On the trail of the Free Hugs founder. It is a story of how, eight years ago, a man from Sydney set out to bring us all a little bit closer and founded the Free Hugs movement. It is a story of. Feb 17, 2016 This past December I spent an unseasonably balmy Sunday afternoon on The National Mall in Washington D.C. Giving out Free Hugs with three friends. For those who are not familiar with it, Free Hugs is a social movement that began in Australia in 2004 by a man who had been feeling depressed and lonely. Sometimes, a hug is all what we need. Free hugs is a real life controversial story of Juan Mann, a man whose sole mission was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives. In this age of social disconnectivity and lack of human contact, the effects of the Free Hugs campaign became phenomenal. Hugs Are Nice: This new organization aims to bring together everyone involved in the free hugs movement so they can help connect those who need a hug with those who are offering them. In addition to giving out free hugs wherever they go, they are actively seeking out individuals and groups that believe in the healing power of free hugs. I provided free hugs to runners as encouragement along the route. This simple act made national news headlines and lifted runners spirits. Hugs produced smiles and gave runners an extra boost as they ran.” After the 2014 Boston Marathon Hugs video hit YouTube, Nwadike became a viral sensation.
Who is Juan Mann?[edit]
The article makes several mentions of him, but it never says who he is. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.118.89.72 (talk) 11:06, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
South Korea[edit]
I was doing a google search for Free Hugs and came across a lot of stuff from South Korea. Does anyone know if it's particularly big over there?
I did come across a youtube video from Korea with over 1 million views. IT was identical to Mann's video, except of course in Korea. Similiar sign, same song, etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.192.223.240 (talk) 21:22, August 24, 2007 (UTC)
Random vs. Free[edit]
Even if just for completeness sake, didn't this page ought to mention the Random Huggers campaign? Either that or Random Huggers ought to have their own separate page on Wikipedia. The Random Huggers campaign has been going for several years now and has attracted a significant level of media attention. [1]Notreallyrelevant 17:38, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone mind if I just go ahead an add a reference to Random Huggers? RandomHuggers.com - probably to the external links list. Notreallyrelevant 06:48, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
I think Random is good too.but what do you base it upon? every 3rd person you see you see you hug? or use a random number generator from 1-10. I will hug the 7th person, the the 2nd, then the 4th after that? What if someone doesn't want a hug? I think Free is better in most cases. 13:24, 20 September 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.49.190.38 (talk)
post-speedy-recovery commentary[edit]
Interesting phenomenon here; you've got a YouTube video with something like 400k Ghits (350 unique), but they're mostly blogs and journals and the like. No official website for the 'campaign' that I can see, but there's a lot of Signal-to-noise ratio problems in Googling the term. And Juan Mann is obviously a pseudonym, which makes sourcing even harder. -- nae'blis 16:10, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
more data[edit]
But where does it come from? http://www.see.com.au/blog/archives/2006/09/free_hugs.html has an extensive background interview with both Juan Mann and Shimon Moore, but doesn't attribute it to anyplace I can cite, so I can't include it right now. -- nae'blis 18:30, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Also, what station is the woman in the red suit (probably a reporter) from in the main video? -- nae'blis 18:37, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
photo requested[edit]
According to the above blog post, JM is still doing this 'every Thursday'. Can someone from Sydney get a picture for the article? -- nae'blis 18:30, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Should we link to this?[edit]
free hugs have a strong conceptual link with the Transactional Analysis concept of inconditional postive strokes. I suggest to put a link to : http://www.claudesteiner.com/fuzzy.htm Any significant objection to this ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.166.19.234 (talk) 13:51, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Should we link to http://free-hugs.com ? An anon IP editor added it today. It doesn't seem to be affiliated with the original campaign and sells a bunch of merchandise. This looks like an opportunistic commercialisation effort rather than something that's actually relevant. I'd say we shouldn't link it. What do others think? (Until we come to a collective decision everyone likes, I've removed it from the article.) — Saxifrage✎ 00:12, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
I just removed http://freehugs.com.cn (that's the China TLD). This discussion should probably cover all links to domains that aim to be 'official sounding', not just free-hugs.com. — Saxifrage✎ 19:11, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
For accuracy, you should note that Free Hugs started in 2001, long before Juan Mann made the video. Guess what? It started with a guy and a sign. It's all on the free-hugs.com website which has the video to prove it.
