ozarque has been posting a lot recently about touch-oriented people versus visual-oriented culture. I think there is a danger - ozarque is touch-dominant too - for people of a particular type to cluster together telling each other how we are the best. So I don't think a personal preference for touch makes you better. I think there is a cultural issue though. In this post on touch dominance she says
It has been suggested (eg J.W. Prescott and Douglas Wallace, "Developmental Sociobiology and the Origins of Aggressive Behavior," ) that the more biased a culture is against touch, the more violent it is likely to be. If that hypothesis is valid, a culture that places a high value on violence is going to do everything possible to maintain and nuture its anti-touch bias and keep down the level of acceptance for everything related to nonviolent touch.
and links to a looong anthropological study by a developmental neural-psychologist The Origins of Human Love and Violence which does a massive cross-cultural comparison, to argue that cultures where children are kindly (and obviously, non-sexually) touched by adults, tend to be less aggressive.
In a few cases (for instance the Cheyenne and the Apache) children were warmly treated but adult culture was very violent. In these cases there are restrictions on adult touching.
Anyway, I do think our culture tries to control and prevent touch, and to direct it entirely into a very narrow sexual route. And to emphasise that people must look perfect. Whereas what is really important in a lover is that they feel perfect. I think this is part of why our cultures are violent. I think in cultures even more violent than British (for instance Russia and the US) there is even less touching of children. I see on medical dramas, babies in rows in cots, with the parents behind a glass window. I always find that very disturbing.
