ASMR Intimacy and Touch during the COVID-19 Era

A first draft of a column I’m writing that combines a few projects I’m using to expand upon my critical media ecological framework that I debuted in my dissertation project.

Before COVID-19, for years, we heard that the United States was experiencing a "sex apocalypse". For this reason, in my dissertation I explored sociosexually violent and increasingly algorithmic "syncing issues" of this era's U.S. landscape. In doing so, I found that, for decades, researchers like Field (2014) innervated the health harm(s) of touch hunger. Left untreated, touch starvation went endemic. Now, as people pretend COVID-19 is over, these two issues in tandem are especially concerning for immunocompromised folks in the envirusment (environment + virus = envirusment).

Non-coincidentally, as also shown recently, these prior heartbreaks and self-realizations by and about feminine presenting millennial and Gen Z folks are taking place in algorithmic spaces. After following this ongoing trend, I argued that we are in the midst of a contagiously unsurprising shift: an increase in sociosexual expectations for cismen.

See also: the alleged rise in lonely single men, red/black-pillers, MGTOW, proud boys, and other all far right fascist backlashes — simultaneously — while mainstream pornographies hyper-fixate on mostly cisheteronormative (cisgender and heterosexual) “step-family” themed incest, “free use” fetishes (where mostly AFAB [assigned female at birth] objectified bodies are available on demand for AMAB [assigned male at birth] subjects) (Pornhub.com, 2022), and biomimetic sex tech (designed to replicate human touch and technique) all continue to capitalize on hundreds of years of no comprehensive sex ed, numerous underreported/uncriminalized violence(s), and intimacy gaps; culminating in what I’ve called the sexually violent U.S ecology.

Additionally, I found that many femmes are experiencing a post-Roe v. Wade present-COVID-19 silver-lining: late-in-life realized queerness and neurodivergence(s). To tingle new nerves, I update these temporally distanced dissertation discussions, provocatively unmasking and putting them into close conversation with another distanced intimacy: the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) phenomena.

For those who are unaware, the mostly feminine-presenting ASMRartist’s (those who create ASMR) content has existed for over a decade (Keiles, 2019). ASMR is audio-visual content that elicit a kind of “brain orgasm” (Vanbuskirk, 2021) sought by users online. This should be understood in ecological tandem with other phenomena of a different, but related ilk to ASMR “viewer-listener” content (Klausen, 2021a) like “the girlfriend experience,” which, in recent years, has also grown in popularity (Sales, 2016).

There are numerous genres of this type of titillating content called “triggers”. To name a few, there is: whispering, tapping, personal attention, role plays, eye contact, massage, glue sticks, hair play, humming, chewing (think: Mukbangs [food binge eating]), light show, shaving bars of soap, paper, scratching, air sounds, crisp/squishing, caressing, crunching, and clicking, [NebraskaMed.com, 2022]), all of which are social, and none of which are necessarily sensual; triggering a euphoric response, often felt most around the head and neck areas (Keiles, 2019).

Notably, Mooney & Klein (2016) reported that a few years before the COVID-19 era even began there were, “more searches for ‘ASMR’ than the keywords ‘candy’ or ‘chocolate’,” searches which peaked at night when folks were trying to relax and drift to sleep. Now, since C19, there have been at least 2.3 million Google searches for this content, per month (Vanbuskirk, 2021), as well as (now, well-over) 5.2 million ASMR videos on YouTube (Mooney & Klein, 2016).

To add fuel to this already burning relational-ecological trash fire, some psychologists have suggested that those with higher anxiety and/or with “high trait neuroticism” (obsessive thinking, anxiety, distress, dysfunction, etc.) [a term removed from recent DSM-5 revisions]) benefit more from ASMR (Pugle, 2022; Styx, 2022).

I say this with extreme hesitancy knowing that, historically, terms like these, when left profitably decontextualized often blame individuals, instead of structural corruptions. This act (labeling one “neurotic”) flattens pervasive forms of white supremacy, sanism, eugenics, and other infantilizing, dehumanizing, and ostracizing formally stigmatizing Dx terms.

Further dissecting this inequitably designed U.S. body politic, in my work, I have made the overarching argument that there has been a colonially founded, neoliberal capitalist funded, “mechanization of humans”.

Namely, our bodies have been cast as machines, sacrificing the heart at the expense of the mind, prioritizing logic over emotion, and profit over people (Bowen, 2022). As I detailed, this dehumanizingly naturalized view and description (and the discourse(s), histographies, and rhetorics which bore them), have long been normalized in medical, technology, and other scholarly and pop culture literatures, permeating our mediated psyches.

Anatomically, I argue that my critical media ecological approach further illuminates recent critical research, breaking down the young white cismale medical body to highlight other breakthroughs about the (also newly realized) overlap of ongoing self-realized gender fluidity, other queernesses, and long overdue autism acceptance and destigmatization (Sparrow, 2020).

For instance, parodically, in my dissertation project in one passage about biased Dx criteria, I explicated that “like fish to water, these unintelligible pollutants, since the origin of a patriarchal civilization (or menaissance), have been racist, sexist, classist, reifying discriminations. Therefore, they interact, secreting forms of naturalized ecological catastrophes” (Bowen, 2021).

In other words, if we aim to comprehensively diagnosis this sick system and begin treating its sociohistorically and politically bankrupt -- gaping wound -- with liberatory, regenerative, and honest critique, this must also be historicized in the overall colonially capitalist background of the “field” (awful land-owning language, rooted in colonial naturalisms) of psychology itself, that is only more recently being critiqued and expanded to remedy its harms (Washington, 2008).

Beyond understandable and worrisome public skepticism, anti-intellectualism, discussions of the authority gap (2022), and expansions of the Enlightenment (rich, able-bodied, White cismale) canons — for those of us committed to this work -- as detailed here — we have A LOT to treat.