I was including myspace, tribe, and youtube links - which I believe are relevant - for one: they document the various discussions going on. Two: they are legitimate networking hubs, and Three: Just so long as you have the main active sites for promoting freehugs, there is nothing wrong with it. I would like to hear from the person who keeps deleting them. I would like to hear why these 3 points arent relevant to have on this wiki - Eric
I've just removed http://www.abrazosgratis.org from the page. Everyone and their dog seems to want to be the 'official' site of Free Hugs. — Saxifrage✎ 06:48, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
Saxifrage, freehugscampaign.org and freehelpcampaign.org are official sites for the Free Hugs Campaign founded by the original 'Juan Mann'. They were mentioned specifically in his second video on YouTube and I can verify it is indeed the original 'Juan Mann' who founded them. -Kermitron 18:56, 12 November 2006 (AEST)
Wikipedia:External_links says: 'An article about any organization, person, web site, or other entity should link to that entity's official site, if there is one.' What about a movement which, as in this case, has no (and perhaps can have no) 'official' organization? If we provide no links to relevant websites of informal movements, then aren't we introducing a bias in favor of formal, organized activities? Movements with official organizations regularly get dozens of links, it seems to me like we could allow a few here. --John_Abbe 06:14, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm not talking about Wikipedia-as-links-directory (yet, but if you want to trim links directories, see Democratic Party (United States) or Republican Party (United States)). What i am pointing out is an apparent flaw in the guidelines: a bias toward organized, formalized activities. Why should we allow movements with formal organizations to get (even short) link lists, and not allow the same for movements without formal organizations?. Does anyone share this concern, or have an explanation about it from some perspective i'm missing? Note that since i am questioning the guidelines themselves, simply quoting them back is tautological. We do not serve the guidelines, we make the guidelines to serve us. --John_Abbe 06:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I've seen that http://abrazosgratis.org was deleted by Saxifrage. I think it should be added in the section 'Other countries', since in that page are beeing organisated the most free hugs in Spain. It doesn't pretend to be the official free-hugs page. Is the proposition alright for you?--83.40.237.10 17:13, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
New Campaigns to be added ? Juan Mann has started the 'Free Kidney campaign'. He plans to give his kidney away to someone who neds it more than he does. Miroj (talk) 12:14, 13 October 2008 (UTC) Intentions section[edit]
I tagged this section with {{original research}} not because I think it necessarily is and should be removed, but because it really does need references to be in the article. Normally this kind of thing would just be removed on-sight as original research, but Free Hugs has gotten enough attention that something like this might be documented somewhere. — Saxifrage✎ 23:57, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm the one who put in the intentions.The reason is, is that there will be a lot of people reading the site wishing to do it themselves in their own city.Without some grand..ideas on how to conduct yourselves, this anarchistic-freehugging can be taken advantage of for own means ie groping people.To me, that cheapens the movement, and leads towards people not touching others as much.Why have opportunists ruin what is a great energy?So I would request we have an intention list up. Edit it for sure, add ideas, but taking it down? HmmmmBut hey, I'm not hooked to this. Things will happen anyway..sigh..Eric [email protected]
I'm a big meanie[edit]
I cut several references from the Publicity section that were not backed up by citations. I left a few others that were at least specific enough to be tracked down easily, but the following need more detail/references. Remember that YouTube is not generally a reliable source, although the original video is a bit of an exception. -- nae'blis 18:22, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Excised material[edit]
Additional cut entry[edit]
I'm a big meanie followup[edit]
Is it REALLY necessary to include EVERY event that is cited by a local paper? I understand the inclusion of international spots, but every mall event seems a bit overdone. I would like to clean up the article and expand the international section, but I wanted some feedback before I aggressively started to cut and paste.--TravelinSista (talk) 02:05, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
