Male Bodies
This is not, or not primarily, about how men look. The conversation about male body image has grown louder in recent years—the media discovered it, which means it acquired the status of a trend, which means it now comes with statistics and spokespeople and a vocabulary borrowed from the longer-established discussion about women’s bodies.
There is something in all of that worth taking seriously. But I find myself interested in something that precedes the image, something that sits underneath it, something that existed long before anyone thought to run a survey. I am interested in what men do with the tension they carry. Or more precisely, what they don’t do with it.
For a number of years I worked as an erotic masseur to men. I say this plainly because nothing about it embarrasses me, and because the plainness matters—it sets the context without which the rest of what I have to say loses its ground. The men who came to see me were not a type. They ranged in age, in build, in occupation, in how they described themselves and whom they went home to. What they shared, almost without exception, was a body that had been holding on for too long. I could feel it the moment I put my hands on them. The tissue was dense. The shoulders rode up toward the ears. The jaw held. The breath sat high in the chest and moved in short, careful increments, as though breathing too deeply might release something they weren’t prepared to deal with.
Relieving muscular tension is a technical matter. You learn the tissue, the direction of the fibres, the pressure required, the rhythm that persuades a muscle to let go of its grip. It is not mysterious. Given time and the right approach, the body responds, because the body wants to respond—it takes no pleasure in the holding, even when the mind insists on it. That part of the work I could do reliably. What interested me more, what I hadn’t anticipated when I began, was the other tension: the kind that shows up in the body but doesn’t originate there.
Men arrived carrying things they hadn’t put down in years. Not memories, exactly, or not only memories—more like unfinished computations running continuously in the background, consuming processing power, generating heat. The thoughts that crawl in at three in the morning and refuse to organise themselves into anything manageable.
Many of the conversations circled those kinds of questions: the curiosities about other men—physical, experiential, comparative—that a man might spend decades accumulating without ever finding a legitimate space to examine. Questions about performance, about difference, about whether what he feels and experiences and wants aligns in any recognisable way with what he imagines other men feel and experience and want. These questions don’t announce themselves as questions. They manifest as a kind of permanent low-level vigilance, and vigilance lives in the body. It tightens the neck. It flattens the breath. It locks the hips and the shoulders and the jaw.
What surprised me most—and it surprised me consistently, which means it wasn’t an exception but a pattern—was that so many of these men did not know how tense they were. They had been carrying it long enough that the carrying felt like their natural state. They had normalised it so thoroughly that it had ceased to register as a problem and had simply become the texture of being themselves. Some of them told me they slept well, and then spent our first session slowly unknotting a body that told a completely different story. The tension was invisible to them because they had no contrast. They had no memory of what it felt like to be without it, or the memory was so old it had no practical relevance.
There was also the question of time. Not just the lack of it—though that featured—but the particular quality of guilt that attached itself to any hour spent on their own bodies. I noticed it in the way they arrived. Slightly brisk. A note of apology in the manner, not directed at me specifically but at the air, at the hour, at the fact of being here at all. Some men checked their phones before they lay down. Some mentioned, without my asking, the list of things they needed to do afterward. The hour they were about to spend was legitimate only in transit—it existed in relation to what came before and after it, and could not simply be itself. Pausing, it turned out, was not something many of them had practice in. They could stop, technically. They could lie still. But the stopping and the stillness were not the same as rest, and the difference between them was the whole point.
The intimacy question sat underneath all of this, and I came to think it was the deepest layer. For a significant number of the men who visited me, the massage was the only touch they allowed themselves outside of sex—and several of them did not have much of that either, or any at all, for reasons that varied and that I rarely felt it was my place to pursue unless they raised it. Touch for men, in the culture I observed, follows a very narrow set of sanctioned pathways. There is the handshake. There is the brief embrace between close friends, sometimes, on significant occasions. There is sex. Beyond that, the options narrow to almost nothing, and the nothing is so habitual that most men don’t notice they’re living inside it.
What a body does when it goes untouched for long enough is not simply that it misses something. It forgets what contact feels like from the outside—what it is to have someone’s full, unhurried attention directed at your physical self, not instrumentally, not as a route to something else, but as the thing itself. That forgetting has effects. It deepens the isolation of the body from the self. A man who never receives touch begins, without necessarily being aware of it, to relate to his body as a vehicle: something he operates, something he services when it breaks down, something he uses to carry out the functions of his life. The idea that the body might be a place to inhabit—a place that deserves attention and pleasure and rest on its own terms—becomes, if not incomprehensible, then at least foreign. Theoretical. Something other people might have.
The comparison dimension complicated this further. I’ve watched men measure themselves against other men, and they do it with a precision and a thoroughness that might surprise those who assume this is primarily a female preoccupation. They measure height and build and the specific geography of what they carry and how. They measure performance, broadly understood—how much they can lift, how long they can last, how much they earn, how composed they appear in situations that invite panic. They measure against the men in their immediate lives and against a larger, vaguer aggregate of masculine standards that exists nowhere in particular and everywhere at once. This measuring, which never resolves into a final verdict and is therefore never done, keeps a man at a certain remove from his own body. He cannot simply be in it while simultaneously ranking it.
I was well placed, in my role, to address some of this—not as a therapist and not as a professional of any clinical kind, but as another man who had spent considerable time thinking about these things and who created, by the nature of the work, an environment in which certain conversations became possible that weren’t possible elsewhere. Men talked to me. Sometimes they talked a great deal, and what they said was not what they said to their partners or their friends or their colleagues, because I was not their partner or friend or colleague, and because something about the particular combination of physical release and unhurried attention loosened things they had been holding closed.
What I heard, underneath the variations, was a single recurring theme: the sense that they had lost the habit of themselves. Not the image—the image they were often painfully aware of, sometimes too aware of—but the actual experience of being in their own skin and finding it, if not exactly comfortable, at least not hostile. Many men I worked with had built a relationship with their bodies based almost entirely on function and criticism. The body functioned or it failed. It measured up or it didn’t. There was very little room in that relationship for the simple fact of the body as a living, feeling thing that might occasionally deserve something more than utility and judgement.
A man who begins to relax—genuinely relax, which takes longer than an hour and rarely happens all at once—often discovers something that catches him off guard. The relaxation itself feels unfamiliar, and the unfamiliarity can produce a moment of anxiety before it produces anything else. He has been tensed against something for so long that letting go of the tension requires, briefly, also letting go of the vigilance that the tension was maintaining. This is the moment I found most telling. The body, given permission, wants to soften. Something in the man resists the softening, because the softening feels like exposure—like standing without armour in a place where armour has always seemed necessary. Most men, given time and trust, move through it. When they do, what they find on the other side is usually less dramatic than they feared: just their own body, just the present moment, just the uncomplicated fact of being temporarily at rest. They had been afraid of that. I found it consistently worth noting how much they had been afraid of something so quiet.
The question of how men look after their bodies runs directly through this. A man who carries his body as a vehicle—necessary but not valued for its own sake—will maintain it minimally, by default, and attend to it primarily when it produces a problem he can no longer ignore. He will not think to ask what the body might need before the need becomes a demand. He will not build the habit of paying attention to it in the way you pay attention to something you have decided matters. And that decision—that the body matters, that it deserves consideration on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing is wrong and there is no visible reason to stop—is one that most of the men I met had never consciously made. They were waiting for permission they had to give themselves. Several of them, eventually, did.
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