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A pox on you Game of Thrones for pushing my summer reading to the margins.  Just look at the great stuff that has been gathering dust in my book-pile.   This is an excerpt from Susan Brownmiller’s work titled “Femininity”.

“Nancy Henley, psychologist and author of Body Politics, has written, “In a way so accepted and so subtle as to be unnoticed even by its practitioners and recipients, males in couples will often literally push a woman everywhere she is to go – the arm from behind, steering around corners, through doorways, into elevators, onto escalators … crossing the street.  It is not necessarily heavy and pushy or physical in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm, in the way of the most confident equestrians with the best-trained horses.”

In this familiar pas de deux, a woman must either consent to be led with a gracious display of good manners or else she must buck and bristle at the touch of the reins.  Femininity encourages the romance of compliance, a willing exchange of motor autonomy and physical balance for the protocols of masculine protection.  Steering and leading are prerogatives of those in command.  Observational studies of who touches whom in a given situation show that superiors feel free to lay an intimate, guiding hand on those with inferior status, but not the reverse.  “The politics of touch,” a concept of Henley’s operates instructively in masculine-feminine relations.”

-Susan Brownmiller, Femininity.  p. 200

Sociological experiment time ladies and gents.   Let’s test the politics of touch in real life and be aware of how your partner interacts with you on the street.  Is the gentle steering there?  The quote mentions that this is close to being an imperceptible phenomena, so hike up your conscious awareness to 11 and observe what happens.

For extra fun why not try and lead your partner, or be lead to see how the role reversal works out?