Picture added[edit]
I have added a snapshot I took in august 2004 in Sydney's CBD. BTW, written sources (i.e., the Morning Herald articles) only prove free hugs were happening aroung november, so mentioning 'august' looks like 'an original research'; yet it is quite reliable because I only had one honeymoon insofar :-). Of course, if you want to get rid of the 'august' indication as 'unreliable', I won't take it personally. In any case, notice that the sign in the pic looks like exatly the same as that in the video. At the time, there was a small bunch of youngsters taking turns in holding the sign and hugging people, they were wearing school uniforms. I'm not sure what street was that, I only know it was in Sydney's CBD (might actually be Peet Street Mall). Perhaps a Sydney inhabitant might tell for sure based on the pavement and the shop signs behind the girl. Moongateclimber 04:23, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Juan Mann is still giving out Free Huggs, usually in in Pitt Street Mall in the CBD, most Thursdays (except if it's raining). I got my Free Hug last Thursday! Yes that pic appears to be Pitt Street Mall. He chalked up his fourth anniversary this month. Therin of Andor (talk) 07:47, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
free-hugs.com[edit]
I've removed the following from the article:
The guy at free-hugs.com has been trying to change this article to say that he started it all for a while. Since there is no reference for this except his own website (which is therefore not a reliable source) this can't go in the article. Can anyone dig up an independent source that can confirm this claim to fame?
Apart from the lack of source to the claim, this article is about the current phenomenon which was kicked off by 'Juan Mann', so just because someone else had the idea first doesn't mean it deserves primary mention in the article. If we find a source that confirms that Hunter thought of it first, then we should mention that this isn't the first time the idea has come up. However, this article should still be primarily about documenting the current phenomenon and its beginning. Putting the Hunter information first or representing it as the origin without talking about the origin of the current phenomenon would be misleading and disinformative for our readers. — Saxifrage✎ 20:06, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Probably archive.org is reliable?http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.free-hugs.comShows that free-hugs.com was up at least in May 2004. If you browse archived pages, you can see it was the same idea. At least it should be mentioned.83.237.166.193 05:27, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Well I guess http://freehugscampaign.org/ is the official home page, dont you think so?
Free Help Campaign[edit]
I was looking through the external links for this article and I have noticed that the Free Help Campaign link does not appear to be working anymore. I wanted to bring this up before I removed it from the page because maybe it is just a problem on my end or a temporary problem.Reazonozaer 14:31, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
Chile[edit]
There's a similar campaign in Chilevisit [[2]] and add it to the links
Wikimedia Commons[edit]i corrected the 'international free hugs day' part[edit]
as you can see from the history.why? because the international free hugs day is not on a determined day of the year (07/07), but on a recurrence (first weekend after 30th june).
My proof is
let's make International Free Hugs Day the first weekend after the 30th of June, every year.
a quote from a thread made by the original juan mann on the official forum of the campaign.Hope i explained correctly and completely what i've done and why.cheers--81.208.74.182 22:27, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
Links toward Youtube video[edit]
Hello, This campaign being a video campaign I think it may be good to put links toward the Youtube's videos. I propose the following format since it's really consise (use one line), link toward videos of the campaign (the core of the article), links are not promoting any local website, they simply use youtube, the place where all started (-> neutral). I think we need one from each major country and if possible one from each continent (so about 5 to 10), no more. Construction software free.
Do you agree with this add ?:
Videos by country : Sydney ; New-York ; Korea ; Peru ; etc.
