On Being Groomed by a Monkey

I opened the book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language and read the first paragraph:

To be groomed by a monkey is to experience primordial emotions: the initial frisson of uncertainty in an untested relationship, the gradual surrender to another's avid fingers flickering expertly across bare skin, the light pinching and picking and nibbling of flesh as hands of discovery move in surprise from one freckle to another newly discovered mole. The momentary disconcerting pain of pinched skin gives way imperceptibly to a soothing sense of pleasure, creeping warmly outwards from the centre of atention. You begin to relax into the sheer intensity of the business, ceding deliciously to the ebb and flow of the neural signals that spin their fleeting way from periphery to brain, pitter-pattering their light drumming on the mind's consciousness somewhere in the deep cores of being.

Well, exactly. I was once groomed by a long-tailed macaque (as recounted in my previous post, The Monkey Man) and I know precisely what author Robin Dunbar means.

Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Liverpool in the UK. His book, I understand, makes the argument that as human social groups grew too large to allow person-to-person bonding through grooming, language developed to enable us to maintain intimacy and social cohesion. A good gossip is not, he posits, a waste of time but an absolute essential in our primate lives. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book, and hope that the writing will continue to be as lively and delightful as that first paragraph.

My own modest theory is that the physical side of our primordial desire to be groomed is satisfied these days through receiving massages, facials, manicures, reflexology, reiki -- any 'treatment' that involves another person making us the centre of their attention and touch. I am not going to venture further down this line of speculation into the areas of sex and prostitution, but you are welcome to go there yourself if you like. Discreetly.