Massage Parlour
blogOn Thursday evening I went to a massage parlour for the first time. Here’s how it works. You arrive, are greeted with a friendly smile, and told to wait in a chair. At this point it feels a bit like going to a hairdresser, but then you are led down a corridor to a small room with one of those massage beds with the hole in it so you can breathe whilst laying down. The woman asks a few health questions and then asks you to undress and lie under the towel.
Everyone I talked to beforehand immediately associated massage parlours with prostitution, giving me a nudge, a wink, or a leering smile. No wonder my masseuse was so sheepish with me at first: her noble profession has been sullied in the popular imagination. All the necessary work she does, unknotting the shoulders of stressed web designers like me, is undermined.
To begin with I felt slightly claustrophobic, with my head sunk in a black hole with no lights on. The music — a combination of bird tweets and trippy meditation sounds conveyed by a cheap Alba stereo — didn’t help, but I gradually got into it by focusing on my breathing.
From the certificates on the wall and the prominent place on the high street, there was no way that ever be asked if I wanted “a bit extra”, but for the first time in my life I understood why men go through the indignity of prostitution. It felt uncanny to be rubbed and stroked in a therapeutic way, the intimacy (however professional) is soothing. I felt myself transported back to the evolutionary past, being groomed like a chimpanzee or a Bonobo.
In the past I thought that you should avoid massage parlours, not because there is anything wrong with them but because it might encourage you to live a stressed existence because you know that you can be untangled with a simple appointment. Prevention is better than cure, but cure is better than pain.
Thursday night I slept better than I had done in weeks and I would wholeheartedly recommend the experience.