Sex and Massage

I get no sexual pleasure from massage. This may surprise attentive readers of Mole, who will have observed that I get sexual pleasure from a great range of things, from walking in a heavy rain to pouring cream into my coffee. But it's true. I was enjoying watching a woman in one of my classes recently, a dancer, who was leaning over to take her books out of her pack, and it occurred to me that I'd had my hands on her naked body (modestly draped, of course, in the American style) a few times. The interesting thing is that it was the first time that my attraction to her and the massages had bumped up against each other in my mind: they belonged to completely different categories of experience. They simply had nothing to do with each other.

It's not that massage is erotically neutral. It's not. It's antithetical to eros. It moves in the opposite direction. Eros is about narrowing attention and winding it up. Massage, however, is about opening attention and unwinding it. I suppose they arrive ideally at the same place -- a place of stillness, communion, and release -- but they arrive by opposite means. And they don't mix well at all. Massage junkie though I am, I've always been irritated and thrown off if a partner starts massaging me during love play. Likewise, if I begin to have an erotic response to getting massage, which has happened once or twice, it breaks the mood and threatens to wreck the massage -- it is, in fact, a distinctly unpleasant and alienating experience.

The association of massage and sex, which I still encounter from time to time, depresses me. Not because it's a threat to the respectability of the massage profession. I'm not a big fan of respectability. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is the tactile ignorance and deprivation it reveals. To a starving person all food is alike.