Intimacy Surrogacy - Every Body Loves

Intimacy Surrogacy is the missing piece in the world of sexual healing. But to talk about it, we need to set a historical context.

If, 100 years ago, you had a sexual need, desire or problem, you broadly had two options.

You could consult a doctor if you thought the cause was physical.

Or a psychotherapist of some sort if you thought it was to do with your history, with your functioning, with unhelpful ideas you might have about sex, or if you had shame, trauma, or whatever.

Conversely, if you had a sexual need where you wanted a clear something, you could buy that ‘something’ from a sex worker .

That’s the traditional dichotomy in the sexuality field: Expertise or Body.

You either buy professional expertise, or buy the use of someone’s body.

And that dichotomy, primitive as it sounds, has carried itself forward to the present day. Even though there are now many varieties of people operating in the field of sexuality:

Sexological Bodyworkers like myself. Sexual surrogates, [talking] sex therapists, somatic sex therapists,sex coaches and so on.

The tendency has been to stick to one of these two poles. So Sexological Bodyworkers, for example, have endeavoured to adhere themselves to the pole which is characterised by expertise. And which looks like it.

For instance, there’s a rule that touch is just one way.

And the session takes place in a very structured setting, it’s professional. Like the psychotherapeutic world, there’s often an edifice of supervision, ethical guidelines to be followed, a system of complaints and so on. It’s like psychotherapy, just with touch added.

Sexological Bodyworkers and similar practitioners are doing their best to appear to be like doctors or like psychotherapists: they’re professional people.

.And that model of professionalism implies a number of things. It implies expertise. It implies a clear ethical set of standards. And, critically, it implies a particular way of relating which is, no doubt, warm, which is responsive, but which has a certain distance to it.

It’s professional.

And plainly the purpose of that is to distinguish people like them – like me – quite sharply from sex workers.

And that’s particularly necessary because the bulk of practitioners in this field are women, and the bulk of their clients are men.

So you can see how a sharp distinction comes about.And how those qualities of professionalism, of touch being one way and of the relationship being professional rather than relational characterises everybody working in this field.

So even with sexual surrogates, where touch obviously isn’t one way, where there’s a likelihood of sexual interaction with the client, the attitude is one of professional distance. In spirit.

This clustering around the professional pole creates a real problem.

Which is what?

When you come to see people like me, there’s two ways of working.

One is to just give you a particular physical experience. So if you don’t experience much pleasure in your body: or you’re carrying around a lot of stress, or you’re suspicious,or vigilant so can’t experience pleasure. People like me can really help with that through agreed, consensual touch

Alternatively, you might need other things. You might be lacking in confidence or don’t know how to communicate, or find you are a doormat all the time, or can’t assess your needs, or don’t know what your needs are, all of that sort of thing, then we can give you tools like The Wheel of Consent, or various Sexuality Maps. So we give you tools to navigate the contours of a world where previously there were just dragons.

But the problem with that is, as far as the bodywork is concerned, that it might be very helpful in allowing people to live differently in the world out there but very often it’s seen as a sort of pleasure island. Not right away, because there’s a lovely period when people realise they have a much greater capacity for pleasure and presence than they thought. But there’s a limit to that. And after reaching that limit, people still have a deficiency in their life [a sexless marriage for example] and they can come and have a lovely session and then they feel better.They can go out into the world again, refreshed and revitalised, but that world remains essentially the same. It’s difficult to make a jump from what you can experience in the session to how your world outside can be different. So Pleasure Island is gradually re- located further and further away from the Sea of Tranquility. And rather closer to Shit Creek.

.The problem – and it is a problem that’s hiding in plain sight – is that our sexuality has two aspects to it. It firstly has an experiential aspect:“What do I feel and what can I feel?” [ and we can obviously help you feel a lot more] But it also has a relational aspect:

“ What am I feeling and what do I desire in this connective field with another person?”

And that relational aspect within the professional model is deficient.

In a gradual way, very often working with colleagues rather than with clients, I’ve been exploring ways to address this.

What I would often find, for instance, if I’m having a bodywork session with a client, is that the quality of the touch part of the session would be dramatically enhanced if the client felt safe to fully express themselves and felt received in the conversation we had beforehand. And, building on that, if it felt right, it could be a very good idea, after the conversation but prior to the touch work, to dance with the client, which really helped to build on that initial connection. I’ve written more about this here.

And when we got to the touch part of the session, .rather than inviting the client to simply.lie down on my massage table, as they would on a visit to a doctor or physio or masseur, to perhaps start the session in a position chosen by them, such as sitting on the table or standing up, and then being free to move or sound as the urge took them

And it also felt a very good idea to allow two way touch.

You can see how, given the majority of clients are men and the majority of practitioners are women, why a rule is there for one way touch only, but that loses a lot of its force when the practitioner is male. If the client is also free to engage in touch as well,that’s often very helpful – because it’s relational – but within certain boundaries. It’s important for me that I do not engage with my client in a directly sexual way, because plainly there’s the possibility of delusion on my part. A failing common to many male practitioners.

So what I can give, which is distinct, is an emotional and relational warmth to the client rather than simply a ‘professional’ warmth.

That emotional, relational and embodied warmth is Intimacy Surrogacy.

And to me, it makes several important things more possible.

The first is that rather than the experience being a sort of pleasure island that you go to, then go back to the world as usual, we are modelling how you would like actual interactions in your world to be. And because the modelling is much closer to your possible interactions with people in the world outside,I think it’s got a much better chance of creating real change

But the second thing is that what we can experience, and I think this particularly applies to women that I’ve worked with, the depth and the vividness of our experience has a connective quality to it.In other words,if we feel connected, we can experience much more

And that experience isn’t just what we might be experiencing in sensory terms, but on the widest range we have.We are experiencing more emotionally. We’re experiencing more in our visual imagination. We’re experiencing more energetically.We’re experiencing more spiritually

[ If you’re interested in exploring the possibility of working with me, just email me at johnwebberfraser@gmail.com or text me on 07545707751 and we’ll get something in the diary]