Yug(talk) 13:23, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Dave Matthews Band video[edit]
There's no mention in the article of the video for the Dave Matthews Band song 'Everyday,' but it came out in 2002, which means it predates Juan Mann's campaign by two years, and is clearly the same idea. Worth including?Charolastra charolo (talk) 18:37, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
Official Website offline???[edit]
I have changed the article to reflect the fact that the freehugscampaign.org website is currently offline! Does anyone know why this site is offline or if it will ever be coming back??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.73.76.48 (talk) 21:06, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Site is back up, updated article accordingly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.73.76.48 (talk) 20:04, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Huh?[edit]
Who is Juan Mann and what is his importance? This article is frequently incomprehensible. --S.dedalus (talk) 02:09, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
First attempt at a clean-up, article still has weaknesses[edit]
I've just completed a solid attempt at a clean-up. Nothing unreferenced was kept (the article was littered with a lot of 'we had a free hugs day and we hugged 200 people' nonsense) and I've tried to create a meaningful narrative of how the campaign came about. I've greatly improved the article's explanation of who Juan Mann is.
However the article is still weak at explaining how the movement spread to other countries and what level of organisation exists around it. I'll come back to it when I have time, or someone else can research and improve the article. Manning (talk) 13:11, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
Encyclopedic how?[edit]
For all the crap that Wikipedia minions delete for not being noteworthy or encyclopedic, this tripe merits inclusion? Are you friggin' kidding? 98.232.219.86 (talk) 13:25, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
Mumbai[edit]
Edit made at end of June added 'in Mumbai started by Vinit Mehta' shortly before lifeisdelightful.com ref, but Vinit is not mentioned in the ref. Remove that addition? There a ref saying the song was inspired by Free Hugs in Mumbai? --EarthFurst (talk) 04:54, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
'In its present form'[edit]
I could swear I had seen some people doing this with 'Free Hugs' signs well before 2004. Is there any earlier information on where this may have initially started?
203.131.210.82 (talk) 05:46, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
Juan Mann's retirement[edit]
I'm kind of a wikipedia noob, anyone want to tell me how to add this link to the references?
http://juanmann.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/now-hiring-the-next-juan/ Kermitron History[edit]
I watched Rude Tube on channel 4 and they said that free hugs started when the founder got back from somewhere (forgot) and had no one to greet him in the airport.
Which version is corrct?--Sghfdhdfghdfgfd (talk) 13:26, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
So some perv wanted some groping action, and others did too. Big deal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.243.1.25 (talk) 00:20, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
Juan Mann's website[edit]
It looks like the original Juan Mann is back, this site should be included as it seems a relevant resource.
Maerstk74 (talk) 02:53, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
duration of hug[edit]
No mention is made of the duration of the average 'official' hug in seconds.Three seconds might not feel meaningful, and in fact perhaps leave the person being hugged feeling worse than before -- 'they've even depersonalized hugging. What will they depersonalize next?'One would think there might be interest in an alternative 'minimum 5 minute hug' movement.Jidanni (talk) 01:27, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
Australian Jamboree 2004[edit]
I was at AJ2004, which was several months before Juann's campaign started, and there were free huggers there. I think the random who hugged him probably knew someone at Jamboree or went themself; unfortunately, I can't find any sources to prove this. If anyone has any issues of 'K.E.V.I.N', the newspaper published for the Jamboree, could they write it into the article and reference it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 175.38.209.13 (talk) 10:55, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
Benilde High School Bansktown in Sydney[edit]
Juan Mann is Peter Goodeman, a graduate of Benilde Bankstown in Sydney Australia year 2000. The school was amalgamated with Bankstown De La Salle in 2001. Pete was a known rebel in his time at that school but always pranked in good spirit.
He is currently living in Newcastle NSW. A seaside area 2 hours drive north of Sydney.
Offshoots and hijackings[edit]
Wherever there is a popular movement that is not allied to one of the powers-that-be, there are those who would hijack its energy for their own purposes. I just walked in from the UCSB commons where a religious campaign was holding a sign 'free hugs', offering to pray for the person as soon as they were within their arms, and then handing them religious literature.
The hijacking may be a result of the institutions of oppression which cause our initial separation identifying themselves with the movement: http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=D6G7PNNX Here this link suggests that the free-hugs campaign is a Christian movement. Which it wasn't, isn't, and never will be. 128.111.95.39 (talk) 20:17, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Is this appropriate to add at the end of the listing for Publicity and Expansion[edit]
Good Afternoon :-)This is my first contribution to Wikipedia, so I'm a little wet behind the ears.
