There's a small strip of shopfronts being rebuilt down by the riverfront. One lawyer's office, one hipster whiskey bar, a florist, and a massage studio. I've been in the whiskey bar before. It wasn't a bad place--- overpriced but pleasant enough. I've never been in any of the other places. Looking at the empty fronts, it occurred to me that going in the whiskey bar was just a matter of paying fifteen dollars for a Sazerac with some artisanal rye. Going into the massage studio would've been beyond me.
There was nothing particularly off-putting about the massage studio, It was very much a GOOP-lite sort of place, a place that had New Age overtones rather than any hint of a Happy Endings place. Brooklyn, not Bangkok. The chalkboard signs the studio would have out on the sidewalk were done in colored chalk by someone who'd been to design school, and made cheery jokes and used all the right New Age versions of Sanskrit terms. The patrons and staff all seemed to be in their late twenties or early thirties, women in expensive yoga pants or gymwear; the smell of essential oils drifted out to the street. I knew for years that there was no way that I could ever go inside. I was far too afraid for that.
I had a chance to go inside once. I was given a gift certificate for a spa afternoon there--- a birthday gift from a lovely young friend. I thanked her very sincerely for the gift and for remembering my birthday. She meant well, and I had to remember that. I never used the gift, though. That was something I could never have done. I'd have been far too afraid to go through the doors.
I've never had a massage. At my own advanced age, I'm not at all sure how I missed having it happen even once, but I've never had a massage. No young companion has ever given me a massage on her own, and I've certainly never had a professional massage. It's possible that I'd have been fine with a lover doing a massage for me--- she'd have already seen my body, after all. But a professional? That would've been far too risky, far too much an occasion for humiliation.
If I have to admit to more than one embarrassing thing, it would be that I completely understood the 'Seinfeld' episode where Geo. Costanza was terrified at having a masseur rather than a masseuse appear at a massage studio. I understood that, and at some instinctive level accepted his reasoning. I refused to go to any hamam in Istanbul or Izmir because I was horrified at the idea of a masseur. I'll just admit that.
My fears here, though, aren't about that particular fear. My fears about the massage studio here have to do with being male in a rather charming massage establishment. I'd know from the moment that I opened the front door that I didn't belong there. A place like that isn't for anyone male, let alone anyone like me.
To put it simply, I'd have been ashamed to be imposing on anyone's time there. No one who looks like me belonged at a place like that. I'd have been terrified to be on a massage table there. There are standards of class and aesthetics that I can never meet, and all those standards would be applied to a hip, GOOP-lite kind of massage studio. I've rarely been ashamed being seen undressed by lovers. The girls I've been to bed with have accepted me on other grounds, for other reasons. But I'd have been ashamed to be seen at a hip massage studio. I'd be ashamed to be seen by a masseuse who'd see my body as a failure.
More to the point, I'd be ashamed to be male there. I'd think that the masseuse was looking at me with derision and contempt no matter how professional and pleasant a face she wore. And I'd be terrified of being male there. I'd be terrified of my body betraying me. What if there was some...inadvertent...physical response? I'd take it as a given that the masseuse would explode in anger and stalk out, that I'd be 86'd instantly, that any completely inadvertent sign of an erection would lead to me out on the street feeling lucky that I wasn't being arrested, that my face wouldn't be all over social media as the pervert villain of the week.
I understand that the reverse of that could happen, too--- that I might have no indications of any response at all to being touched by a lovely masseuse and that I'd spend the next six months agonizing over whether my body had lost its capacity for any response, over whether age had finally won. I understand that that could've happened, too...but that's a very different kind of fear. That wouldn't have social consequences.
The massage table would be one more place where my fears would set in: the certainty that the masseuse would be disgusted by my body, that even being there as a male would be seen as a violation of hip standards, that any inadvertent physical response would be seen as horrific and threatening. All those things mean that I'd never have been able to set foot through the door.
So the gift certificate remained unused. The massage studio will be torn down and rebuilt into something even more upscale. I have nothing against the people who owned or worked there--- please be sure of that. But I've never had a massage, and I never will. There's too much risk involved, too much potential humiliation. Flesh has never been anything I was good at, and a massage table is too much a place where all my failures and fears can be exposed.
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