Nudity
I worked naked. This requires some explanation, not because nakedness in the context of erotic massage is surprising, but because the way I approached it was particular, and the particularity turned out to matter in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated.
The reason I was naked was practical: the work involved sustained physical contact, and moving in and out of clothing during a session was cumbersome, disruptive, and broke the quality of attention that the work required. So I removed the clothing at the start and that was that.
My attitude to my own body was, and remains, neither especially positive nor especially troubled. I did not strip off at the door because I loved being naked, and I did not dread it because I was ashamed of anything. I approached it in the way you might approach a cold swimming pool: you can ease yourself in gradually, accommodating the temperature by increments, or you can jump in and be immediately wet. I chose the jump. I greeted a client at my front door dressed as you’d expect, and stripped the moment we entered the studio. It set the terms for the session before anything else had been said about them.
The formal training for massage suggests a different protocol. The instructor told us—and this was repeated in the textbooks, consistently and without apparent irony—that the masseur should leave the room while the client undresses, then re-enter and, presumably without looking directly, offer a modesty towel. The modesty towel would remain in place for the duration, folded and repositioned as required to maintain decorum. I understood the intention and I dispensed with it entirely.
A full body massage conducted around a strategically placed towel is not a full body massage. You cannot sweep your hands from head to toe with a towel in the way. The towel’s function was not practical—it was ceremonial. It signalled that the nakedness was being managed, that it would not be looked at directly, that the professional transaction required a kind of organised pretence that the body was not quite fully there. I preferred the jump.
What I did instead was stand—often with a mirror behind me, which I mention for reasons that will become clear—without looking directly at a man as he undressed, and wait for him to lie face-down on the table before I began. I did not leave the room. I did not offer the towel. My nakedness was simply present, as a fact of the environment he had entered, and his nakedness was simply present once he had removed his clothes, and neither of these facts was treated as requiring management.
I have read the research on male nudity—the findings that it changes status, reduces performance, lowers inhibition. I don’t dispute any of it at the level of the finding. What I question is whether a clinical assessment of the phenomenon captures what actually happens in the room. Have such researchers been naked in a room with a man who is not accustomed to being naked in a room with another naked man? I suspect most of them have not, and the absence of that experience leaves a gap between the finding and the actuality that no degree of methodological rigour can fully close.
What the research doesn’t seem to account for is the specific quality of ease that arrives when the naked person in the room is clearly at ease with their own nakedness. I don’t claim to have been perfectly comfortable—I’ll come back to that—but I had made a settled arrangement with the fact of my own body, and whatever signal that arrangement transmitted was, I found, considerably more effective at lowering a man’s inhibitions than a clinical variable could easily measure. Comfort is contagious in ways that discomfort isn’t, or isn’t as immediately. A man in a room with a naked man who is treating his own nakedness as unremarkable tends to find the nakedness unremarkable sooner than he otherwise would. The unremarkableness was not achieved by confidence exactly. It was achieved by not making anything of it.
Now I want to say something about what I actually observed, because the research and my experience of it diverge in ways I find worth noting. The men who came to see me had, in a significant proportion of cases, never seen another adult man naked. Not in any context. Not a friend, not a colleague, not anyone. This surprised me when I first encountered it, and then it stopped surprising me because it kept being true. The changing rooms of their youth had become something to be navigated rather than occupied; the easy communal nakedness that previous generations apparently experienced had, somewhere along the way, become a source of anxiety or avoidance rather than an ordinary social fact. And so the men who arrived in my studio were, in many cases, encountering something genuinely new.
What I noticed in their responses was not what the clinical literature most emphasises—the status levelling, the performance reduction. What I noticed was curiosity. Simple, almost childlike curiosity of the kind a child has about the physical world before anyone has taught them that such curiosity requires management. Do all men have that? Are all men built like that? Is that normal? Sometimes the curiosity emerged as a direct question.
More often it emerged as a comment—that I seemed comfortable, or that they had never seen this or that, or that they had never seen an erection that wasn’t their own. I noticed it in the looking, which was not prurient—not searching for anything in particular—but observational, the way you look at something you have been curious about and finally have the opportunity to see.
The mirror behind me was relevant here. It meant that a man lying face-down on the table, if he chose to look, could see me moving around him without raising his head. He could observe without being observed observing, which lowered the self-consciousness of the looking. I placed the mirror there deliberately, not as an erotic element but as a practical one: it gave the curious man somewhere to look that didn’t require him to announce his curiosity. He could be curious in private while being entirely present in the room.
I encouraged the curiosity beyond what men usually expressed. I noticed the desire to look more directly, to ask the question that was forming but not yet being spoken, to say something about what they were seeing—and I noticed the simultaneous resistance to that desire, the checking of the impulse, the sense that expressing the curiosity would reveal something they’d rather not reveal, or would change the quality of the session in a way they couldn’t predict. I have written elsewhere about what I declined to do in a session.
In this case what I chose to do was make it easier for the looking to happen, and for the question behind the looking to find its way out if it wanted to. I am not an exhibitionist by nature—this is worth saying clearly, because the assumption might be otherwise. I found sustained scrutiny uncomfortable in the way that most people find sustained scrutiny uncomfortable. But I found that the discomfort was beside the point of the work, and setting it aside was a straightforward decision.
The curiosity, once allowed, tended to resolve into something quieter than it arrived as. A man who had been holding a question about what other men’s bodies looked like—a question held sometimes for decades, accumulated in the absence of any legitimate opportunity to look—found, when he finally looked, that the looking was less charged than the holding had been. The question was ordinary. The answer was ordinary.
What other men looked like was interesting and various and, fundamentally, not very different from what he had imagined, which was itself a form of information. The comparison he had been unable to make was now made, and the comparison didn’t produce the revelation he might have expected. It produced something more like resolution. The question, once answered, stopped requiring the energy he had been spending on not asking it.
I think about what it means that this curiosity had no ordinary outlet. The research focuses on what nakedness does to status and inhibition, which are interpersonal dynamics, social variables. What I found sitting underneath all of that was simpler: men had been physically curious about their own kind since early in their lives and had, for reasons that are not hard to locate culturally, found almost no acceptable way to pursue that curiosity. The curiosity didn’t go away. It went underground, or into the locked box, or into the category of things that couldn’t be looked at directly. And when a room became available in which direct looking was possible—in which the looking was not only allowed but quietly encouraged—the curiosity surfaced with a simplicity and a relief that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with finally being in a room where a question you’d carried for years had an answer.
I realised the looking wasn’t about me. The body in front of them was not my body in the personal sense in which I live inside it. In the room, in the session, it was something more like a reference point—something that could be looked at and learned from and compared against without cost or consequence. I found I could offer it in that spirit. The nudity was the least complicated part of what I offered. It was also, in some sessions, the most significant.
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