The Body That Didn’t Have To Audition
I knew, after a while, that some of the men who came to me were not primarily coming for a massage. They were coming because they had been rejected, or expected to be rejected, or had organised their lives around the anticipation of rejection, and what I offered was a room in which that particular anxiety was not in play.
The price of a session was small against the cost of approaching another man and having the door closed in your face because of how you looked. Several men said this to me directly, in those terms. Others said it in other ways, or said nothing but arrived in a manner that made it legible. The anticipation of rejection has a particular quality in a body—a preparedness, a slight bracing, a way of offering oneself that is already half-apology.
I want to be precise about what I mean when I say the anticipation of rejection and the embarrassment about one’s body are not the same thing. Embarrassment about how you look is an opinion about yourself—something you have concluded from comparing your body to a standard, to an ideal, to whatever image the culture has supplied as the measure.
The anticipation of rejection is something else: it is an expectation of another person’s response. It is the projection forward into the moment when someone else sees what you see, and concludes—as you fear they will conclude—that it is not enough. The embarrassment is internal. The anticipation is about what happens at the door.
What I could do, professionally, was remove the second of these as a factor. Not the first—I could not change what a man thought of himself, and I was not in the business of trying to. But the anticipation of rejection—the specific anxiety about what happens when another person sees the body and decides—that I could remove simply by having a professional stance that made it irrelevant. The body that came to me did not have to audition. The decision to work with it had already been made before it arrived, and would not be revised based on what it looked like when it got there. This was not a performed acceptance. It was simply the condition of the work, in the same way that a physiotherapist does not select knees based on aesthetic preference. If you find old knees distasteful, you are in the wrong profession. The knee that arrives is the knee you work with.
I had preferences, of course. Everyone has preferences, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But preferences were not the professional instrument. Observation was the instrument. And observation and comparison are different operations. Comparison places the body in front of you against a standard external to the body—a template, an ideal, another body you have seen. Observation attends to what is in front of you as itself, asking what this body is doing, how this person inhabits it, what the muscle and skin and breath are telling you about the person you are working with. In thirty years of this work, comparison was almost entirely useless to me. Observation was indispensable. The two should not be confused.
What I found when I applied observation rather than comparison was that every body was interesting in ways the comparison would have obscured. The body shaped by decades of physical labour had a quality of density in the muscle that was distinct from the density of a body that had been worked on in a gym—the labour muscle was functional in a specific way, oriented toward particular movements, compressed in particular directions. The body shaped by illness or the aftermath of surgery had its own specific intelligence—accommodations that had been made, compensations that had developed, the body’s ongoing negotiation with what had happened to it. The body of a man who had lived with significant weight for most of his adult life had a quality of solidity and warmth that was its own fact, not a compromise version of some other body it was failing to be.
I noticed early that the men who came to me carrying the most acute anticipation of rejection were not always the men whose bodies gave the most obvious grounds for it by any standard I could apply. Some of the men who arrived most braced for the door to close were men whose bodies were, in any reasonable assessment, entirely ordinary—middle-aged, slightly soft in the way that most middle-aged bodies are slightly soft, unremarkable in the best sense of the word. What they were carrying was not a response to their actual body. It was a response to an image—to the gap between what they were and what the narrowing visual vocabulary of the past few decades had told them they needed to be. The door they feared having closed was not being slammed because of anything real. It was being slammed by an abstraction.
Other men arrived who had better grounds, by any external measure, for expecting difficulty—bodies that had been significantly marked by illness, by accident, by age, by specific conditions that altered the body’s presentation in ways that were visible immediately. Some of those men arrived with an ease that surprised me, given what they were carrying in. They had, it seemed, arrived at a relationship with their own physical fact that the other men had not found. The acceptance was not performed. It was simply what had happened—the negotiation between the man and his body had been completed, at some point, and what remained was equanimity.
I found those men among the most instructive I encountered, not because ease in one’s body is a moral achievement or a lesson to be derived, but because the equanimity was clearly not dependent on the body meeting any particular standard. It was available to bodies that had been through a great deal and looked like it. What produced it was not something I could identify from outside. What I noticed was its presence, and the contrast with the bracing that other men brought in bodies that had less apparent reason for it.
The language men used when they arrived was, as it always is, evidence. Some said: “I know this isn’t much.” Some said: “I hope you don’t mind.” Some said nothing but offered the body in a particular way—slightly forward, slightly exposed to assessment before the assessment had been invited—that did the same work in gesture that the words did in speech. The body auditioning before anyone had asked it to. The anticipation of the door so thoroughly absorbed that it was operating even in a room where there was no door.
What I could offer, in that room, was the simple prior fact that the assessment had already occurred and the verdict had already been reached before the man arrived, and the verdict was: yes, come in, we will work with this. Not because I was indifferent to what arrived, but because indifference was beside the point. The body would be what it was, and what it was would be what I worked with, and the working would proceed on the basis of what observation revealed rather than what comparison judged.
I have been thinking about what this amounts to, in the context of the larger history I have been tracing through these essays. The history of the male body in Western culture is, in significant part, a history of the body being evaluated—by art, by law, by medicine, by the advertising image, by other men in changing rooms and on beaches and at the door. The body has spent most of the last two thousand years on probation of one kind or another, subject to verdicts about whether it met the standard, whether it was the right kind of body for the relevant context, whether it required management or concealment or correction. What I was offering, in a room with a table and a bottle of oil, was a brief suspension of the probation. Not because I had decided the evaluation was wrong or the standards unjust. Because the evaluation was irrelevant to what was going to happen.
I am aware this is a modest thing. The hour ended and the man dressed and went back to a world where the probation continued. I did not change anything beyond the room. But what I noticed, with some consistency, was that the removal of the anticipation of rejection—even temporarily, even in a single hour—changed the quality of the man’s presence. The bracing would ease. The body that had arrived auditioning would gradually stop auditioning and start simply being there. Not because anything had been resolved, but because the condition of the room had not required the audition.
I keep thinking about the men who arrived with the anticipation so thoroughly installed that it continued to operate even after the conditions for it had been removed. Men who, twenty minutes in, were still managing themselves against an expected assessment that had already not arrived. The body still offering itself for a verdict the room had declined to deliver. That persistence is its own observation.
The anticipation of rejection is not a response to the room you are in. It is a response to the rooms you have been in before, and the rooms you have imagined being in, and the doors you have imagined closing, and the accumulated experience of what happens when the body is presented for inspection and found wanting.
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