Men: To hug or not to hug?

Manhug!
As men rub up against "The Embrace," confusion arises over when, where and how to do it

By Douglas Brown
Denver Post Staff Writer
DenverPost.com

The hug, long reserved for women, celebrating sports victories, and men from other countries, is muscling its way into everyday American Guydom.

Stoic machismo still thrives, but at its heels yaps a touchier, Dr. Phil version of virility. Boundaries are eroding. Defenses are being scaled.

The male hug is complicating everything.

Men accustomed to the automatic and dependable hand clasp accompanied with a brisk up-and-down pump at dinner parties and college reunions, now must preface their greetings or goodbyes with intricate and split-second calculations based on body language, length of friendship and other factors.

Do I shake or do I hug?

Making the right choice matters. If one guy goes for the hug, but the other decides upon a handshake, they might collide. An excruciating dance will follow, as the poor lads work feverishly to determine what to do with their hands, their arms, their bodies.

Memories of the previous disaster will haunt all following encounters. It's possible the fellows will even dread socializing, for fear of the paralyzing hug decision.

"It used to be a handshake. Now everyone wants to give the little bit extra," says Davis Cline, 43, sitting in the sun on the 16th Street Mall with a few of his fellow construction workers on a recent afternoon.

As his colleagues "rated" the attractiveness of passing women, Cline said "there's a time and place" for the male hug.

"I don't know you'd get in front of all of your construction buddies and give hugs," says the Lakewood resident. "Maybe we'd hit each other."

Whether to hug or hit sounds straightforward, but it's tricky, says Jason Tesauro, the author of "The Modern Gentleman," a guide to the protocols of maleness.

Absent any formal rules about the matter, Tesauro says that "if you are in a casual scenario and you are greeting someone, I don't think a hug is out of place. It says you are an extroverted, demonstrative person."

He hugs most of his male friends, he says, although he usually does not hug men upon meeting them for the first time. After that initial handshake, though, the hug could happen any time.

"Saying goodbye is always safer," he says. "You've built up fellowship. It's the difference between a hello kiss on a first date and a good-night kiss."

There's more to the hug decision, however, than an embrace. The next question is: which hug?

With Cline, "a handshake, a pat on the back, that's cool," he says. "But the full-fledged hug thing is out."

So Cline opts for the ubiquitous handshake that has grown a back pat. Other men opt for the embrace, with one arm around the waist, and the other draped over a shoulder: back-clapping tends to accompany this hug.

Former Denver City Councilman Ed Thomas, a big hugger, says rules are few when it comes to the man-to-man embrace.

Just don't take a hug too far, he warns. "If a hug becomes a mug, then you've got problems. You just have to know what that line is."

A hug to Thomas is a "higher level of greeting," one he doesn't bestow upon other guys right away but will unleash with abandon at any point after introductions.

He's an unabashed, eager hugger, but he's no Norm Early, former Denver district attorney and now private businessman.

Early is "the hug captain of the world," Thomas says. "When you get around that guy, he takes the cake. There's no two ways around it."

Soon after becoming district attorney, Early recalls, "I remember when one cop said to another, 'You might as well go over and hug him because he's going to get you sooner or later."'

Early advocates the full-on bear hug. He does not feel compelled to demonstrate his masculinity by slapping his partner's back mid-hug. He does not shrink from the male hug during introductions.

"What often happens when you meet somebody the first time, the other people you already know, so you hug them, and then you say, 'I'm going to have to hug you too,"' he says. Otherwise, he says, if the new guy has his hand out, ready for a firm clench, "what I will normally do is say, 'Hey, I'm a hugger, not a shaker,' and basically take my hug."

Whether, and how, to hug or not falls along cultural lines too. One of them involves a handshake, a mutual tug inward, and a shoulder-bump.

When Duke University professor of black popular culture Mark Anthony Neal is with men, he'll go right in for a certain kind of hug - as long as the other guy also is African-American.

"If I was greeting a white guy, I would probably never go for the hug, it would always immediately be the handshake," says Neal, the author of the just-released book "New Black Man," about black masculinity in the 21st century. "In the case of black males, particularly around my age, 40, it's the hip-hop hug: a handshake, you pull yourselves together, and you bump."

