Sex Between Men
This is not about the act. There is no shortage of information about technique—the internet made sure of that, and what it didn’t cover it misrepresented with considerable enthusiasm. What I want to talk about is something that sits behind the act, underneath it, and that the act is often being asked to carry without being suited to the weight.
I want to talk about what men think sex is. And what they think it is, in my experience, is almost never what it is.
Sex, as most men define it when pressed, tends to resolve into performance, penetration, the exchange of bodily fluids, some combination of these. The climax, literal and figurative. Men learn early that this is what sex means and that the meaning is self-evident, and so they rarely question it, because the questioning itself would seem to reveal some inadequacy or confusion that other men presumably don’t share. The definition sits in place, unexamined, and organises a great deal of behaviour and expectation around itself. And then a man finds himself unsatisfied by the thing he has defined as the point, and doesn’t understand why, because by his own reckoning he got what he came for.
Again and again I found myself wondering whether many of the men who came to see me were really looking for something that began only after sex had ceased to be the point. I say this not as a provocation but as a description of what I observed over many years of work that placed me in a particular position to observe it. The want underneath the want—the thing that was there before the wanting began and remained after the wanting resolved—was intimacy. And by intimacy I don’t mean warmth or romance or emotional disclosure in the sense therapists tend to mean it. I mean something simpler and more specific: the opportunity to be seen as they are in the present moment. Not assessed. Not managed. Not reflected back through another person’s expectations or judgements or needs. Simply seen, by someone paying full and genuine attention, in the moment of being themselves. Everything else—the technique, the activity, the sequence of events—was the mechanism by which some men hoped to arrive at that. The mechanism and the destination are not the same thing, which is why the destination so often fails to materialise even when the mechanism runs perfectly.
I worked as an erotic masseur to men. The work carried a practical component—the massage itself, the physical release it offered—and it carried other components that took me longer to understand. The sessions lasted an hour by arrangement. A significant number of them lasted several hours more. Once the urgency resolved, which is to say once the physical dimension of the session had run its course, something remained that had been there from the beginning and that hadn’t been addressed. Men didn’t want to leave. Not because they wanted more of the physical—the physical was done—but because what they actually came for was only now becoming available.
They wanted to talk. Not about sex, in most cases, or not primarily. They wanted to talk about whatever occupied the foreground of their minds, which was often something they had not said to anyone else, not because it was shameful or secret but because they couldn’t identify the right context for it. There is no obvious venue in most men’s lives for saying whatever is actually on your mind to someone who will simply receive it without agenda. The right context didn’t exist, and so the thing didn’t get said, and it accumulated.
One man said, without preamble and without apparent connection to anything: “My parents put me on a pedestal.”
I didn’t ask whether that was true or false. I kept listening, which meant I stayed open to what came next without deciding in advance what to do with it. What came next, over the following hour, was a portrait of two parents that sounded worried, ordinary, fallible—perhaps loving, perhaps overprotective in the way that parents who are anxious about getting it right tend to be—but not people placing someone on a pedestal. People on pedestals are elevated and admired and kept at a distance that prevents ordinary contact. What he described was something closer to the opposite: parents who pressed in too close, who needed something from him, who watched him in ways that felt to him less like admiration than like surveillance. Two accounts had arrived in the same conversation. They pointed in different directions.
I hadn’t produced them. He had. Both of them came from him, which meant that whatever was true about his parents, something in how he held the story contained a tension he hadn’t yet examined. My role in that was not to interpret it. Interpretation would have been a form of redirection—here is what you really mean, here is the correct reading of your own experience. I had no authority to offer that, and it would have served him less than what I actually did, which was to hold the inconsistency open long enough for him to see it himself.
What I said, at some point after it had become clear that the two accounts couldn’t both be right, was something like: help me understand something. You said earlier that your parents put you on a pedestal. But everything you’ve described since seems to point somewhere rather different. It was an invitation, not an explanation. I wasn’t telling him what was true. I was pointing at two things that existed simultaneously in what he’d said and asking him to look at them both at once.
He might have answered: you’re right. He might have said: no, because—and then offered something that would have resolved the contradiction in a way I hadn’t anticipated. He might have said: I’d never noticed that. All three were acceptable. None of them required me to have the answer. The answer, if there was one, lived in him, and my job was not to supply it but to create enough space around the question that he could move toward it at his own pace.
This is the shape of what men wanted, again and again, in those extended hours after the formal session ended. Not advice. Not explanation. Not the name for what they were experiencing, provided by someone with a framework and a filing system. They wanted the particular quality of attention that allowed them to hear themselves—to encounter what they actually thought and felt and believed as though from a slight distance, which is the distance necessary to examine something you normally live inside of without perspective. You cannot step outside your own experience to inspect it. But you can speak it into a room where another person receives it without immediately sorting it, and in speaking it you can sometimes hear it differently, notice what doesn’t fit, discover what you actually think as distinct from what you assumed you thought.
Most of the conversations were not about parents or childhood or the formative material that therapy tends to foreground. They were about whatever was most present: a decision at work, a relationship that felt stuck, a question about what to do next, a vague dissatisfaction that didn’t yet have a name. Ordinary life, pressing in with its ordinary weight. What distinguished these conversations was not their subject matter but the quality of space they happened in—a space that carried no expectation, no reciprocal demand, no subsequent accountability. A man could say something he wasn’t sure he meant and refine it without consequence. He could contradict himself and not be held to the contradiction. He could not know what he thought and say that too. The not-knowing was allowed. It was, in fact, often where the most useful things started.
I think often about what it means that men carry so much that they rarely say. Not because they are inarticulate—many of the men I spoke with were extremely articulate—but because the articulation requires a destination, and most of the destinations available to men in ordinary life come with conditions. A friend listens, but a friend also has needs, and history, and a perspective shaped by his own experience of you, which means he cannot always receive what you say without the reception being shaped by what he already knows. A partner is closer still, which means the stakes of speaking are higher, and the things left unsaid tend to be precisely the things that would change the most. A therapist offers a professional version of the space I’m describing, and for many men this works. But therapy carries its own frame—the clinical distance, the modality, the notes—and some men find the frame itself an obstacle.
What they found in a conversation with no frame, no agenda, no next session booked and no treatment plan building in the background, was the thing they had been reaching for through sex, through the urgency that brought them to the session in the first place. The experience of being present, without performance, in front of another person who was also present and who received what they said without immediately doing something with it. That was the intimacy. It had almost nothing to do with the physical. The physical was the door. What they found on the other side was a room they had been trying to locate for years, through means that weren’t equipped to take them there.
I don’t think this is exotic. I think it is the ordinary condition of men who have been given very few legitimate ways to need what they need and ask for what they want. The body was a plausible excuse—plausible enough that they could use it without having to know, consciously, that they were using it. They came for the massage. The massage delivered. And then the other thing was still there, the way it is always still there, and sometimes, in those extra hours that no one had planned for, they found their way toward it. Not all of them. Not always. But often enough that I stopped being surprised by it and started to understand it as the point.
Sex, in the narrow technical sense, is easy enough to find. The other thing is harder. Men spend considerable effort, and misdirect considerable appetite, in the search for it. It would help, I think, if more of them knew what they were actually looking for. The answer wouldn’t require them to find it in the place they’ve been looking. It might only require them to be somewhere, with someone, saying whatever is actually on their minds, and finding that the someone stays.
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