Here is an article I’d like to share with all the women thinking about manifesting their own healing. Forwarding from Philadelphia magazine, May 2009.
Sex: Very Desperate Housewives (I so dislike this title!) *To distort the beautiful sharing bodywork can be and write a titillating headline. Ahh!*(my comments, not the article)
A man willing to pay for sex in the city can find it easily. But for a woman looking to buy erotic pleasure, it’s not so simple. Then our writer found Brian, who will come to your home to deliver a certain sort of massage
By Loren Hunt
Page 1 of 4
Betty [Client names and identifying characteristics have been changed.] lit all the candles because the electricity had gone out due to a thunderstorm raging through the Delaware Valley, not because she expected the massage to be particularly romantic. She’d found the massage therapist online, and scheduled the appointment for a night when she knew she’d be alone, with no kids or husband to distract her from this simple bought pleasure that, at 46, she was just starting to feel she deserved. Betty didn’t realize exactly how pleasurable the experience would be. When Brian showed up at her door with his massage table and waited for her to take her clothes off in the other room, it was all business. Betty was so self-conscious about her body at first that she almost didn’t want to step out into the living room without clothes on. She was the first to admit she was no supermodel, no size two or four or six or any of those trim little numbers that women are always striving to diminish themselves into. But she reminded herself that Brian was a professional and surely had seen worse. And what this whole thing was about was how badly she needed to be touched, a need that had lately begun to overrule all self-consciousness, all fear, all propriety. When Brian began to massage her, whispering in her ear, “It’s all about you,” Betty’s enjoyment must have been obvious. “I have another website,” he told her. “I offer a full body massage, where every part of your body is touched, with a full release.” Same price; a hundred bucks. Was she interested? The answer was yes, oh God, yes.
I first stumbled across Brian’s ad buried in the something-for-everyone circus of Craigslist while researching the options available to women for erotic pleasure of the purchased variety. When men want sexual gratification, they don’t have to look very hard to find it in Philadelphia, in almost any price range. What I was looking for was an equivalent just as readily available to women. I wasn’t expecting to find much. As I clicked around on Craigslist, though, I realized I really wanted to. Not so much for myself right now. I was thinking of myself all alone at 60, or married to a husband who was impotent or uninterested, or me on a business trip to some lonely town, or in any number of situations where it would just be more practical to pay someone to get the job done than to go out and find it. As I’d suspected, there wasn’t much out there that fit my basic criterion: It had to be easier and no less dubiously safe than anything I could arrange for myself at the local bar.
PERHAPS SAYING THERE wasn’t much out there is unfair. Rather, there wasn’t much that sounded like something I might do, regardless of how badly I was craving touch or company. Sure, there was the guy with the boa constrictor draped around his bare shoulders, whose typo-ridden ad offered cheap massages for the ladies. He actually seemed like one of the better options, because at least he was charging. Most of the other ads offering to service women were amateur men seeking sex, in the same way men seek sex in practically every other section of Craigslist. But these ads almost invariably used “massage” as a code word. I looked for other possible codes, such as “pool boy” or, grasping at straws, “private car washer,” but no dice. There was a lot of jabber about “tantra,” an Eastern practice that incorporates orgasm into its mostly spiritual course of study. Brian’s ad was different. What he was proposing sounded just like an ordinary massage. When you followed the ad to his website, Pleasinghandsmassage.com, however, it became clear: Brian markets himself as a legitimate, professional massage therapist who happens to massage everything. Specifically, everything on women. The website is no-nonsense, light on the flowery promises, and heavy on testimonials that include the e-mail addresses of his most satisfied clients. Brian ranges far and wide from his Jersey home to serve clients in the Philadelphia area — he travels with his folding massage table — and points beyond. In my mind, the distinction between this website and the other advertisements I’ve looked at is self-evident: This is something women would do.
Despite the close quarters at the counter of the Dutch Eating Place at Reading Terminal Market, Brian of Pleasing Hands Massage is unflinching about explicitly discussing the nature of his business. I can sense the ears of everyone around us perking up as I struggle through all the possible polite euphemisms for what makes Brian’s massages different from those available at a spa or gym: “full release,” “happy ending,” “complete full-body massage,” and his own “pleasing hands.” Brian, being in the business of making women feel comfortable in situations that could very quickly turn uncomfortable, patiently matches my euphemisms until I get over myself and come out with it: Genital massage. Clitoris. Orgasm.
