy skin, from a woman my body has a long history with and has filed accordingly. Nurturant intimacy. Testosterone down, oxytocin up, the grooming system fed properly for the first time since I was a teenager and everybody stopped hugging me.
And there is no drawer for that. So a system firing at full volume with no category to put itself in does the only thing available to it. It files under SEX. What’s actually happening is a sixty-seven-year-old nervous system finally getting the one thing it was built for, and having no word for it, on a Tuesday afternoon, with its face wedged in a towel hole.
He hasn’t got the word either
Ronald Levant has spent decades on this and gave it a name that sounds like jargon and isn’t: ‘normative male alexithymia’. Normative, meaning it’s the standard factory build, not a fault in your particular unit.
The precision of it is what gets me. Levant’s team ran a word test and found alexithymic men made more errors on the emotion words masculine norms discourage—the vulnerability and attachment words—and no more errors at all on the words masculine norms permit (Levant et al., 2014). The gap is stencil-shaped. He can do words. Specific words were removed. And the mechanism was suppression rather than repression, which means nobody did it to him in the dark. He did it himself, half a second at a time, for forty years, because that’s what he understood good men do.
What’s left is anger, sadness and happiness. That’s the triumvirate. Ask him how he feels and he runs a quick pass across three options and picks the nearest, which is how fine and tired were promoted to emotions.
Why it lands so hard when you say no
This is the other half of your question, and you probably didn’t know it was the same question.
You say, ‘not tonight’. Entirely reasonably. And he goes quiet, and stays quiet, and it’s Thursday before he’s himself again, and you think: for God’s sake, it was one night.
Lisa Feldman Barrett showed that people who can slice their feelings finely regulate them better (Barrett et al., 2001). Todd Kashdan’s review adds the detail that ought to stop everyone dead: finer emotional granularity comes with less neural reactivity to rejection (Kashdan et al., 2015). And Matthew Lieberman found the mechanism—naming a feeling damps the amygdala down (Lieberman et al., 2007). The word isn’t decoration. The word is the brake.
He hasn’t got the word, so he hasn’t got the brake. What arrived in that kitchen wasn’t my wife has had a long day. It was an unlabelled crate, delivered at speed, and the only shipping label he had within reach said REJECTED, so that’s the one he stuck on it. Call it sulking if you like. From the inside it’s a man with no vocabulary taking a hit he can’t name, in the one relationship where his entire touch economy is banked.
Is this just an Anglo thing?
Partly, and the interesting part is which part.
The bond-to-area grammar turns up in Japan as well as the UK, so the underlying machinery is human. But Burleson’s team, surveying 849 American college students, found Mexican Americans rated affectionate touch as more culturally acceptable than European Americans did—with acquaintances, and in public, though not with close others or behind closed doors. And personal comfort with affectionate touch ran higher for Mexican American men and European American women than for European American men (Burleson et al., 2019). The Anglo bloke is the outlier. Not men. Anglo men.
And here’s the bit I can’t get out of my head: greater acculturation predicted less comfort. The longer you marinate in it, the worse you get at it. It is the only skill I know of that you acquire by losing it, and somewhere out there is a young bloke getting measurably better at flinching every year and calling it growing up.
One more turn of the screw, because it’s the honest thing to include. Ip and colleagues argue that emotional granularity—the very yardstick I’ve just spent this whole article hitting men with—is a WEIRD invention (Ip et al., 2024). It scores you on mental-state language, while plenty of non-Western vernaculars run emotion through the body instead. Which means a sixty-seven-year-old Australian sitting in Đà Lạt, complaining he has no words for his feelings, is holding up a ruler built by people with precisely the same gap. I don’t think that sinks the argument. I think it means the argument is about a particular kind of man, and I’m looking at him in the mirror.
If he’s autistic or ADHD, double it
Kinnaird’s meta-analysis of fifteen studies puts clinical alexithymia at 49.93% of autistic people against 4.89% of the non-autistic controls in those same studies (Kinnaird et al., 2019). Population estimates for everyone else run nearer 10%, so call it a five-fold gap rather than a ten-fold one and you’re still looking at half of autistic people. So an autistic man carries normative male alexithymia and clinical alexithymia at once: issued the same faulty dictionary twice, by two separate departments, neither of which is speaking to the other. Keep the nuance, though. Shah’s group found it’s the alexithymia, not the autism, that tracks the trouble reading your own body’s signals (Shah et al., 2016).
And this finding is recent: Fukuoka and colleagues, working with seventy autistic and seventy non-autistic Japanese adults, found autistic people permit less social touch across nearly their whole network, and that touch allowance predicts emotional bonding more strongly for them than for anyone else (Fukuoka et al., 2025). Fewer channels open, and more relational weight riding on each one that’s left.
If you’re living with an autistic man: he has fewer drawers than the bloke in the kitchen, and every one of them is carrying more.
A word about RSD, since I’ve just been arguing with myself
Three days ago I published a piece arguing that rejection sensitive dysphoria is real, clinically useful, and running well ahead of its own paperwork: the scoping review that finds it isn’t yet an established research construct (van Asselt et al., 2026) is a verdict on the catalogue rather than on the phenomenon, and the term isn’t in trouble so much as in a queue. I’d like to keep that, partly because I still think it’s right and partly because changing my mind twice in one week is not the reputation I’m chasing.
In that piece I said the honest answer is that the gut punch is part learned and part constitutional, in proportions that shift from person to person, and that the mix quietly decides which tools can reach you. Everything in this article is an itemised entry for the learned column.
Somebody stopped hugging him. Nobody ships with that. It’s an environmental input with a date on it, and Burleson’s acculturation curve means you can stand there and watch it being installed. It doesn’t explain the whole gut punch. Dodson’s constitutional slice is still in there (Dodson et al., 2024), and so is the thirty years of rejecting caregivers that Downey and Feldman (1996) started measuring. But it’s one more thing on the learned side of the ledger that nobody had bothered to count, and it’s a big one. And if a man’s entire touch economy is banked in one relationship, then every ordinary Tuesday no is a margin call.
So what do you actually do
For her: not more sex, and not gritting your teeth through a hand you didn’t want. Just knowing what the hand was asking, so you can answer the question he was actually asking. Not tonight, but come here is a complete sentence. It costs a cup of tea and forty minutes, and it lands on the system he was aiming at all along.
For him, and for me, it’s duller and harder. Get more hands on you that aren’t hers. That’s the entire prescription. There’s no workbook, and I’m sorry, because a workbook would be so much easier than ringing another man and asking for a hug. Every drawer you get open takes weight off the one currently holding everything, and you cannot reason your way out of a constitutional idle but you can absolutely change how many people are allowed to touch your shoulders.
I’m sixty-seven and I still haven’t fully worked out how to be hugged by anyone who isn’t married to me or paid to touch me. My aunts and uncles knew how. They stopped when I turned into a teenage boy, for reasons nobody has ever explained to me, and I’ve spent five decades finding out what it cost.
He isn’t a grub. He’s under-equipped, gently, and by people who loved him, and he’s been holding one drawer shut with his shoulder ever since.
References
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