#hug machine

[Image ID: A digital illustration of Esmeralda, a teenage girl. The drawing is in warm colors. She has red swirls on her cheeks and a buzz cut with star pattering. There is a simple doodle of her on the left and a detailed one on the right. On the left, she has 6 green fairy wings. She has two antennas with green stars at the end of them. She wears a red hoodie with skeleton patterns. She has baggy brown pants and black boots. The stars in her hair are blue. She has orange zigzag patterns behind her.

On the right, she sits on the floor with her right hand covering her mouth. Her visible fingernail is painted purple. She has tiny red dots along her arms. Her eyes are red with green stars. She is wearing a red shirt with lighter red stripes along it and baggy green pants. She has red converse. The stars in her hair are red-orange. She has yellow swirl patterns behind her. The background of the drawing is orange with slightly darker colored wavy lines. /End ID]

A weighted blanket is grand The contraption can give him a hand But Sherlock likes best When he's close to John's chest In a hug that makes his heart expand

Notes on ao3!

Talk about a niche post

Being of a practical turn of mind, she soon made her fantasy come true. The early models were crude, with some snags and glitches, but she soon evolved a totally comfortable, predictable system, capable of administering a “hug” with whatever parameters she desired. Her squeeze machine had worked exactly as she hoped, yielding the very sense of calmness and pleasure she had dreamed of since childhood. She could not have gone through the stormy days of college without her squeeze machine, she said. She could not turn to human beings for solace and comfort, but she could always turn to it. The machine, which she neither exhibited nor concealed but kept openly in her room at college, excited derision and suspicion, and was seen by psychiatrists as a “regression” or “fixation”—something that needed to be psychoanalyzed and resolved. With her characteristic stubbornness, tenacity, single-mindedness, and bravery—along with a complete absence of inhibition or hesitation—Temple ignored all these comments and reactions, and determined to find a scientific “validation” of her feelings.

Both before and after writing her doctoral thesis, she made a systematic investigation of the effects of deep pressure in autistic people, college students, and animals, and last year a paper of hers on this was published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology. Today, her squeeze machine, variously modified, is receiving extensive clinical trials. She has also become the world’s foremost designer of squeeze chutes for cattle, and has published, in the meat-industry and veterinary literature, many articles on the theory and practice of humane restraint and gentle holding.

While telling me this, Temple knelt down, then eased herself, face down and at full length, into the V, turned on the compressor (it took a minute for the master cylinder to fill), and twisted the controls. The sides converged, clasping her firmly, and then, as she made a small adjustment, relaxed their grip slightly. It was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen, and yet, for all its oddness, it was moving and simple. Certainly there was no doubt of its effect. Temple’s voice, often loud and hard, became softer and gentler as she lay in her machine. “I concentrate on how gently I can do it,” she said, and then spoke of the necessity of “totally giving in to it. . . . I’m getting real relaxed now,” she added quietly. “I guess others get this through relation with other people.”

It is not just pleasure or relaxation that Temple gets from the machine but, she maintains, a feeling for others. As she lies in her machine, she says, her thoughts often turn to her mother, her favorite aunt, her teachers. She feels their love for her, and hers for them. She feels that the machine opens a door into an otherwise closed emotional world and allows her, almost teaches her, to feel empathy for others.

After twenty minutes or so, she emerged, visibly calmer, emotionally less rigid (she says that a cat can easily sense the difference in her at these times), and asked me if I would care to try the machine.

Brantley: *help help I’m being ambushed!*