A Boner for Bobo

Bobo is the unwitting subject of my 976-word piece on my close encounter with the touchy-feely kind.
Warning. This piece contains language that may be unsuitable for some readers. Reader discretion is advised.

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The following is the real story, which due to space considerations was almost halved for publication in Now Magazine. The 1,834-word piece had the thesis that the Cuddle Party has no place in today's society.
Warning. This piece contains ideas that may be unsuitable for some readers. Reader discretion is advised.

Bobo does it teddy style

What am I doing here?

In Bobo’s world, everybody loves each other and everybody loves him. You see, Bobo is a 37 cm. tall black and tan stuffed dog, made in China for the purpose of pleasing boys and girls in the most solitary moments of their precious little lives.

My world however isn’t the lovey-dovey one that Bobo was born into. Most days you see more skin than shirt while crawling along the Yonge Street strip, but don’t think about sparing a second glance into a stranger’s eyes; we are a neurotic, manically independent yet terribly lonely society. There are more of us in this world but we are further apart from one another.

Into this world comes the Cuddle Party, the brainchild of a couple New Yorkers who wanted to provide “a space to explore and enjoy touch, nurturing and communication.” Last year Torontonians Cecilia Moorcroft and Barbara Brown went to check it out and were so impressed they flew down to Los Angeles for training, and now host regular Cuddle Parties.

I went to one last month and brought my friend Bobo. The Party takes place in a room behind a storefront just south-west of Spadina and Harbord, where a little laneway leading to the door provides the nervous with smoking and pacing space, while the brave walk right in and are greeted by the facilitators.

"this ain’t a night for scoring"
Inside were people changing into pyjamas and getting comfortable on mats. After a short wait we gathered into a Welcome Circle (think ice-breakers) where the first exercise is having a request for a kiss rejected with an unqualified “no.” It’s the first of several exercises done to teach you the rules, including the fact that this ain’t a night for scoring but for initiating and receiving non-sexual intimacy, that it is ok to say no to anything outside your comfort zone, and that this is a safe space where a no, or even a maybe, definitely means no.

During the Welcome Circle Bobo sat content on my lap, while I sat in a circle of 16 people. The group cannot be defined. Their ages ranged from 24 to 62, and included some of the most attractive and youngest-looking 30ish and 40ish people in the city.

One of these was Grace, a North York customer sales rep who attended the Party with her husband Dan because she wanted a safe space to test the edges of her intimacy comfort zone, a common theme among the participants. She says she felt more confident that her husband of 3 years took part as well because such exercises help establish (or re-establish) boundaries in a relationship. “It teaches you to respect someone when they say yes and when they say no. When you’re in a relationship for a while you sort of lose that perception of what means no and what means yes.”

Grace says people also lose sight of the pleasures of platonic intimacy. This could be physical like the Cuddle Party, she says, but also emotional, which drew her to the Party. “Intimacy is about being vulnerable, being honest, being able to expose your inadequacies and intimacies in a safe place. Too many people think that intimacy has to be sexual and it’s not.”

It’s painfully clear that people don’t understand platonic intimacy and suppress their anxieties. Sex powers much of the advertising industry, the entertainment industry, and dominated the term of a former U.S. presidency. But this world also preaches the perils of intimacy. Arm brushes, smiles, second glances are taboo in our trams. We here in Toronto are not touch-feely just for touch-feely sake, be it physically, emotionally, or even just in passing by. Not I, not the people I ride with on the 506 streetcar every morning, not the female who stayed on the sidelines for most of the Cuddle Party, and was quite comfortable doing so.


Breathe in, breathe out.

Antonio Calcagno teaches a theory-intensive Philosophy of Love and Sex course at Ryerson (no hands-on learning here folks) and says this is because society shoehorns us into a vicious contradiction in individual values.

“There’s something peculiar (about our society) about what it is to be an individual, not to want to have to need anyone but at the same time you do need someone. I mean the culture tells you that you are an individual and that you are independent and that you are free – that you should get what you want and that you are entitled to everything – but that creates a false perception that you don’t need anything so there is a conflict.”

For example, recent Leger Marketing figures shows would be very happy being single
even as Cuddle Parties become the next mainstream feel-good medium, like online dating, swinging services and quick-date parties. In fact, a Cuddle Party will be part of an upcoming episode of CSI: New York.

If this is a bad thing, consider that it’s the right thing, at least according to Richard Harris’s 2004 book Creeping Conformity, a study into the rise of suburbia in Canada in the first half of the 20th century. In it, he writes that sociologist Louis Wirth identified way back in the 1930s that “in urban areas, especially in the largest centres, people see each other for the most part as strangers: the definite urban experience is that of anonymity.”