I would like to add the following information to the Publicity and Expansion section of the Free Hugs Campaign entry. I saw that you need to clear this kind of entry with a concensus, so let me know what you think. Thank you. Please let me know if you intend to add this yourself, or if I am expected to do it. :-) Have a great day, and get 12 hugs for good health today. --Donna Pirnat
Free Hugs Vienna in the External References[edit]
I wonder whether other editors would like to add the following website to the EXTERNAL REFERENCES page of FREE HUGS CAMPAIGN. The FREE HUGS VIENNA website is an organized group carrying the FREE HUGS message in VIENNA, AUSTRIA and even ABROAD. The official page is: FREE HUGS VIENNAAvohana (talk) 09:56, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
External links modified[edit]
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Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Free_Hugs_Campaign&oldid=850861799'
The man in front of me has fear in his eyes. Fear, suspicion, and something else, something more subtle, that I realise after a few seconds is pity. It is the evening rush hour in London and I am standing in the middle of Carnaby Street holding aloft a placard that reads: 'Free Hugs'. My mission is simply to reach out to strangers, clasp them close and make them feel better about their day – no strings attached. But this man isn't convinced.
'What are you selling?' he asks.
'Nothing,' I explain. 'We're just offering hugs to people. For free.'
The man slips his iPhone out of his jacket pocket and takes a photo, as if he cannot quite believe what he is seeing. I open my arms in what I hope is a welcoming, earth-motherly fashion. I remember what I've been told in the pre-hugs briefing by the group co-ordinator: smile, but not so much that you look psychotic, and don't take offence if someone doesn't want to hug you back. I wait. The man looks uneasy, a bit embarrassed and then, unexpectedly, his face breaks into a smile.
He hugs me. And although I've been secretly dreading the moment when I'll have to engage in a surprisingly intimate act with a stranger who might have all manner of personal hygiene problems, I discover that it's a nice feeling. We hold each other for a moment, then release. We exchange smiles and I watch as he makes his way back down the street. I like to think there is a certain lightness in his step that wasn't there before, but it's probably just that he's walking more quickly in order to get away from the crazy woman with the 'Free Hugs' placard.
The story of how I got to be here, pressing flesh with random pedestrians, is an intriguing one. It is a story of how, eight years ago, a man from Sydney set out to bring us all a little bit closer and founded the Free Hugs movement. It is a story of how the idea caught hold of people's imaginations across the globe and made him famous. It is a story of how he set out to spread free love but ended up in a battle of bitter recrimination over money. And it is a story, ultimately, about how you can start with the best of intentions and yet end up disillusioned.
In June 2004, an Australian who went by the pseudonym Juan Mann started giving out free hugs in his local shopping mall. Mann had reached a point of personal crisis in his own life: his parents had divorced and his fiancée had broken off their engagement. He realised that people were living increasingly disconnected lives. The need for human contact had been neglected. In Mann's eyes, we were living in a computer-mediated culture where friends were made through MySpace and families were breaking down. Where previously small-scale local communities had been integral to individual wellbeing, now people were pursuing far-flung separate lives in different corners of the globe.
Mann hand-wrote a sign advertising Free Hugs and went to the Pitt Street Mall in central Sydney, where he stood for 15 long, lonely minutes before an elderly lady took pity on him. Her dog had just died, she confessed, and the hug had made her feel better. Soon Juan Mann was handing out hugs every few seconds. As the days passed, more volunteers with their own handwritten signs came and stood alongside him.
Shimon Moore was one of them.
'I had a job holding a sign advertising a sale on shoes,' Moore says, speaking to me from his home in Los Angeles. 'I saw this guy offering free hugs one day. Asphalt 8 install. I thought it was a great idea, so I started talking to him.'