“There are any number of reasons why my clients come to me,” Brian tells me. “Which is to say that there are any number of reasons why someone would feel the need to be touched. I work with sexual abuse survivors. I’ve served as sort of swinger training wheels for couples who are experimenting with the idea of opening their relationship. I’ve been the entertainment for girls’ weekends at the beach. I’ve helped some achieve their goal of G-spot ejaculation. I’ve worked on women whose husbands were impotent … pretty much you name it.” Brian doesn’t discriminate, as long as a prospective client is at least 18. His clients sometimes ask him whether he finds giving full-release massages arousing. “I can get aroused,” Brian says. “I’ve gotten aroused — but I’m there for the person I’m working on, not my needs.”
age 3 of 4
LAINE, A SPUNKY 50-year-old manager of a suburban hair salon, says she was almost too nervous about having a strange man in her house to book her massage with Brian. Curiosity got the better of her. “When I opened the door and saw him, though, I trusted him completely. There was this big bodybuilder guy in a t-shirt that said ‘Massage Therapist,’ filling up the whole doorway. It sounds silly, but he looked like such a nice man.” Brian, 39 years old, is enormous in all directions, the kind of big man that even other big men would not want to anger, buzzed bald and dressed simply in shorts and a t-shirt. His voice is mild and friendly, and he’s engaged to a woman in secretarial temp work who’s interested in becoming a massage therapist. Brian’s the sort of archetypal bruiser-turned-teddy-bear that women trust instinctively.
I had originally intended to book a massage with Brian myself and write about the experience. The legality seemed questionable, though, in that hair-splitting, ambiguous way that would probably be nothing to worry about if I weren’t planning to write about pleasing hands. Brian himself says the legality of his massages is “sort of in a gray area.” The police department’s take seems equally ambiguous. Sergeant Irvin Riley of the Philadelphia Vice Enforcement Unit told me: “A massage becomes prostitution when an extra sexual service is offered for extra money. If the massage costs the same amount with the sexual element as it does without it, that’s considered to be the business of two consenting adults.” The department’s public affairs division, however, took a harsher view, calling paid-for massages that become sexual a form of “prostitution.” Legal or not, I was too chicken to go through with it.
Not so Mary, a 47-year-old college administrator who hired Brian after her marriage of 22 years fell apart. “I wasn’t comfortable dating yet, but I thought that this was something I could do for myself,” she says. After a moment’s hesitation, she adds, “My husband never touched me down there. Every time I’ve had an orgasm, I did it for myself. It was hard to get used to the idea of anyone else even trying to give me one.” While Betty the candle-lighter is still married and intends to stay that way, her story is similar: “I got married for the wrong reasons, as a lot of women my age have. You get to a certain age, your friends start getting married, you meet someone who seems like he’d make a good husband … and then the rest of your life happens,” she tells me over the phone. She’s not complaining; her voice is matter-of-fact. “My husband is … ” she begins, and then pauses to think. “My husband is my husband. It’s not that he’s a bad person, but sex is very simple for him, and he can’t exactly grasp that I might want something more.” Brian’s clients naturally encompass other attitudes toward his service. For example, Molly, 48, says that for her, Brian has been a “natural adjunct to a very satisfying sexual relationship with my husband of almost 15 years, who is completely aware and supportive.”
BRIAN HAS BEEN a massage therapist for 20 years, starting the “Pleasing Hands” leg of his trade six years ago. One of his regular clients broached the subject of getting a “full-release” massage, he did it, and she then referred him to a friend of hers, which started the chain of word-of-mouth referrals that led Brian to advertise himself as a full-release massage therapist.
At first, he offered the full-release service to both men and women. “It wasn’t necessarily a gay thing with my male clients,” Brian says. “Many of them were men who had chronic pain and literally needed a strong man to work on their muscles. The orgasm release at the end is just finishing the job: release of tension, release of stress, release of pain, release of orgasm.”
Brian’s impulse to cater to both genders was touchingly democratic, but he acceded to his female clients’ desire that he work only on them. To a man, a full-release massage that actually gets out the kinks in his back is just one more way he can generally get whatever he wants. For a woman, it’s an act of liberation and courage whose exclusivity to women increases this exact appeal.
Brian sees anywhere between five and 15 massage clients a week, roughly 75 percent of them women who want to experience a full release. His competition is limited to one other practitioner Brian considers to be legitimate: a man named Frank who works in the area and uses the same Internet marketing resources as Brian (Craigslist, Sensualzen.com, Frank’s own website, Tantricserenity.com). Frank tends to play up the aspect of tantra in his copy, whereas Brian bypasses this to focus on sounding professional and nurturing.
Clients such as Betty, though, are still somewhat circumspect about their use of Brian’s services. “I don’t have a happy marriage,” she says, “but I want my home to be as peaceful and happy as possible for my children. It’s not a perfect world. Brian needs to be my secret. I don’t feel I’m cheating, but I can see how it would be seen that way.”
Betty’s right; it’s not a perfect world. When you speak to Brian’s clients, it’s easy to forget just how much could go wrong when a woman hires a man to address her sexual needs. Safety concerns aside, sexuality is still an inner minefield for many women. Even in an age in which sex-toy parties have replaced Tupperware nights, it’s still the few and the brave among women who hire a professional to help them get off. And it’s the even fewer and braver men who’ve stepped up to the task and figured out how to meet these women’s needs in a way that satisfies their female clients, as opposed to their own libidos.
Originally published in Philadelphia magazine, May 2009
