Body Play
There came a point in the work where my hands were no longer enough which is, given my skills, saying something. I say this without boasting, because it is not meant to be—it is an observation about a practical limit.
Hands on a body are hands on a surface. They can reach most of the surface, can work along it, can attend to it with considerable thoroughness over an hour. But hands remain at a remove from the body they are working on. The masseur’s hands and the client’s back are in contact, but the masseur is still upright, still in his own position, still operating from the outside. At some point I noticed that this arrangement was missing something, and I thought about what the missing thing might be.
The answer I arrived at was contact of a different order. Not hands on skin but skin on skin—the full surface of one body brought into proximity with the full surface of another. The concept seemed to me to contain its own description. I called it a body slide, and I expected the words to do the explanatory work. They did not. Of all the questions I received before a man arrived—and men asked many questions, some of which I have described elsewhere—what is a body slide became, in time, one of the most frequent. I found this genuinely surprising.
The practice itself was simple enough to describe, though the description is several steps removed from the experience. It happened after the massage, when his body was already well-oiled. I applied oil to my own body. We moved to the bed rather than the massage table, because a bed allows more room to move in more directions.
What followed was contact—front to back, back to back, head to toe, the bodies arranged in various combinations that brought as much skin into contact as the arrangement allowed. The oil made the contact continuous, frictionless, one body moving across another without the resistance that dry skin produces. Interfemoral contact, where the bodies overlap rather than simply touch. The whole surface involved, not only the parts that hands had reached.
What that produced was harder to account for than the practice that produced it.
I noticed that for some men, this kind of contact was genuinely unprecedented. Not unusual. Unprecedented. Men told me that full-body contact of this kind—even without the oil, even dressed, even outside a sexual context—had not featured in their adult lives in any form they could identify. Some of what I heard carried a cultural dimension.
For some men, this was unprecedented—the lights off, the bodies largely covered, the contact limited and purposive. They had not experienced mutual nudity in a lit room. They had not experienced their whole bodies being present to another person’s whole body.
When I heard this I noticed something shift in how I understood what they were doing in my studio, and what the body slide was for them specifically. It was not only a variation in technique. It was, for some, the first time their body had been in extended contact with another body in conditions where both could be seen.
The quality of held tension I described in the massage work would sometimes loosen under this different kind of contact in a way that the massage alone had not managed. The best account I have—and I want to be careful to describe what I observed rather than what I theorised—is that something about the full presence of another body produces a different quality of permission than the hands of a practitioner.
The hands say: I am attending to your body. The body slide says something more lateral than that. Less hierarchical, perhaps. The attending is mutual, or at least the bodies are in equivalent positions relative to each other, and the equivalence seems to matter.
Some men described specific sensations when they tried to account for what made it different. One man said he liked the firmness of the skin against his—not the yielding quality of a woman’s body, which was what his life had otherwise contained, but something harder, more resistant, the specific texture of male skin against male skin.
Another mentioned the beard—the sensation of a beard against a part of his body that had never encountered one. Another described what he called the intensity of mutual touch, though when I asked him to say more he found he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, and I let it go. I noticed that the specific sensations men named tended to be male-specific—things that required another man’s body to be present in order to exist.
One man, who had been visiting for several years and who was not given to declarations, said something toward the end of a session that I have not forgotten. He said: “I like your warmth. You’re a warm person. That’s why I keep coming back.” He was not describing the oil or the contact or the specific arrangements of our bodies in the previous hours. He was describing something that arrived through all of those things but was not identical with any of them. I took what he said and held it as I hold most of what is said to me in those sessions—without immediately organising it into a conclusion.
What the body slide made possible that the massage alone did not was a change in the quality of conversation. When two faces are in proximity—genuinely in proximity, not across a table or at a professional distance—the conversation that becomes possible is not the same conversation that the massage produced. Something about the closeness of the faces changed what a man was willing to say, or how he said it. The conversational intimacy increased along with the physical intimacy, as though they were aspects of the same thing being adjusted simultaneously. I did not set out to produce this. I observed it happening.
I called the longer sessions body play because the word play described something important about what I intended—the absence of a predetermined sequence, the permission for the time to move in whatever direction it moved in. The description on the website was loose by design.
An over-described offering selects against the man who would find something different from what was advertised, and some of the most significant sessions I had were with men who arrived without a specific idea of what they were looking for and found it anyway. Some of what happened in those sessions was explicitly sexual. Some was almost entirely conversational. Many fell between, or moved, as the hours allowed. The latitude was not a gap in the offering. It was the offering.
What I found was that the longer sessions—two hours, three hours, the occasional day-long arrangement—produced their significant moments late rather than early. A man needed time to arrive in a room in the full sense, which is not the same as being there physically from the beginning. The body slide, when it came, often came after that arriving had happened. The man who had not yet fully arrived when the massage began would sometimes be, by the time we moved to the bed, someone different from the man who had walked through the door. Not changed in any dramatic sense. Simply more present.
The quality of the silence when the contact eventually stilled was something I noticed every time and named to myself each time and never found a word for that satisfied me. It was not the silence of completion, exactly. It was not the silence of exhaustion.
It was something particular to that specific arrangement of two bodies that had been in extended contact and were now still, and whatever it contained, it was not nothing.
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