Moore wrote songs in his spare time and was the lead singer for a band called Sick Puppies. The band was looking for a record deal, so Moore took his father's video camera to the mall and started to film Juan Mann with the idea of making a music video. Free Hugs had started taking off: every day, hundreds of shoppers would stop to be hugged by the anonymous man with the home-made placard. By October the police had got wind of it and threatened to ban the movement. Ten thousand people signed a petition. The police backed down.
Moore filmed it all. When he and his band, Sick Puppies, moved to Los Angeles in March 2005 in search of a record deal, he edited the footage, set it to music and sent it back to Mann in Sydney as a present. Mann posted the video on YouTube and it went viral, attracting 70m views.
'I had a feeling when I was making it that this was good, that it would connect with people – and that doesn't happen often,' Moore says now. 'I did it in one night. It was just really flowing.'
The YouTube video made Juan Mann into something of a celebrity and his campaign attracted global media coverage. By 2006 he was being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and Free Hugs was going international: branches sprang up in Taiwan, Israel, Italy, America, Switzerland, Norway, India, Portugal and the UK. It seemed to touch a nerve.
In Philadelphia a sociology professor called Faye Allard set up her own Free Hugs spin-off and explained its appeal. 'The success of the movement reflects the fact that we're all becoming increasingly isolated,' she said. 'Households no longer contain extended family, people stay single for longer and have children later. This is compounded by the fact that we have become more geographically mobile… Phones, the internet and email mean that much of our personal contact is reduced to electronic interaction. What the Free Hugs movement does is restore a sense of community in a society of disparate individuals. It gives us a sense that we belong.'
Off the back of the YouTube video, Moore and his band got a record deal. They started selling Free Hugs merchandise at their gigs – T-shirts and mugs emblazoned with Juan Mann's distinctive handwriting. Mann wrote a book – The Illustrated Guide to Free Hugs – became an after-dinner speaker and published his address and mobile-phone number online, offering to go for a meal with anyone who contacted him. For a while, everything was good.
But then it all went quiet. When I attempt to get in touch with Juan Mann, he seems to have disappeared. I try sending him messages through his website, his Facebook profile and his Twitter account. I call the number he published online and the line goes dead. I contact his friends, none of whom will tell me his real name. They tell me Juan hasn't been in touch for a long time. There are a few dark murmurings about him 'flipping out' and going to live in a surfer's community north of Sydney. One of them gives me another phone number and that doesn't work either.
Eventually I track down a brief interview Mann gave to a New York-based business news website in 2010 in which he claimed Shimon Moore had screwed him over financially by getting him to sign up with the same management company that represented Sick Puppies.
'I complied, believing that Shimon, as my friend, would make certain that we were both amply compensated for the video and the Free Hugs merchandise the band sells,' Mann said. But according to Mann, that didn't happen: he claimed all the earnings went straight to Moore and his band members.
'Needless to say,' Mann continued, 'we aren't friends anymore… I haven't seen a dollar from the band, nor the manager.'
When I speak to Moore, he is clearly uncomfortable. 'That's a touchy subject,' he says over the phone. 'I haven't commented before because I don't want to fuck up the brand. The truth is, we had a falling-out over money… Juan flipped out and got lawyers and stuff. He totally changed when he got famous, and it messed up our friendship. But I don't want people to focus on that because Free Hugs is supposed to be about love, not two guys bickering.'
Moore seems genuinely distressed about the falling-out. He loved Free Hugs.
'It wasn't a Christian thing or a colour thing or a cultural thing in one country,' he says. 'Everyone likes a hug no matter what, no matter how broken you are.
'It's just a shame because it was Juan's thing: he made it, he started it.' He sighs. 'But the beautiful thing now is that it's so much bigger than any one person.'
Free Hugs Campaign Banned
He sounds as if he is trying to persuade himself. And yet it is true that the concept of Free Hugs has been extremely influential. People still stand on busy streets holding placards in much the same way as Juan Mann did all those years ago. Majella Greene, a former social worker, founded the London-based Guerrilla Hugs in January 2010. She is currently studying for an MSc in Positive Psychology and is interested in the positive impact touch can have on human interaction.
