Love this!!!

For the last couple of months I have gradually made ASMR videos part of my bedtime routine. I find that watching and fantasizing about touch is soothing and meditative.

I’ve written before about Turkish barbers and ASMR massage videos, and lately I’ve discovered a similar phenomenon coming out of Indonesia.

ASMR touch, by men for men, seems to be quite a phenomenon in those cultures right now. None of the men involved, I’m sure, think of what they’re doing as sexual. In fact, one mega-popular Indonesian channel on YouTube features a father and son exchanging ASMR massages, with a new video coming out every couple days.

I love this emphasis on touch. I think it’s so important, and often so overlooked in American culture. We’re so primed to think of touch as erotic, forgetting that sensual pleasure isn’t or doesn’t have to be the same thing.

But as you point out, that can rob us of many of the pleasures of touch when we DO want touch to be erotic. Touched deprived in general, we forget about it in more ways than one.