Fantasies
Fantasy is not the same thing as desire, though the two are often treated as interchangeable. Desire is immediate—it points at something present or proximately available. Fantasy is more elaborate, more constructed, often more specific, and occasionally more difficult to explain than the fantasy itself.
In my experience it also had less to do with sex, as sex tends to be defined, than with something harder to name: the particular shape of a man’s imagination, the private theatre he had been running for years, the scenario that had acquired an almost architectural specificity through repetition and refinement. And more often than not it was about bodies—male bodies, the presence of them, the arrangement of them, the particular quality of attention they might receive—rather than about the mechanics of what those bodies might do together.
I offered men the opportunity to bring their fantasies into the session. I required one condition: tell me before you arrive. This is not an unreasonable request, and I explained it plainly to anyone who asked why. A two-hour session is a specific thing with its own rhythm and its own quality of attention, and asking me, at some point in the second hour, to suddenly become a commanding officer confronting a soldier caught absent without leave is asking me to make a transition I haven’t prepared for, in a direction I haven’t thought about, in a character I have no prior relationship with.
It is a reasonable request as a piece of advance information. As a mid-session instruction, it places me in an impossible position and tends to produce, in my experience, something that satisfies neither of us. The same applied to dirty talk, which I found stilted and rather silly without preparation, and in which the silliness, once noticed, produced laughter—mine, at least—which does reliably ruin the effect. Some things require rehearsal. Fantasy, when it involves another person, requires at minimum some advance warning that it is coming.
Four examples will give some sense of the range.
A man wrote to me before his visit to say that he wanted us to spend the entire session in silence. No words exchanged from the moment he arrived to the moment he left. I confirmed I could do this. He arrived and immediately began talking to me with some animation. I responded with attention and, when it seemed appropriate, a smile, but did not speak. After a while I noticed his animation shifting toward something closer to frustration. He could not understand why I would not engage with what he was saying. Eventually he asked me, with some directness, why I was refusing to speak. I reminded him of what he had asked for. He had forgotten it entirely.
We then talked for a long time about why he had made the request in the first place. What emerged was that he lived in a world of non-stop talking—conversation as obligation, words as currency, the requirement to be articulate and responsive and engaged every hour of every working day. The silence had been, he thought, a way of stepping outside that. What the forgetting told us was that he had stepped so far outside it, so quickly, that the original request had dissolved into the very thing he’d wanted relief from. We found this equally funny.
A second man wrote to say he wished to wear his y-fronts throughout the session. I told him I had no objection as long as he understood they would get oily, which they would. He visited six times. On each visit he wore a different style and a different colour. He did not explain the significance of this and I did not ask, because the curiosity—and I was curious—seemed less important than letting the pattern run at its own pace. After the sixth visit, at which point I had concluded that he had cycled through the available range of styles, I never saw him again. What the y-fronts were in relation to his fantasy I genuinely do not know. The fantasy had its own internal logic, and the logic was entirely self-contained. I offered the space and the non-judgement, and assume this was sufficient.
The third request did not result in a session at all. A man wrote to describe in some detail what he wanted: to arrive and be tied to the massage table, naked, with pink satin ribbons that he would supply. Once constrained, he wanted to be covered from head to toe with man-sized tissues. He did not explain what was to happen after that, and I was sufficiently curious that I waited to find out. He did not book. I thought about this for a while and arrived at a conclusion that seemed to me the most probable: the act of writing the fantasy out in sufficient detail to send it to another person had done most of the work the fantasy needed to do. The expression of it, the articulation and transmission of the specific detail—the pink, the satin, the man-sized tissues—had been, in some functional sense, sufficient. The session would have been an anticlimactic addition to something already complete.
The fourth was funnier, and also the one that tested my composure most reliably. It was a request I encountered not once but on enough occasions that I came to recognise its arrival. It would come early in the session, delivered with varying degrees of directness, and in its various forms it amounted to the same thing: take advantage of me and make me do whatever you want. The phrasing differed. The logical structure did not.
I always made the same response. You cannot make someone make you do what they want if you ask for it first. The request asks for coercion. Coercion requires the absence of consent. The consent is already present in the asking, which means the coercion is, from the outset, structurally impossible. The man asking for this has already exercised the very agency whose suspension he claims to want.
I said this, or some version of it, with as straight a face as I could manage, which was not always a very straight face. I should add that on several occasions my more immediate reaction was a strong desire to ask the man to leave. Not because the request was offensive, but because the particular quality of self-deception involved in asking for coercion exhausted me slightly. A man who cannot see the contradiction in that request is a man with whom I was likely to spend the rest of the session doing similar work, and the work was tiring in a way that other work was not.
These are four out of a much longer catalogue accumulated over many years. I have read Krafft-Ebing, whose “Psychopathia Sexualis” conducts a similar inventory of human sexual imagination and buries it in medical Latin, which has the effect of making the extraordinary seem clinical and the clinical seem authoritative. I have sometimes wondered, given the book’s enduring popularity, whether some of my clients had read it and found themselves described there. That seems possible. People read such books for many reasons, not all of them academic.
What I found more interesting than any individual fantasy was the quality of relief that accompanied the telling of it. A fantasy that has been private for a long time accumulates a kind of pressure—not always uncomfortable, but present, a thing held in a particular place that requires maintenance. Telling it to someone who receives it without alarm or derision and without immediately running it through a diagnostic framework releases something of that pressure, regardless of whether the fantasy is ever enacted. I noticed that some men arrived with a fantasy and left having described it and expressed no further interest in acting on it. The description had done the work. The session itself, the massage, the conversation, happened around the fantasy rather than in service of it.
I was not a fantasy fulfilment service, though I worked to be useful within that direction when it was what a man had come for. What I offered more consistently was a room in which the particular privately-held thing could be brought out and looked at without immediately requiring a verdict. Some fantasies, examined in that light, turned out to be questions. The man who wanted silence was asking what it felt like to be without the requirement to perform availability. The man who wore the y-fronts was exploring something about his own body and its presentation that he had no other context to explore. The man who wanted the pink satin ribbons had, I suspect, already found his answer before he ever came to see me.
The capacity of human sexual imagination is not, in my experience, alarming. It is, in the main, specific and particular and deeply personal and occasionally very funny, and it asks to be received in roughly those terms. Krafft-Ebing classified. I mostly just listened, and let the fantasy be what it was, which in many cases turned out to be considerably less complicated than the years of privacy surrounding it had made it seem.
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