Historical Context of Erotic Massage

How the Study of PTSD has influenced Sexuality Practices.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) experienced by war veterans is a known life-destroying consequence of war that has impacted so many. The Veterans from the wars that the USA were engaging in impacted society's health and harmony, with the wounds of war continuing to rage.

Psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists and psychotherapists researched together to deepen knowledge for understanding trauma and ways of integrating exiled grief and pain. Bessel van der Kolk, in his book 'The Body Keeps the Score', articulated and brought home into hearts the heartbreak of the trauma responses to unintegrated unwitnessed suffering and pain. He normalised our common understanding, which has offered liberation for many living in hiding with pathologised identities, thinking they were not normal and would never lead harmonious lives or have the grounded ability to be of service and contribute to society or be in non-dramatic intimate relationships. From under the cloaks of the PANIC system shame response, many have 'come out' and come home into collective power belonging, and this has hugely influenced our field of sexuality concerning ethical practice. These studies have proven that the mind alone cannot heal what is tortured inside the body, and it is the body that is keeping the score with the mind managing this.

How the AIDS epidemic influenced Sexuality Practices.

Joseph Kramer's school of Sexological Bodywork grew from his sensate focus specialism working with gay men in San Fransico during the AIDS epidemic, where he and many suffered immense grief with the loss of loved ones. Joseph created The Body Electric School, which became the fecund ground from which Sexological Bodywork was birthed. Joseph Kramer learned from the Jesuits the power of collective community and training in disciplines. He founded two institutions: the Body Electric School of Massage and Rebirthing in Oakland, which was approved to train professionals by the State of California in 1984, and Sexological Bodywork in San Francisco, which was approved as a profession by the State of California in 2003. Joseph achieved legal status with Sexological Bodywork, categorised as an 'Educational' modality because of its educational intent. It involves a code of ethics, one-way touch, and the practitioner wearing gloves. Our current code of ethics began here: one-way gloved touch decoupled from partner engagement. Because Sexuality Practitioners did not have legal status in the United States, Joseph approached the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, providing professional training for Sexological Bodyworkers. In 2003, after the California Bureau of Private Postsecondary Education investigation, Sexological Bodywork was approved as a legal profession in California.

These erotic community gatherings offered routes for somatic openings with a special focus on anal pleasure - 'from Sphincter to Great Spirit’. He designed community self-pleasuring rituals called the three circles ritual, traditionally practised together during the current Sexological Bodywork training intensives with many online.

For some communities, the three circles ritual was a daily practice like prayer, accessing altered states of consciousness with god. These community practices were collective power as an antidote to the collective shame around being accepted as gay, with the anus being the physical and multidimensional route into intimacy.

Joseph worked alongside Chester Maynard, who became a Sphincters and anal passage genius. Cherishing these precious somatic openings into becoming one with the universe, they creatively found a way of continuing these sacred practices, allowing the ‘little death’ of orgasm to be savoured in this lifetime rather than leading to literal death by bringing in gloved consensual touch for facilitating these somatic openings.

Chester Maynard famously said that if he had just ten minutes with a person, it would be the anus he would give his focus to. His audience was the San Francisco Gay scene, where anal knowledge was already installed and receptive. This might be an impossibility in many of our current Western and Eastern societies with the immense shame and meaning associations with this down-under hidden part of our bodies.

In 1992, in collaboration with Annie Sprinkle, he began offering Taoist Erotic Massage classes to both men and women. They filmed these ritualised erotic practices to make them available for people worldwide to experience the transformations of these practices, harnessing the media of pornography as a route to accessing erotic play. ‘Fire on the Mountain, in 1992, and Fire in the Valley, in 1995. Because his earlier films had not dealt directly with gender diversity, in 2017, he commissioned Barbara Carellas to create ’Transcendent Bodies’ - The Erotic Awakening Massage for Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Bodies. His School of Erotic Touch offers many hours of online streaming education for the public and Sexuality professions.

Joseph Kramer recognised the need for an erotic healing profession that offered a profoundly compassionate, pleasurable healing touch for the dying during the AIDS crisis. The Body Electric school began training men as sexual healers, erotic bodyworkers and hedonic midwives to the dying. Kramer named these men committed to erotic service “Sacred Intimates.”

Joseph began teaching Taoist Erotic Massage classes in 1986. Because of the presence of HIV in semen, he included the Taoist practice of semen retention massage.

