You’ll be amused to hear that my friend grew much more assertive when she was pregnant on account of hormones. She had an exchange roughly like this:
Woman: (comes up in grocery store and puts her hand on her belly)
Woman: “Oh my, your uterus is so hard!”
Friend: “THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!”
Woman: (gets angry and storms off)
Friend: (Stares after her, grinning smugly)
My sister said that when was pregnant, it creeped her out that some acquaintances (and some strangers) would touch her belly.
eta: I just saw that @anon75430791 must know my sister?
Hair-touching, pregnant stomach-touching is just creepy. I can see a five year old doing that, but adults are just overstepping…
FTFY. 
Although, yes, I fully agree with your original point. Strangers sure love to impart their unwanted wisdom.
I get pissed off enough if someone whom I’ve never met before tells me I need to smile. I can’t imagine how much it must piss off someone when being given unsolicited parenting advice.
I literally came here to post that. Thank you for beating me to it and doing a better job 
I am white, and it has happened to me … but I have very curly hair. It’s fine and frizzy and fluffy, and does not reach the magnificence of texture that black hair has. But yeah. I walked into the post office and a dude in his 60’s reached out as I passed him and “boinged” a curl.
I even understand the urge to do so. I’ve seen some lovely curly hair that my fingers itch to boing, but I restrain myself because I’m not that big of an asshole.
I have rarely seen people so instantly infuriated as my black girlfriends when someone touches their hair. From cheerful to “BITCH! WHAT DA FUK??!” in two seconds.
Well, until I moved to Boston and had to deal with the drivers here, that is.
Another white person here, and I’ve had people try to touch my hair without asking. My hair isn’t even all that interesting! Just long and lots of it, and I usually wear it in braids to keep it from Roseanne Roseannadannaing all over the place. One day I was in Trader Joe’s and turned my head to see some lady approaching me with her hand out, about to touch my hair. She backed off (and had a look on her face like a deer caught in the headlights), but what the hell makes someone do that? How is it appropriate to touch someone without permission?
I’m bald as a cueball and people sometimes want to touch my head. My friends used to rub it for good luck, mostly while bowling. And when drinking was involved.
Mine is more in the nature of a bristle brush. People want to touch it all the time. Apparently I’m a little scary looking, which is probably why it’s pretty much never men who try to touch it without asking permission. Unless I have a mohawk, and then even men can’t seem to resist.
I think people want to touch hair that isn’t like their own, which is why this particular rudeness easily comes across as racist and sexist, and I’ll blindly guess that people who have stupid ideas about racial or gender superiority are more likely to act on such impulses, so that sometimes it really is explicitly racist and/or sexist. But I wouldn’t call it “aggression” - I save that word for things like the doormen at the Jane Ballroom in New York City who accost and berate pretty young women passing by. At some point you have to draw a distinction between touching someone, and physically seizing and terrorizing someone. But maybe “micro aggression” is apt… at least from the point of view of a person with fascinating hair!
This is the only kind of hair touching I can get behind. It’s just good policy. Who can’t use more luck?
I tweeted the same thing last night.wtf is the matter with white people?
I only learned this was a thing in 2012 when I heard the fine song Black Sheep by the band M&O.
Just ask politely first, that’s all I ask.
Oh now I get it.
It seems that some people have either had no home training as my dear old Gram used to call it, or they are just that afflicted with an immense sense of ‘over-entitlement.’
Maybe they’re hipsters trying to get a free body mod…
I suspect for a lot of people, it simply never occurs to them that other people may not like or be comfortable with the same kinds of physical interactions they are…literally just a failure to engage empathy.
Whereas with other people, that’s when the bleeding starts.
WWBLD: What would Bruce Lee do?
Besides, that’s just cause God hadn’t gotten around to giving Jesus PTSD yet. But he always gets around to it eventually.
Give it a name. That’s still inconsiderate and rude, at best; which to my mind, goes back to a lack of training, be it at “home” or otherwise.
Humans are not “innately endowed” with common courtesy and decent manners; its something that each of us is supposed to be taught during our early stages of societal development.
The people who clearly ‘missed the memo’ may need to be “reeducated.”
Oh, I agree. What I’ve found anecdotally though is that far more often than not people do get and understand the trespass when someone calls them on it. I doubt that most are thinking I deserve to be able to touch this person so much as they’ve internalized an incorrect belief that because they like it, so will everyone else. A lot of non-American cultures criticize Americans for being on average more protective of personal space and less comfortable with shows of affection. But those cultures aren’t all groping petting anarchies of space invaders. Rather Americans tend, I think, to assume that what they’re comfortable or uncomfortable with, so are the people around them, so they tend to check in less when they do touch. In non-American cultures, on the other hand, it seems more common to consider what the other person’s body language and verbal cues are saying before going in for the touch. Basically I think one way we could reduce the prevalence of space invading microagressions would be to teach more empathy, especially (but not exclusively) at a young age.
