Every Body Wants To Hurt Just a Little

And Other Truthy Ponderings of My Life as a Massage Therapist

I would like to set the record straight right this very moment: Contrary to popular belief, I am not a dominatrix.

I do not want to hurt people. I do not like inflicting pain. For starters, I don’t get paid enough for that kind of business, and even if I did, it’s not the type of person I am. I mean, I won’t even kill a cockroach and I have literally let wasps live in my apartment for days until they die of natural causes, so I am definitely not the type to heel smash anyone’s balls because it brings me any kind of pleasure.

And yet for reasons I don’t fully understand, many people come in saying things like, I just want you to know I can take a lot of pain. Or even, Don’t be afraid to really let me have it, on the heels of saying something that means the exact opposite, like, I’m really just looking for a relaxing massage.

It makes no fucking sense.

You would think that these pain lovers all have something in common. Like maybe they are all men, or perhaps they’re all athletic, or maybe they really are thinly veiled sado-masochists looking for a little thrill.

As a side note, there may have well been a good number of secret masochists on my table, but thankfully I don’t know about them. If there is one rule of massage club that has been my saving grace, it is there will be no discussions of sex or sexual pleasure during a session or otherwise. As they say, ignorance is bliss.

The point is, there are not obvious types — pain seekers can be grandpas or schoolgirls, 80-pound librarians or 350-pound construction workers — the body type, age or gender doesn’t seem to matter a bit.

The thing that does seem to matter is their underlying motivation, or what is driving that person to seek a massage in the first place. Even though I can’t say for sure what drives or motivates anybody, I can observe patterns, and those patterns can lead me to conclusions that may or may not be grounded in reality. You know, good old-fashioned science.

One such conclusion is that in the world of recreational massage (by which I mean not clinical) there are at least three different subcategories of those who like their relaxation painful: the Sensationalists, the Fondonians and the No-Bodies.

The sensationalists are the sort of people that eat hot sauce for breakfast and habaneros for the fuck of it. They like their yoga sweaty, their love passionate, their dreams damn near impossible. They want to feel everything — good, bad, or otherwise. For them, it’s not about the pain, per se, as much as it is about the gluttony of pure, clear, and abundant sensation.

The Fondonians (named after Jane Fonda’s famous — and toxic — “No Pain, No Gain” work out motto that was all the rage in 1982) have a different motivation.

This type defines themselves and their worth by how much pain they can endure. They wear it like a badge of honor and treat their suffering like a grand achievement. They are engaged in a constant power struggle between their will and the limitations of their body with which they have developed an antagonistic relationship so deep that pain has lost its meaning entirely.

Which leaves us with the No-Bodies.

Based on my calculations (of which I have done none), I am sad to report that No-Bodies make up at least 72.5% of the American population, and roughly 17% of the massage population (which is an impressive percentage considering massage is bodywork and No-Bodies, are by definition, unaware of their bodies).

They are the disembodied floating heads of our increasingly virtual society, and they haven’t exercised or moved their bodies since that Fonda tape in 1982. They are stiff from head to toe and have entire body parts they have written off as hopelessly incurable and fundamentally “bad.” Put plainly, No-Bodies are numb — it’s not that they want to feel pain, it’s just that they want to feel something and pain is what they know.

The deep-down truth of it all is that everybody wants to feel a little bit of pain. But the problem is that not everybody’s pain is optional. The quality and duration of uncontrollable pain experienced in the body changes the relationship between the body and self, and not necessarily in a bad way, either.

Take, for example, Miranda Wells, a woman I met while working at a chiropractic clinic some years ago. Miranda came in twice a week for treatment of chronic pain brought about by fibromyalgia (and yes, she was a little eccentric because chronic pain will do that to a person).

At the beginning of each visit, she had to fill out an intake form just like any other patient. The form was a half a sheet of paper with a drawing of a body and instructions to circle the area of pain and to rate the pain on a scale of 1–5. Most people would circle their treatment area and then jot down a middle number like a 3 so they could get back to the more important business of scrolling on their phones.

Not Miranda Wells.

Miranda Wells brought in her purse a packet of markers and colored pencils and when she filled in her intake forms, she created nothing short of bona fide works of art.

She drew spirals of varying densities and shapes with many points. Dotted lines and wispy lines, some so thin you could barely see them, others so thick they took up the whole of an arm.

She drew green arrows going up next to red ones going down alongside clusters of dots thick like a pointillist painting. She swirled in dips and dives. Swooped in led, wax and ink.

For an entire half hour, she would sit and color this paper body and when she was done, she would quietly shuffle up to the desk and hand me her form with a nervous but accomplished smile.

Never before and never again have I met someone who knew their body as well as Miranda Wells.

She was a woman who knew her nooks and crannies. Her ebbs and flows. The rivers. The valleys. The impassable mountainous ridges of sensation. She knew the texture and topography of her pain with an exactness that would terrify many.

I always assumed that the important part of Miranda’s body drawings were the shapes and colors that she had chosen. One day she told me something that blew my mind and that I will never forget. She told me that the significant part of the drawings was not the colors or shapes as I had imagined, but was instead the white space that surrounded and defined them both.

I used to think my whole body hurt all the time, she explained as I strapped her into a cervical traction machine that looked not unlike a revamped medieval torcher device.

Like if you would have asked me to fill out one of those forms five years ago, I would have just colored the whole thing in black and called it a level 5. But I started doing these body scans, these meditations, and then I realized that there was space in between the pain where I could find some rest. There were breaks in the lines. White space in the shapes. Those are my favorite places to be. Like vacations in my body.

Miranda’s illness had forced her to break her pain down into its smallest and most digestible components. Out of this deconstruction, she created for herself a gradient of sensation and an appreciation for the texture of each shade.

She was long past the thrill seeking of the Sensationalist, the militance of the Fondonians, and the numbness of the No-Bodies. Instead, she was present in spirals and purples all the way down to the core of her being. She didn’t need me to take her there. She was very much there already.

That’s not to say that her experience of body was better than or preferable to anybody else’s — her body was known to be hyperaware and her entire nervous system was nothing short of problematic and enough to drive her a little batty.

I bring up Miranda and her drawings to illustrate how pain exists on a spectrum and manifests in patterns that are felt differently in each unique body. I also bring her up to underscore the fact that a fluent knowledge of touch is one that recognizes pain as but one of many possible sensations that can be felt in the body. It is not all there is to be felt, regardless of what the jaded may say.

Instead of pain, one could linger in the electric blue spiral of the brush of a fingertip, or the orange pointed urgency of a single strand of hair pulled taut. Instead of demoting a profound sensation to a tickle, one could feel the whisper of subtle sensation leaving the body and echoing back to the silence from which it came, like the sweet reverberations of a singing bowl drifting back into nothing.

Or, if not. If pain and only pain is the object of one’s desire, then perhaps one really should hire a dominatrix and leave me out of it entirely (but remember she too has a feather tickler).