I’ve been thinking about sex, shame, compulsion, and desire – and, intrusive thoughts. As I’ve written, years ago, I spent gobs of money on happy ending massages, on sugar babies, on commercial sex. I’ve been replaying those experiences, trying to make meaning of them in recent days, and just recently, I had something of an epiphany:
A memory (or really, a sort of condensation of multiple memories)
I lay on a table in a venue that made me slightly anxious about the possible arrival of the police. Before I even reached the table, I had rung a buzzer on the street, and waited anxiously, eager to get out of view of passers-by who might include someone I knew, someone to whom I had to explain my presence at this particular location. After the buzzer rang, as I descended the stairs, I was sensitive to the moment at which I no longer was visible from the street, through the door; to the moment I no longer was visible from the top of the steps; to the moment I was no longer visible from anywhere on the stairway. In short: my shame at my presence made itself known by intrusive thoughts about my discover-ability.
Back to the place: maybe half a dozen women worked in this venue at any one time. There were maybe a dozen rooms. The woman I was seeing greeted me at the door and walked me down the hallway to her room. I gave her some money (probably $200). She asked me to get comfortable and absented herself while she engaged in a financial transaction with her employer, the venue. I undressed and lay down on my stomach on a massage table.
I lay there, anticipating her return.
Between her departure, though, and my lying on the table, I engaged in all sorts of weird calculations and contemplations, though. It began when I took off my shoes and socks, then my shirt, then my pants, and then my boxers. With each item of clothing I removed, I was doing math. How many items of clothing was I wearing? How many had I removed? What proportion of the items that I had entered with had I removed? How many muscle movements would I have engaged in by the time that I removed my final item? (This last one wasn’t so much a calculation as a speculation.)
And all of these calculations and speculations, I measured constantly against a single, repeated question: “Am I halfway there, relative to when I started/the last time I counted in this sequence?” So, for example, I would begin by counting the number of items of clothing I was wearing. Suit pants. Two shoes. Two socks. An undershirt. A dress shirt. A tie. A jacket. A belt. I might do parallel math, in which, in one equation my shoes were one pair, my socks one pair. But. I would be conscious that, before undressing, I had ten items on. As I removed my shoes, my socks, I would think, “Only one more item until I’m halfway there.” And then, would start some more math: “Now there are six items remaining; only three more until I’m halfway there from here.”
Undergirding all this? A weird sense of, if not danger, something more like a gamified sense of low-stakes victory or defeat. If she came back before I was halfway “done,” that would be a defeat. If I finished first, that would be a victory.
Intrusive thinking and my shame
And here’s the thing: that particular obsessional, intrusive counting? It’s still a part of my life. Constantly. I do similar calculations when making coffee (the race is against someone entering the room in the middle of my process). When getting undressed at the gym, when getting dressed at the gym (the race is, oddly, against someone new entering my field of vision). When setting the table. When making the bed. When loading the washing machine, emptying the dishwasher, chopping vegetables. It’s fucking constant.
As I said – the stakes are low. I’m not particularly troubled when I lose any of these games, not particularly happy when I “win.” But. I can’t fucking help myself – I’m committed to playing this game. Over and over. And somehow – in some ways I understand, and in other ways I don’t – this game relates to my shame. I think, I think, it’s a little way I allow myself to control my shame, to deploy it in a low-stakes venue, in the same way I deploy some of my memories and fears of abandonment, my commitment to reliving it, in lower-stakes emotional relationships.
Back to the massage…
I lay down on the table, face down, and waited.
I was impatient.
Where was she?
Why was she taking so long?
I heard her approach, I heard her knock at the door. A strange custom. What was it that she feared she might interrupt? Because if all was well, she would find me nude. Was she worried I might not be nude yet? In any event, she knocked and entered. Said something like, “Are you ready for me?” and began to massage me. Maybe after removing an item or two of her own scanty clothing, maybe not.
In a typical version of this scenario, I might have been counting my breaths while she was touching me. I might have measured the number of breaths until the first time she touched my balls between my legs. I might just have been tracking the time. I knew about myself that in this circumstance, I took 12 to 14 breaths a minute. If I had scheduled an hour, that meant realistically that 50 minutes of that hour would be spent on the “massage.” Sometimes I would anticipate how many minutes it would be before she first touched my balls. I might have been angry that she hadn’t yet touched my balls. I would be thinking about when the flip came, when she would say to me, “You can flip over.”
Depending on the relationship, I might even have started on my back, or she might have known that I’d like to flip to my back as soon as possible. If she didn’t know that, I would be replaying in my mind all sorts of ways I might communicate to her my preferences and predilections. The words never were complicated. The delivery always was complicated.
The words were straightforward: “There are two things you should know about me. I have infinite stamina and perfect control. The more time I spend on my back, the more time you spend on my cock, the happier I’ll be.” That was very straightforward. I meant it literally, if I ever managed to get those words out of my mouth. But I was hesitant. I knew that many women in this role experienced that as something of a demand. Some didn’t. Some experienced it as useful information. Those were the women with whom I clicked. But most experienced it as a demand.
If I managed to squeeze out those words – and that was hard for me to do – what happened next varied. Sometimes, she would say, pleased, enthusiastic, encouraging, “Well, flip over then!” Or maybe she would spend three or five more minutes on my back before saying, “You can flip over now.” Or, she might say something I experienced as vaguely shaming – along the lines of, “Well, you’re here for a massage. I’ll give you that first.” Or, she might say nothing, keeping me on my stomach for forty minutes before flipping me over for a cursory rub and tug.