Juan Mann Free Hugs
'My concern is that as we get older, as children grow up, the amount we experience positive, platonic touching reduces,' Greene says when we meet in a café with other volunteers who have given up their time to hug total strangers of a Thursday evening. Greene is an enthusiastic and bubbly speaker, much given to expressive hand gestures. I get the impression that most of the people round the table have been won over by the sheer zeal of her personality. 'In the UK, there's this moral panic about physical contact with other people, either in the workplace or with children because of concerns around sexual harassment or worries that teachers are going to be accused of paedophilia,' she says. 'You've got a generation of children growing up playing computer games without being able to take part in normal rough and tumble that builds up alliances.'
Greene cites research by the psychologist James W Prescott, who claimed in the 60s and 70s that the lack of affectionate contact between mothers and infants could result in permanent brain abnormalities associated with depression, substance abuse, eating disorders and violence. More recently the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that primates groom each other for longer than they need to in order to cement bonds, make friends and influence fellow primates.
'I think that's true of human beings as well,' explains Greene. 'If they experience non- sexual physical contact, they're more likely to feel protected and protective of each other.'
Sejarah Free Hugs
Greene says that everyone has their favourite hugging story. 'I hugged an older man a while back whose wife had died 14 years ago and he hadn't been hugged in all that time,' she recalls, looking distinctly misty-eyed. 'He stood talking for ages about how he'd not been held or touched and how it made him feel better that I had… When people turn round and say: 'Thank you, I really needed that,' it makes me want to cry.'
There is a sense that such acts of gentleness are having a necessary comeback after decades of aggressive self-interest and self-promotion. Perhaps it is partly allied to the economic crisis, to a new-found respect for the simpler things in life that do not need to be bought with a credit card. For years we worshipped at the altar of conspicuous consumption in an age when fame was accorded for marrying a footballer or appearing on reality television, and when friendships were made and lost at the click of a computer mouse. These days we take more delight in the everyday kindnesses, in the shared experience.
Free Hugs On Youtube
That, at least, was the thinking behind the artist Michael Landy's recent project, Acts of Kindness, in which he invited members of the public to submit stories online of kindnesses they had witnessed or been part of while travelling on London Underground.
Free Hugs Social Movement
'People can exist in a bubble on the tube,' he explains when we meet for a coffee at the National Gallery. 'They're reading their paper or listening to their MP3 player and everyone is cut off from each other, trying not to make eye contact. It's partly what you have to do to survive in a city like this, but I was surprised by the response I got. Often we feel that everybody is out for themselves, but that isn't the case at all.'
Free Hugs Guy
Landy received countless stories: of women crying after the break-up of a relationship and being offered a smile or a reassuring squeeze, of someone making an origami bird and dropping it into the lap of a person who looked lonely, of strangers helping with heavy luggage.
'I was interested in that emotional bridge between self and other,' Landy says. 'Every now and then, someone does something kind, and it's life-enhancing because you're mixing your emotions with complete strangers.'
Founder Of The Free Hugs Movement
Back on Carnaby Street, my efforts to mix my emotions with complete strangers are gathering pace. Some people walk past the Guerrilla Huggers with understandable wariness in their eyes. Others – and it is disproportionately young women in their 20s – get the idea immediately and hug me without my having to explain. A handful of shop assistants pop out to have a hug in their cigarette break. A Belgian tourist with a camera slung round his neck tells me there should be more of this kind of thing. I get hugged by a nine-year-old boy, a pensioner and a member of the French Olympic boxing team who explains he is very sad after having lost his match. Every single hug makes me smile. I enjoy it far more than I thought I would.
As I'm standing there, handing out hugs to people I've never met before and will probably never meet again, it strikes me that there's an obvious irony in the fact that a movement predicated on free gestures of intimacy should have been riven by in-fighting about money between the two men who made it happen. But maybe it doesn't matter. Like most of the best ideas, Free Hugs has gathered its own momentum. After all, it was always meant to be bigger than just Juan Mann.
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