“Is intimacy something you desire to persist?”
As sad as this may sound, this is the world I grew up in, and has been molded to fit this way. The city is filled with dead-eyed souls wandering the streets in the increasingly busier beehive, as intimacy is left behind. With this in mind I ask Calcagno if there is still a point to intimacy in this world. He says it’s not a matter of intimacy’s place in the world, but a question of intimacy’s place in my world. “Is intimacy something you desire to persist?” he asks.

Absolutely, I say, just like world peace.

He takes my cynicism in stride by reverting to Darwinism to make his point.

“I think (intimacy) is a fundamental human need. We have moved away from it, we have created a kind of mechanism to say we don’t need it, but you cannot undo a few thousand years of human evolution.”


Let me stay right here.

What my world has evolved into is one where people do equate physical contact with sexual activity. During the Welcome Circle we discuss the natural but icky subject that still baffles too many people: arousal, and erections in particular. As Moorcroft says, people are too scared to talk about it so when the subject comes up, especially in Cuddle Parties, too many people don’t know how to deal with it.

“There’s a fear that (arousal) will happen, and that it will be embarrassing and you don’t know what they will do about it.” There’s plenty you can do, she says, including stepping off the cuddle mat, or taking a breather elsewhere. Or, if you are like me, just back your bum away from the spooning to avoid dry-humping, a no-no during this evening.

This misconception is what Moorcroft says leads to the critical perception of Cuddle Parties, that it is attended by horny lonely losers, and blames this on movies that show too much sex and not enough intimacy. “Watch a movie to see the amount of time it takes for (people) to go from making out to totally naked.”

That leaves people in the dark about this odd nature of cuddling. Most of my friends raised their eyebrows at the prospect of being intimate with strangers. I myself wasn’t sure what the party entails. After all, if you grew up in my world, without knowing intimacy and cuddling in a non-sexual way, how do you know how to do it and do it right?


I smell your Timotei.

Love and sex professor Calcagno suggest that part of the problem stems from mass media, which muddles intimacy to the point where you don’t know what it is. “They want to be your inner life, so the technologies and media, they want to impact your mind. T.V. really is so seductive because it really is like your picture, your consciousness, but at the same time the intimacy it presents is a fantasy so at the same time very intimate but at the same time very deceptive so you have a constant tension.”

In an email Mark Federman, chief strategist at the U of T’s McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, disagrees.

“The mass media (and, in fact, any medium) is not ‘about’ intimacy, but rather the nature of the effects that emerge from them. A medium changes its effects over time, as we change in response to the media we have created…

“Television is isolating, but that is an effect (message) of television as a hot medium. It fragments, isolates and hypnotizes. It is not seductive in the sense of appeal, but rather it induces a state of hypnotic trance. If people watch programs that show particular lifestyles, they may be influenced by those images as a sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”

"the key to having cuddling fun is the same as oral fun: use the hands baby... use the hands"
Regardless, the point remains that we do not know how to cuddle, hence the commoditization of it. For a sliding scale of $25 to $35 you get 2.5 hours of tug-less rubbing fun. As I discovered, the key to having cuddling fun is the same as oral fun: use the hands baby… use the hands. If you’ve ever cooed to a warm tongue lapping at your genitilia you know that half the fun is in the palms of the hands as they glide around the other, more sensual parts of your body. Cuddling is the same, except of course for the tongue.

Back at my Cuddle Party I was spooning an older woman while giving her a back massage. When I looked up from a back massage that I was giving a woman I found him in the clutches of a man at the head of an 8-person spoon line. The bugger was getting more action that I was.

Nonetheless my step into Bobo’s world was the most memorable, pleasurable, non-sexual experience of my life. It was intensely satisfying and to this day I get thrills up my spine thinking of it.

Even the non-sexual aspect of it was just as Moorcroft suggested. I came in thinking I would leave a horny rabbit, but after the party, as I peeled off my pre-cum – stained underwear, I knew there was no need to finish the job. As I stepped back into the real world and onto Harbord, I experienced the only O of the night, the U of T one hanging over the middle of the road.

I carried my thrill home with me that night and woke up the next morning with a vow to give a little more of my space to others. But when a rushed man blocked my arm with his briefcase as I went past the College Station ticket booth, I realized that I had indeed left Bobo’s world and returned into mine. I was back in Toronto.