What Men Said
I kept a record of what men said after sessions. Not systematically, not with any formal method—more the way you keep anything that strikes you as worth keeping, because it said something you couldn’t have arrived at yourself.
The comments arrived at the end of sessions, sometimes, or in emails over the following days, and I recorded them because they served a practical purpose: they added content to the website, showed prospective visitors that other men had been there and found it worth describing, and occasionally served as the thing that tipped a hesitant man from enquiring to arriving. Some men quoted the comments they had already read, which produced an odd kind of loop—one man’s account shaping another man’s expectation shaping a third man’s words.
Why men felt they needed to comment I never really decided. It might have been a form of courtesy, a way of completing the transaction by returning something after the session itself had ended.
It might have been that the experience had produced something they wanted to make real by putting it into words. I noticed that the comments tended to arrive when something had happened that exceeded what the man had anticipated, which might suggest that the anticipation had been insufficient, or that the exceeding of it was itself what required naming.
What I noticed, reading them over time, was a consistent pattern in the language. Men arrived at the session with a vocabulary assembled from their ordinary lives—the language of value, of intimacy, of pleasure—and then encountered something the vocabulary didn’t quite fit. The comments were attempts to close that gap. Sometimes they closed it. More often they pointed at it, circled it, and left it open.
“Fantastic. Fabulous. Wow! What you can do with your hands and the rest of your body. Definitely worth the money.”
The superlatives arrived often. Fantastic and fabulous and wow are words that point at an intensity without describing its character. They are words a man reaches for when the specific words have not arrived yet, when the experience is still too close and too large to be examined from any angle that would let him describe its particular shape.
I received them without particular attachment, not because the feeling behind them seemed insincere—it didn’t—but because the words themselves were doing the work that feeling does when it hasn’t yet found language: they were marking the place where something had happened without being able to say what.
Then the comment moves, quickly, to the hands and the rest of the body—the body slide, which by that point in my practice had become a central part of the longer sessions. And then, at the end, the financial note: definitely worth the money.
I noticed that this specific formulation appeared in many comments, and I held it each time with more attention than I initially gave it. When men said “worth the money” they seemed to mean something more than value for expenditure. The fee had been in their minds on the way there—I knew this from the enquiry calls, the careful questions about what the session included, the implicit calculation of whether what was being bought was worth what was being spent. And at the end, the verdict was that what he had received not only equalled the fee but had made the fee irrelevant. The experience had dissolved the transaction that had made it possible. Worth the money is the last thing a man says before money stops being the frame. I found that transition worth noticing.
“I enjoy the freedom you give me to explore your body. Plus it’s a real turn on the way you respond and how much you obviously enjoy yourself too. It’s the most intimacy I’ve ever experienced with anyone.”
I read this one more carefully when it arrived. Not the first sentence, which describes something about reciprocity—the encouragement to touch as well as be touched—but the last. The most intimacy I’ve ever experienced with anyone. He was not a young man. He had a marriage and a history and a life that had contained decades of other people. And yet he placed this—this session, in this room, with this specific combination of physical and conversational proximity—above all of it.
What I found myself considering, eventually, was what the word intimacy was carrying in that sentence. The man had not said it was the most pleasurable experience, or the most sexual, or the most relaxing. He had said the most intimate. Which implies that the other experiences in his life—the marriage, the relationships, the decades of what intimacy is supposed to look like—had not provided him with this particular thing in this particular measure.
Or that this thing was not something he had understood as intimacy before, and now that he had encountered it, he had reached for the only word large enough to hold it. Either possibility left me sitting with the sentence rather than past it.
“It was obvious you knew exactly how to add layer on layer to my increasing excitement and arousal. Your massage was remarkably relaxing and sensual. The way we slipped and slid together was delightful. And how you knew where and when to touch me. Everything was perfect. I can’t wait for my next visit.”
Layer on layer. The phrase appeared in this comment and I recognised it immediately as accurate in a way that many of the superlatives were not. Where fantastic and wow marked the place something had happened without describing it, layer on layer described the structure of how it happened—the accumulation, the sequence in which what occurred in one hour created the conditions for what occurred in the next, each stage depending on what the previous stage had produced.
The man had experienced this accumulation and found words for its mechanism. That seemed to me a different kind of naming from the superlatives, and a more difficult one. To say something was fantastic is to perform the feeling; to say layer on layer is to have observed the experience well enough to describe how it was built. The two modes appeared throughout the comments and I noticed them as distinct—the performance of intensity, and the observation of structure. The second was rarer.
What I found harder to account for was the end of the comment: how you knew where and when to touch me. The knowing of where and when was not something I could describe in advance, or reconstruct afterward, with any precision.
It arose from attending to what was present—the quality of the breath, the slight shift in the body’s texture under the hands, the particular moment when the held quality in a piece of tissue began to change and the hands followed the change rather than preceding it. The man had experienced this as knowing. From inside the work, it felt more like listening. I am not certain the distinction matters to anyone but me, but I find it sits differently depending on which word I use.
What these three comments share—among hundreds of others— and placed next to each other, is the quality of a man arriving at the edge of his vocabulary and making different choices about what to do there.
The first man reached for the largest words he had—fantastic, wow—and then grounded the comment in the financial verdict, which was ground he recognised. The second man found the largest word he knew for what had happened—intimacy—and placed it carefully at the end of a sentence, where it would carry the most weight. The third man noticed the structure and named it: layer on layer. Each approach got closer to something and none of them arrived quite at the thing itself.
I held all of these comments as I held most of what men said in those sessions and afterward—without arriving at a conclusion, without organising them into evidence for something I already believed. They were attempts, made in good faith, to name an experience that had not arrived with the right words attached. The experience had been real. The words had done what they could.
Whether the gap between the experience and the words is a failure of language or a quality of the experience itself, I find I cannot say. I notice the gap. I leave it there.
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