The Line And What It Protects
There is a boundary, and I want to talk about it honestly, because pretending it does not exist harms everyone in the vicinity of the pretence.
The work I did for thirty years was erotic in the sense that it involved the body, its pleasures, and the specific kind of attention that takes pleasure seriously as something worth attending to. It was not, for most of its duration, what would be described as a sexual encounter in the full sense—there was not, in the majority of sessions, the mutual sexual engagement between two men that that phrase usually implies. The distinction matters, and the distinction was real, and I want to say so plainly before I describe the much more interesting and complicated terrain that sits between the categories.
What I found in practice was that the categories—sexual and non-sexual, erotic and platonic, intimate and professional—were less cleanly separable than any framework I had read about, or any legal and social convention I was operating within, assumed them to be. Not because the boundary was not real, but because the boundary was a line across a landscape rather than a wall between two rooms, and the landscape itself was varied and interesting and different in every encounter.
Men arrived carrying the assumption that the work was sexual in the way that pornography is sexual—that the unclothed body and the touch and the arousal that might follow were all pointing toward a single specific destination. This assumption was partly a product of pornographic saturation. A culture in which the unclothed male body appears primarily in sexual contexts produces men who can only read the unclothed male body as sexual. The grammar of the image has been so thoroughly established that the body without clothes, in the presence of another person, arrives pre-loaded with sexual meaning regardless of the actual conditions of the encounter.
What happened when the encounter proceeded beyond that initial assumption, was often something different from what the assumption had predicted. The body became the body—not the sexual body, not the non-sexual body, but the body doing what bodies do in conditions of warmth and sustained attention. Arousal was part of this, sometimes, and the arousal was not separated from the experience as something requiring management or apology. But arousal was also not the destination, and in many encounters was not even the dominant quality of what happened. What was more consistently present was something else: a quality of being in the body rather than monitoring it, of sensation being received rather than performed, of the encounter being what it was rather than what the pornographic grammar had predicted it would be.
I want to be careful not to claim too much for this. The work was erotic. I was not providing massage in the way a physiotherapist provides massage. The conditions of the room and the nature of the work created the possibility of arousal and acknowledged that possibility rather than treating it as a problem to be managed. What I am trying to describe is the space between the pornographic destination—the encounter understood as performance building toward a specific act—and the clinical neutrality that pretends the body’s erotic dimension does not exist in rooms where it very clearly does. In my experience, that space is where most of what is interesting about the male body’s experience of itself actually lives.
In the past several years I have been offering something I describe as a “boyfriend experience”. I want to try to say what I mean by this, because the phrase arrives with its own freight of assumption—associations with escort work, with performance, with the purchased simulation of intimacy. What I mean by it is something more specific and also more modest. The boyfriend experience I offer is a form of sustained, unhurried physical closeness—lying together, holding, being held, the contact of bodies without the expectation that the contact is building toward anything in particular. It is intimate without being explicitly sexual. It is warm without being performed. It acknowledges that men have bodies and that bodies benefit from the sustained physical closeness of another body in ways that the sexual encounter, with its specific grammar and its specific destination, does not always provide.
What I have found in offering this is that it addresses something different from what the erotic massage addressed, though the two overlap considerably. The erotic massage offered a man his own body’s capacity for pleasure, discovered through sustained attention to the whole body rather than its most symbolically loaded parts. The boyfriend experience offers something that is less about individual sensation and more about the quality of physical presence in relation to another person. The shyness that many men carried into the erotic massage—the hesitation, the brief covering gesture, the apology for the body—is present in the boyfriend experience as well, but it has a different texture. It was less about whether the body was adequate to the erotic occasion and more about whether the man was entitled to this particular kind of closeness.
I wrote elsewhere about the phenomenon of men who had not been non-sexually touched for long periods—the specific quality of relief that arrived when sustained physical attention was given to the body without the pressure of the sexual destination. The boyfriend experience operates in that territory. It says: the body can be held. The body can be close to another body. This can happen without the closeness needing to produce anything, without the arousal that might arise needing to go anywhere in particular, without the intimacy being a step toward something that has a name and a conclusion.
What I notice about the men who come for this is that several of them are not men who lack sexual partners or sexual opportunities. They are men who lack this specific kind of closeness—the closeness that does not require performance, that does not require the management of desire toward an expected outcome, that simply provides the physical fact of another warm body, present and attentive, without agenda. The sexual encounter has its own grammar, and the grammar has a destination. The boyfriend experience has, or I try to give it, a different grammar—one that is not going anywhere in particular, that is simply where it is.
The impact on self-awareness, when men remain in this long enough, is something I have watched and found genuinely interesting. The man who arrived shielding himself from his own body’s visibility—monitoring, apologising, managing the impression he was making—will sometimes, over the course of an extended period of this kind of contact, stop. The monitoring stops not because anything has been resolved but because the conditions are not requesting it. Nobody is assessing. Nobody is building toward a verdict. The body can simply be there, warm and heavy and real, receiving the closeness of another body, and after a while the commentary on the body quietens and the body takes over.
That quietening of the commentary is what I have been trying to describe throughout these essays as the condition in which the body finds out something about itself. It is not a therapeutic outcome. I am not treating anything. What I am providing is conditions—and the conditions happen to make certain discoveries possible.
I want to return to the question of how non-sexual nudity is misread as sexual, because I think the misreading has become more acute as pornographic saturation has increased. The men who came to me in the earlier years of my practice had a certain quality of genuine naivety about the distinction—they were not always sure what to expect, partly because the landscape I was operating in had fewer established reference points. The men who came in the later years often arrived with a more specific set of expectations, and those expectations were shaped by the visual grammar of the pornographic content that had become the primary vocabulary for the unclothed male body in the culture they had been living in.
What pornographic saturation produces is not the elimination of the non-sexual from the possible. It is the difficulty of accessing the non-sexual, because the grammar has become so established that the body in any state of undress, in the presence of another person, arrives trailing its pornographic associations. The man who has grown up with the pornographic grammar as his primary vocabulary for the naked body reads every naked body through that grammar, including his own. The question “is this sexual” is almost always yes in that grammar, because the grammar was built around the assumption that the unclothed body and the sexual act are the same conversation.
What I was doing in the room—and what the boyfriend experience continues to do—is not a refusal of the erotic. It is a proposal that the erotic is larger than the pornographic grammar suggests. That the body can be close to another body in states of arousal, warmth, and physical intimacy without the arousal requiring management toward a specific destination. That intimacy and nakedness and even desire can coexist with a quality of attention that is not performance and not building toward anything and not requiring the body to produce a specific output.
Some men found this immediately recognisable—they arrived already knowing that they wanted something in this territory, even if they did not have the vocabulary for it. Others arrived with the pornographic grammar so firmly installed that the encounter kept trying to resolve itself into the expected destination, and the experience of it not resolving was itself new information about what was possible.
The boundary is real. It is not a wall. It is a line across terrain that most men have been told is simpler than it is—told by the visual culture, told by the market, told by the long history of the male body being either managed into clinical neutrality or ignited into sexual performance, with very little in between.
The in-between is where I have spent my working life. It remains, in my experience, the most interesting part of the landscape.
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