In the Taoist Erotic Massage, the masseurs genitally stimulated the receivers for over an hour. Those receiving them were also guided in up- and down-regulated breathing patterns to enhance arousal regulation. These massage experiences and the paced breathing were choreographed to facilitate the receivers maintaining sensate rather than role-play or romantic focus. Habits of going off into erotic fantasy or shame were seen as distractions, with body-focusing guidance on bringing back attention to the body, offering immersion in sustained sexual arousal.

The Taoist Erotic massage often ended with a Big Draw, a practice that provides intense release without ejaculation. The receiver clenches their body muscles, holding their breath for thirty seconds. This is followed by a fifteen-minute integration practice in which, ritually, nothing happens. The receiver bathes in the altered states of the experience of having journeyed with waves of arousal. They are released into stillness and bliss, awakening emergent insights in somatic openings. However, for some, these down-regulated altered states led to emotional hangovers and the awakening of implicit memories that some practitioners were not rained in holding space for. One of the problems with group erotic practices is the collective influence to go along with what everyone else is doing and feel ostracised when feeling out at sea waving red flags and nobody recognising them.

On this point, the shaming of shame became a problem when these practices were taught militantly in these early waves of shame busting in the exhibitionistic route to shame-free. Betty Martin acutely noticed this tendancy in the field of sexuality and learned about the ‘Three Minute Game’ from Harry Fadis as a way of facilitating consensual relationships in titrated stages. From these collaborations, she developed the Wheel of Consent, which has revolutionised sexuality practices from the treatment model into a model that facilitates active receiving with relationship agreements focusing on the choosing and attuned decision making rather than the doing and being done to approaches. This offers the titration required for many people entering into erotic bodywork practices.

Alongside Betty developing consensual relationship agreements with the Wheel of Consent, I was developing the ‘I want’ game in my practice as a sacred intimate as an antidote to the Tantra Massage treatment model where versions of what was expected were either disappointed or surprising for both the practitioner and the client without clarity at the beginning. Coming from a psychoanalytic background in Tantra, I could see the somatic opening potential for re-traumatising as well as for integrating exiled aspects of self. I witnessed one too many casualties in emotional hangovers with shame snowballing shame, and my ethics could not be complicit any longer and I left the Tantra School, where I had been trained and on the teacher team for twelve years.

During this time, I was working ten-hour days with a full practice of clients as a kind of psychodynamic shamanic sacred intimate and I was training for several years in Quodoushka, recapitulated shamanic de-armouring and aura perception, analysis and working closely with Kenneth Ray Stubbs. Our deep friendship spanned over 12 years online and in person, and I miss him in my third-dimension life now he passed into the other dimensions. Serendipity led me to meet Deej Juventin, who also worked closely with Ray and his co-teacher Uma Furman, who teach Australian Sexological Bodywork training.

At the time, I formed a collaboration with Kian de la Cour and in 2014, we sponsored Deej and Uma to come to the UK to teach the first Sexological Bodywork Training in the UK. They had introduced the Wheel of Consent to their CSB Training and during those days, it was a half day on the intensive devoted to the three-minute game. It was a joy and profound relief to meet Betty and discover the genius of the Wheel of Consent. This was enough for me to recognise the enormous significance of this, and I began weaving these practices into my work with clients alongside my ‘I want’ game. Body Poem simultaneously began emerging as I recognised the transformational power of radical acceptance to support the integration of exiled aspects of self. For four years, we joined the faculty with Deej and Uma, and in 2018, Joseph invited us to co lead the UK and Ireland Sexological Bodywork Training. Deej continues to be my supervisor ten years later!

During this time, we sponsored Betty to come to the UK, and I initiated the formation of ‘The Sea School of Embodiment’ Somatic Sexology Training and invited Kian as an administrator and co-director to facilitate trauma-informed practices for practitioners wanting to train in the field of sexuality. We are both steeped in the history of this field of work and centrally involved in the ‘Outsiders’ organisation advocating Sexual freedom. I was involved in writing the original code of ethics for ASIS at the time. My passion for ethics and Affective Relational Psychodynamic Neuroscience, Body Poem, Right Use of Power, and Wheel of Consent influenced sexuality practice has led to the development of the current Relational Harmony Institute, now co-directed by Dr Phoebe Garland, who brings with her thirty years of medical and mindfulness practice that has led to the development of a syllabus that is a dream coming true for me for our profession.