I am a masseur and a teacher of massage. Although I have given hundreds of wonderful massages to women, my specialty is touching men. In fact, in the last twenty years I have massaged more than 10,000 men. I am honored to say that laying hands on men is the “great work” of my life. I would like to share with you some of the wisdom that has come to me giving, receiving, and teaching massage.
In 1979, as I was completing my master’s degree at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, I realized that for too long I had been studying literature, psychology, mathematics, and philosophy, but that I had had no formal education in the subject that intrigued me most- pleasuring a man. My traditional quest for knowledge had taken me deep into the realm of words and ideas. Yet, I had forgotten the wisdom available to me within my own body and within the bodies of those around me. I trusted a voice within me that said, “Look for a teacher.” Two weeks later I was enrolled in the Berkeley School of Massage in their professional certification program. I found it humorous that many of my class-conscious friends were horrified that I was training to become a manual laborer. But that hundred-hour massage training has had more impact on my life than all the thousands of class hours I endured during my undergraduate and graduate education.
I did have one full-body massage just as I began graduate school. John Coleman, S.J., my academic advisor in Berkeley, announced to a group of students that he had just completed a course in Esalen Massage and he was looking for bodies to practice on. I volunteered. Although I knew this massage would not be erotic, I feared I might get an erection since I was to be naked. Before he began the massage, John explained the goal of Esalen massage was to awaken consciousness throughout my body. “The long, slow strokes from your head to your feet and back again are to give you a sense of wholeness and well-being.” It was interesting that this massage was not about tense muscles. I was surprised that I had nothing to do but breathe and enjoy and surrender.
There were parts of me that woke up during that massage that had been asleep for years. My whole body screamed yes to this touch experience. Yes! Yes! Yes! This massage was, without a doubt, the most significant two hours of my first twenty-five years. An older and wiser man had initiated me into a new way of feeling and being a body. That massage helped me discover my vocation, my life path.
All men need to be touched. There is no place in America that suffers more from the legacy of rugged individualism than the male body. As boys enter their teen years, they are overtly and covertly initiated into the loneliness and isolation of being a man. The mantra of my childhood, chanted nonstop by teachers and parents, was “Keep your hands to yourself.” I am sad to say I heeded the adults’ warnings. As a teenager, I was consumed by skin hunger that I felt only as generalized rage. I totally identified with Paul Simon’s lyrics, “I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock. I am an island.” In my early twenties, I was Tommy, the boy who plaintively reached out his arms, singing, “See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me.” I still hear those words thirty years later in the men I touch on a daily basis.
Wanna erotic massage?A San Francisco masseur once wrote that after giving a thousand massages the masseur becomes enlightened. I am not sure what “enlightened” means, but I do know that I have become extremely sensitive to my clients. I have educated my empathic skills so that, if I choose to, I can feel in my body what the man I am massaging is feeling. This helps me focus on tensions and places where he might be feeling pain.
Many times, after I had finished what I thought was an excellent session, I would feel a deep dissatisfaction in the man I had just massaged. Although I had been sensuous and intimate with most of his body, I had chosen not to touch his genitals. This is the norm in massage therapy today. But, instead of the man feeling his body being massaged into wholeness, he feels a split between the parts that I touched and the parts I didn’t touch. This dilemma has always been with bodyworkers and other touch therapists.
In 1983 I transgressed professional boundaries and became an erotic masseur. As AIDS began to spread among men who had sex with other men, I recognized a need for a new, no-risk erotic way of connecting and playing. And so I developed and taught Taoist Erotic Massage. This astonishing combination of conscious breathing and genital stimulation activates highly pleasurable states within a man’s body without having ejaculation as the goal. Erotic massage is a wonderful intimacy for one man to offer another.
In 1984, I founded the Body Electric School of Massage in Oakland, California, after reading the research of the brilliant developmental neuropsychologist James Prescott. According to Prescott’s studies “deprivation of physical affection in human relationships…constitutes the single greatest source of physical violence in human societies.” Prescott’s studies of dozens of cultures convinced me that massage was an important antidote to violence. In other words, to know how to pleasure a man’s body is to know how to stop violence in today’s world. This essential truth of men’s liberation was missed by the leaders of the so-called “men’s movement.” In fact, Iron John not only never gives or receives a massage; for all we know, he doesn’t have a penis.
Massage separates the acts of giving and receiving. Many men discover that they are very good at giving massage but terrible when it comes to receiving. They can’t let go of being in control. They don’t trust themselves or the masseur enough just to receive. I have learned to let go into the pleasure of receiving touch by focusing on the effortless exhaling of each breath. And I have helped many men who were having trouble with receiving pleasure by guiding them in conscious breathing where all of their effort is on the inhale and the exhale leaves their lungs like a gentle breeze.
I have massaged hundreds of men who have had life-threatening illnesses. When I touch men who are close to death, I try to let go of my own sense of time. This moment is all there is. I emphasize energy work like acupressure on those men who are sick or close to death, because often men who are dying do not want to be grounded in the body they are preparing to leave.
After giving thousands of massages, I realize that I continue to touch men because of the mystery I feel in the act of touching. In other words, touching men is my spiritual path and my meditation practice. Touching men is where I contact the sacredness of life.
“See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me” by Joseph Kramer was written for Male Erotic Massage: A Guide to Sex and Spirit by Kenneth Ray Stubbs, Ph.D.
