The Body That Cannot Be Met
There is a particular kind of stillness that arrived in some men after about twenty minutes on the table. The earlier part of that time—the undressing, the settling, the adjustment to being horizontal in a room with another man—had its own quality, often slightly effortful.
But then something would shift. The body would stop managing the situation and start being in it. The breath would change. The skin would change in a way I can only describe as becoming more available—not to anything specific, but to the fact of being touched. What I noticed about that shift was not that it was sexual, exactly, though it could be that too. It was something more fundamental than sexual. It was sensual—the body returning to itself as a thing that received sensation, that had nerve endings and warmth and weight, that was made of something and was somewhere.
I have been thinking about when that shift didn’t happen, and why, because the cases where it didn’t happen were as instructive as the ones where it did.
Some men arrived with a body they had brought with them rather than a body they were in. They had their body available to the occasion in the way you make a room available to a guest—presented, prepared, slightly not-inhabited. The body was ready to receive information about how it was being received, but it was not particularly ready to receive touch. What it was primarily available to was assessment. A quality of the man’s attention was turned outward, monitoring, checking what was happening against some standard that existed outside the room. I found this consistently more difficult to work with than a man who arrived anxious, because anxiety at least was in the body. The monitoring I am describing was somewhere else, and you cannot reach somewhere else with your hands.
I began to understand something about this over many years: the body that cannot be met is not an unresponsive body or a defended body or even necessarily an anxious body. It is a body that has been converted, over time, from a subject of experience into an object of evaluation. The conversion is not always conscious. Most of the men I am thinking of were not aware that they were monitoring themselves. They thought they were simply present. But the quality of their presence was that of someone performing presence rather than being present—going through the motions of relaxation, demonstrating openness, showing that they were the kind of person who could do this.
I find the word performance useful here, not as a criticism but as a description. What I watched in those men was sex and sensuality as performance in a very specific sense: as something done in relation to an audience, even when there was no audience present other than the internal observer the man carried with him. The question the performance was answering was always some version of: is this right? Am I doing this correctly? Does this look like someone who is enjoying themselves? And the performance was disconnected from the simple prior question, which was: what does this feel like?
The word sensuality is harder to use precisely than I would like, because it has been slightly corrupted by association with a particular style of lifestyle advertising—candles, fabrics, a certain vagueness. What I mean by it is more specific: the body’s capacity to receive sensation as primary information, without that information immediately being processed through a filter of assessment or comparison. A hand on warm skin. The weight of a body. The particular quality of water, or sun, or contact. These are not performances. They are events in the body, and they require the body to be present as a receiver.
What I observed, repeatedly, was that the conversion of the body from subject to object had damaged this capacity, or at least suppressed it. The man who was monitoring himself could not feel what he was feeling, because the monitoring occupied the attention that feeling required. He was too busy watching himself have an experience to have the experience.
I have thought about this in relation to masturbation, which men rarely discussed directly in my room but which surfaced in what they said about their bodies and their experience of them. What I have noticed from the conversations I did have, and from what I have read about how men describe their own sexual experience, is a shift in how masturbation is understood and practised.
The language around it has moved toward efficiency—it is stress relief, release, a physical function that requires management in the way appetite requires management. Several men described it in terms that had nothing to do with pleasure, in the sense of sensation deliberately attended to. They described it as a process with an endpoint, something completed in order to return to the ordinary business of the day. The self-exploration that an adolescent engages in—the discovery of what the body responds to, the building of a vocabulary of sensation—had been replaced by a procedure.
I am being cautious about this observation because I cannot draw on a sample large enough to sustain a strong claim. What I can say is that the men who arrived in my room most at home in their own sensory experience were not always the men who had had the most sexual experience, or the most varied partners. They were the men who had stayed curious about their own responses—who had not converted the body into an instrument with a single useful output but had maintained some relationship with it as a source of information about what felt good, what felt interesting, what felt like something.
The question of type sits here, though I approach it carefully because the word is loaded with its own politics. What I have found, both from what men said and from what I have read, is that the idea of a type—a specific configuration of body that one finds attractive—often functions as a substitute for a more nuanced engagement with the actual body that is present. The type is an image, a template, and the actual body is either measured against that template and found adequate or inadequate, or it is consumed in proportion to how closely it approximates the template. What the template cannot accommodate is the body as a particular body—the specific person, the specific warmth, the specific way of moving and responding that has nothing to do with whether the body is the right shape.
I have worked with men who had very specific ideas about what bodies they were attracted to and men who had almost none. What I observed was not that one group was more satisfied than the other—that would be too neat. What I observed was that the men with the most fixed templates were often the ones who found the least in actual encounters, because the actual encounter was always doing something the template hadn’t accounted for. The body in the room was always messier, warmer, stranger, more present and more various than the type had predicted. If the template was the primary filter, the excess of the actual body went unregistered.
This connects to something I noticed about the difference between a body assessed and a body met. I am borrowing met from Martin Buber, at a slight remove—the distinction between an I-Thou encounter, in which the other is present as a subject, and an I-It encounter, in which the other is present as an object. I am not invoking philosophy to make an argument. I am using the distinction because it names something I observed.
Some men arrived in the room able to meet the occasion—to be present with what was happening as a mutual event, to receive as well as to offer, to allow the encounter to be something that could surprise them. Others arrived to consume the occasion—to use the time and the body and the experience for a result that was already fixed before they arrived, and to leave when the result had been produced.
I do not say this to privilege the first kind over the second. Men arrive where they are for reasons that have a long history, and the consumed body is not the result of personal failure but of everything I have been tracing in these essays: the image archive, the monitoring, the conversion of the body into an object of assessment. What I observe is the cost. The consumed body cannot surprise you. It can only confirm or disappoint. And when it confirms, the confirmation is temporary—it satisfies the template rather than the person, and the template remains hungry almost immediately.
The men who seemed to get the most from being in a room with another body were not the men who arrived with the clearest ideas about what they wanted. They were the men who arrived with enough curiosity about what might happen to be open to what did happen. The openness was not indifference—they were not without preferences. But the preferences were held loosely enough to be revised by the actual event. A body they had not anticipated responding to would produce a response. A sensation they had not expected would arrive and be noticed and followed. The encounter was generative rather than confirmatory.
This seems to me to be the thing that the body image crisis, if that is what it is, has been slowly eroding—not the capacity for attraction, which remains, but the capacity for this. The capacity to be surprised by an actual body. To find that warmth and particular weight and the specific way a person breathes are their own kind of interesting, regardless of whether they approximate any template.
I think about the men who arrived monitoring and went away still monitoring, and the men who arrived monitoring and stopped somewhere around twenty minutes in. What changed in the second group was not the body they were in. It was the attention they were applying to it. The attention moved from the outside to the inside, from the evaluation to the event. And for the duration of that attention being inside rather than outside, the body was neither a performance nor a product. It was just the body, receiving what was available to receive.
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