The alternating approach - a handshake for a white guy, a hug for a black guy - is cultural, he says.

"There are shared assumptions when I am greeting an African-American man ... there is a shared experience that connects us," he says.

Hugging between African-American men, though common now, wasn't always so, Neal says.

"For older African-American men, I would be more apt to handshake," he says. "I cannot imagine hugging my father."

At least two professors - Kory Floyd at Arizona State University and Mark Morman at Baylor University in Waco, Texas - have dedicated part of their careers to studying the male hug. The two often collaborate on research.

Floyd, for example, has studied the forms and duration of hugs between men. Rarely do they last much longer than one second. As hugs extend to two seconds or more, men watching the huggers quickly begin assuming the embraces are romantic, instead of just friendly.

Only men too engage in the combination handshake-hug, says Floyd.

"It follows what we call an 'A-frame' configuration; the only body contact is the shoulders," he says. "Men often do it with their handshake in between them, so there is a physical barrier. The third thing is the aggressive patting on the back that comes along with it, which is a very combative gesture. It's a way for men to say, 'I have positive feelings for you, but let's show them in a way that is masculine and gender validating.' All of those things - distance, a barrier, the combative movement - are all stereotypically masculine ways of behaving."

Morman says male fear of hugging other men revolves around homophobia and family.

Some straight guys worry that if they are seen hugging other men, they will be viewed as gay, he says.

And for most men, he says, "fathers are the first role models we have for how to be men, and if Dad isn't hugging and kissing, chances are we aren't either."

While Morman agrees that hugging among American men is spreading, he says it always has occurred in certain contexts.

The more "emotionally charged" the environment, he says, the more freedom men feel to hug one another.

"If you are in the office, generally there is not a lot of emotion there," he says, and hugging remains taboo. But at a wedding or a funeral, or on a battlefield or basketball court, men for a long time have hugged without much hesitation.

Watch ESPN for a few hours, and there's a fair chance you'll encounter lots of big men embracing, especially after a big play or a victory.

Hugging is OK in sports, Floyd says, because a sporting event is "a very gender-validating environment."

On the court or the field, he says, "I'm not worried that my teammate will view (a hug) as a sexual type of behavior."

It doesn't take a touchdown to compel Tony Nalepa, 25, a Denver geophysicist with an Abe Lincoln beard, to embrace a buddy.

"I'll hug my friends," he says, but his love of the hug doesn't extend to the office. "I certainly wouldn't hug my co-workers. I think they would get scared."

To which Eric Mackey, 21, one of his office-mate lunch partners at an outdoor downtown table, let loose a mock sniffle and whimper, saying, "You'll hug your other friends, but not me."

Nalepa's brother is "uncomfortable" with the hug, Nalepa says, "but I hug him anyway. It's more fun that way."

Another lunch partner, Heath Robertson, 37, says he started hugging when he worked in South America, where people "thought I was strange because I didn't hug."

Now, he says, "usually it's the handshake and the pat on the back deal," and it's reserved for family and close friends. He'll hug his martial-arts buddies, he says, "but usually we start grappling."

Robertson's experience in South America illustrates how hugging and handshaking have little to do with gender alone: Contact between males always is yoked to culture.

In "high contact" cultures in southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, men will hug, hold hands, even kiss - "something most American men would consider a very intimate action," Floyd says.

"In a lot of cultures, that kind of high contact - lots of touching, close personal space - isn't necessarily any more intimate than a handshake would be to us," he says.

America qualifies as a "medium-touch" culture, Floyd says, with some Northern European and Asian cultures - in Japan, for example, where people bow to one another instead of touching - registering as "low touch."

In some places, everybody hugs, or everybody bows. In America, it's mixed. The handshake remains the standard greeting, but some guys hug with relish. Others recoil from outstretched male arms. Most men probably sit somewhere in between. It's when two on-the-fence huggers meet that it can get messy.

Will either guy make the first move?

If guys are OK with male hugging but still tentative, for fear of embarrassment, they should bury their worries, writes Michael Flocker, author of "The Metrosexual Guide to Style," in an e-mail.

"If, however, you do get caught going in for the hug and have second thoughts, don't panic," he says. "Just follow through, go for a quick pat on the back, and move on."