Furthermore, in the current late-stage neoliberal capitalist envirusment age of anxiety, it has been well-documented that neoliberal capitalists are willing to appropriate, co-opt, and sell us practices of McMindfulness: secularized individual solutions, diverting from deliberately designed exploitations and structural inequities (Purser, 2019). You read that right, the same nation providing no comprehensive sexual education since its origin, is now throwing a bunch more individually useless wrenches into its -- already violent -- intimate rings for everyone.

Thus, despite the mental, emotional, and physiological benefits of ASMR (DiSalvo, 2018; Poerio, Blakey, Hostler & Veltri, 2018) it might be another hollow McMindfulness. And concurrently, it might still fill our inequitable, sickening, disabling, and deadly intimacy gaps.

Viscerally, the culturally unorthodox intimacy of the ASMR experience likely ends up initially repulsing the same folks who often likely are the most socialized into sociosexual shame and touch starved. Their internalized sense of bodily shame hits first, causing discomfort.

After taking the body politic's temperature over this ongoing pandemic (namely, for all aforementioned reasons [and more!]), I echo those who amplify that audio intimacies are filling envirusment intimacy gaps. For example, NYT Magazine writer, Keiles (2019) diagnosed it well:

Intimacy is a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk (para. 34).

In the sociosexually violent ecology, it makes sense ASMR intimacies are in high demand. To further triangulate this desire, I critically extend Miroshnichenko’s (2014) insight(s) on “man as media,” further contextualizing them in what Sharma (2020) called a “machinelike” society. In other words, my critical media ecological approach subversively brings attention to ways humans have served as “media” in our society building processes, adding to media ecology a long overdue system’s update. For those of you unfamiliar, media ecologists study the ways technologies, when introduced into a society, influence our entire environments, altering our lives. Since 2019, other critical colleagues and I have paved a critical wave of this approach.

To be frank, one of my key guiding aims in applying this timely and timeless approach has been to spread the word that we need to feel/hear/see – as much as humanly possible, and now more than ever, being that we’re most connected -- that narrow Enlightenment bodied canon (read: rich able-bodied White cismale humans) who were allowed to act as media in society building processes have Never been Objective. Also, to remind anyone that comes in contact with I, or my work, that we have never seen what liberatory worlds are possible – OR -- a world where everyone has been genuinely seen/treated as fully human, let alone educated, and/or thriving.

For example, as I anticipatorily explored within my dissertation, during the last few years (especially, Black and Brown) millennial and Gen Z AFAB folks have made numerous life-changing self-realizations. Despite algorithmic racisms, sexisms, and ableisms (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018; Russell, 2020), many younger femmes are diverging from cisheteronormative identity and relational expectations; embracing queerer gender fluidities and open relationships.

This relates to ASMR because, being that, again, most ASMR artists are femme, it could be argued as a rather sapphic, and otherwise digitally intimate experience.

Additionally, countless folks are realizing they were also undiagnosed neurodivergent (due to failures of traditionally biased neurotypical diagnosticians and their Un-universalizable diagnostic criteria). And, as Maxfield Sparrow (2020) highlighted in Spectrums, these fluidities often do overlap. Autistic and ADHD folks, especially, also seek out and/or are extra sensitive to audio content.

I argue that this is why, first and foremost, that it is of the -- utmost importance -- we acknowledge that our inequitable institutions (religious, legal, political, educational, digital, algorithmic, virtual, etc.) have always acted as media. That all discriminatory extensions of humans act as media. And that this is why, we find evidence demonstrating sexually violent U.S. (and, arguably wider, unique global) ecologies everywhere.

This is why in this sickening, disabling, violent, and deadly era, it is apparently more attractive than ever before for folks to seek out untouching touch.

However, to highlight the also biased phenomena of ASMR, we know that both on YouTube and on TikTok, viral ASMR artists are predominantly White femmes that are seen as more nurturing than other creators who experience other algorithmic oppressions. Using a critical media ecological sensibility, we see that not even ASMR is safe from biases.

Although correlation is not causation, I don’t believe that the recent envirusment era wave of lost neurodivergent and/or queer femme folks self-realizations — happening simultaneously — with a rise in ASMR is a coincidence. Everything is connected, and I believe that — as we continue to unmask cisheterosexisms and neurosupremacies alike, returning to our bodies — that the untouching touch of ASMR might help us.

And this is why, using all tools at our disposal, we need to ask ourselves -- no matter what the technologies: Who were they designed by? For what purposes? To who’s benefit? And, to who’s detriment? And in doing so, we must center the voices of historically and intentionally targeted marginalized users of these digital and algorithmic spaces, who most aptly gleam their biases.

If you remember nothing else from this essay, keep in mind that despite allegedly universalized claims, U.S. access has never been evenly distributed – EvEr – not even once. Relatedly, it is imperative that in the algorithmic age we remember that any media has capacity to be credible or not, while also remembering that time and space have been abstractly designed into quantitative metrics to control our lives, subjecting each of us in differently inequitable ways this age reveals.

With all this said, whether you hear yourself in the critical voices that inspired me (or the little whisper in your head), or if reading this tingled your brain just the right way, I need you to let it radiate through you that binaries have always been harmfully inhumane BS. Neuro-logically and politically, autism is another diversely expressed lived experience, among the numerous others that make up what Judy Singer (2017) has called neurodiversity.

By using ASMR as a resounding example in this brief essay, I have done my best from my Dr. bird’s eye view to show how critical media ecology usefully unmasks both physical and algorithmic viral happenings in our present-COVID-19 envirusment, revealing both Enlighteningly ableist challenges and inextinguishably human opportunities in this profitably contagious, mass disabling, deadly era.

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