Go Light on My Nipples, Please
On the cost of staying silent and the pleasure of finally speaking up
As I lay blindfolded and naked on a massage table, surrounded by the thrum of loud tribal music, my focus kept shifting between what was happening to me and what was happening around me. In my immediate vicinity, a nude man stood over the table, caressing my body with long, sensual massage strokes while mixing in tantalizing touches — all in the service of getting me to have a “full-body boner” that would culminate in a full-body release. I was doing intentional breathing exercises as my body writhed around the table in response to the varied, surprising ways he engaged every inch of me.
Across the room, someone’s moans of pleasure billowed over the music — music so loud I could feel the bass in my body. There were approximately nine other blindfolded guys on tables, receiving similar treatment from nine other men hovering above them. The room was full of oooohs and aaaaahs, laughter, and yelps. The bass, coupled with the sounds of fulfillment, made it feel like I was inside some sort of shamanic sex portal.
Then a voice cut through everything.
“Men on the table — make sure to tell your partner what you like. It doesn’t always have to be with words. It could be a head nod, a moan. And be sure to communicate what you don’t like. You are not meant to endure anything. If you need to move their hands away, do that. You are the arbiter of your own experience. Ask for what you need!”
In that moment, I felt a door unlock somewhere in my brain. The door creaked open, and a single sheet of paper floated out of a dark abyss and landed at my feet.
The facilitator had made me keenly aware of what I was doing. I had been enduring sensations I didn’t like because I was too caught up in how communicating that might make my partner feel like he was doing a bad job. Mind you, I had no idea who my partner even was! The “givers” — the guys giving oiled up body rubs to the blindfolded “receivers” — rotated every five minutes. I had no personal investment in my giver’s feelings. And still, I was protecting them.
My therapist has a word for this: mind-reading. It’s when you assume you know how someone will react to something, and then you adjust your behavior based on that assumption — without ever actually checking in with them. He reminds me that no matter how well you know someone, you don’t know how they’re going to respond. The only thing you can control is your own response. On that table, I didn’t know the man touching me at all, and yet, here I was, mind-reading.
“Yeeeeesss!!” someone screamed across the room. I wondered what the cost of embodying my discomfort was. “Uuuuuughhh!!” someone bellowed in ecstasy from the other side. I thought about the cost of prioritizing someone else’s imagined feelings over my own actual needs. “Slower, slower, slower,” a voice repeated in rapid succession from a table that sounded like it was right next to mine.
Hearing someone else communicate their needs transported me back to that unlocked door in my brain. I picked up the sheet of paper that had landed on the floor in front of the dark room. And as I read the words on the page to myself in that alternate dimension, I found myself saying them out loud to the giver standing before me in real life.
“Go light on my nipples, please.”