Pleasure Mechanics

Taking Turns In Bed : How To Practice The Skills of Giving and Receiving Pleasure

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Taking turns in bed is one of the most powerful reframes you can make to gain access to way more pleasure and connection.

Taking turns is yet another gift from our erotic massage lineage – on a massage table it is clear how we can take turns giving and receiving touch, centering the needs and desires of one body at a time so we can lavish it with as much presence and pleasure as possible.

Taking turns is not about “you do me and then I’ll do you” – it is about dropping into a shared erotic experience with focused attention. Listen in to find out how this simple idea of taking turns can emerge in sex, love and life.

To practice the skills of giving and receiving pleasure, we highly encourage you to explore the Three Minute Game. Get our recorded walkthrough by signing up for our newsletter below!

Resources

Betty Martin’s Wheel Of Consent : Free Training Videos, Courses and More

Podcast Transcript:

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose: 00:01 Welcome to Speaking of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I am Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have explicit, soulful conversations. Some have called it passionate and compassionate conversations about everything you need to know about sex, love, relationships and surviving this world.

Chris Rose: 00:23 Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find all of our free resources waiting for you. Go to pleasure mechanics.com/free and enroll in our free online course, The Erotic Essentials so we can get started with you right away. Let us get started with you.

Chris Rose: 00:44 On today’s podcast. We’re talking about taking turns in bed. Yet another one of these gifts that comes to us through our erotic massage lineage. We’ve been talking a lot about these perspectives and strategies that we learned because Charlotte and I were both trained in erotic massage and how that perspective changed everything for us I think. How we think about sex and fucking and loving and living. We keep coming across these gifts as we explore our work and so we just want to articulate them and share them with you. Because sometimes when I get your emails and I start digging into your struggles, it becomes clear to me that shifts of perspectives and as I’m saying shifts a lot, it’s a hard word to say, changing your perspective can make dramatic changes in your lived experience.

Chris Rose: 01:46 In the academic world we have a word called “praxis,” and praxis is one of my favorite words that I geeked out on in college that I kind of want to get tattooed on my body. Because praxis talks about the relationship between theory, the ideas we have about something, action, the behaviors we take, and knowledge. And knowledge is another word for experience. Your erotic knowledge is a sum of your experiences. And so sometimes we want to intervene on the actions and sometimes we want to intervene on the theories.

Chris Rose: 02:20 So today is a theory intervention where we’re going to talk about taking turns in bed. Taking turns in bed, taking turns at pleasure, taking turns in the role of giver and receiver and what that means for your entire sex life and your perspective on sex itself.

Charlotte Rose: 02:42 I love this so much because when we’re having “regular sex,” whatever that looks like for you, there is sometimes so much going on. There’s so much to pay attention to. There’s your body, the other person’s body, how they’re connecting, how our thoughts are running wild perhaps. All of the feelings that we’re having. There is a lot going on. And slowing things way down and identifying that one of you is giving and one of you is receiving really allows each one of you to drop into that experience and just do that. And when we do that, we are able to slow down and really feel our feelings, feel our body, feel the sensations that we’re experiencing. It simplifies matters.

Chris Rose: 03:34 And taking turns doesn’t mean you do me and I’ll do you. It’s not waiting in line for a ride. It doesn’t mean checking out of the experience when it’s not your turn. As Charlotte says, it means going even more deep into the roles of giving and receiving so you both can be even more present, more aware and feel more.

Chris Rose: 03:54 This dynamic is so clear to us on the massage table. When you have a massage table set up, one person lies down and one person works at the table walking around at all angles, massaging and touching and being with the receiver’s body. And that entire session, from the first conversation about it, to the conversation afterwards and the drink of water as you’re sitting up and coming to after your hour session, is all for the benefit and experience of the receiver. The giver is there in service to that experience, which doesn’t mean you can check out. The giver goes deep into their role of giving, brings all of their skills, all of their presence, all of their attention to usher in the desired experience into the recipient’s body.

Charlotte Rose: 04:47 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Rose: 04:48 What a gift. What a gift. And that’s true for all massage when done well, because certainly you can go to a massage and the giver is not present and they’re just going through a routine. And you don’t feel that they are here for me in every way kind of feeling. But when you have that feeling it is special, you can feel it, it is palpable. And then when we go to a erotic massage we’re bringing that attention, that full presence and attention and skillfulness into the eroticism, into arousal. And then we take that skill off the massage table and bring it with us into bed.

Chris Rose: 05:30 And this is what I noticed. So just to take you back to our early twenties, Charlotte and I were both living in San Francisco and without having met one another yet, we’re both getting trained in massage. And I was being trained directly in the Body Electric lineage. Charlotte got another training and then entered the Body Electric lineage. But as I learned erotic massage, I’d come home on the weekends and have sex with my friends. I was living in an apartment with two gay men and we were in this play party community and so I was having lots of sex with lots of people. And as soon as I learned massage, everything about my sex changed. And I started bringing that focus of attention and that taking turns mentality into sex. And meanwhile I was in a kinky community, and we see this same dynamic in the kink community where often there is a top and a bottom, a giver and a receiver, and you orchestrate the scene around one person’s desires.

Chris Rose: 06:29 So this combination of educations for me allowed me to create these sex scenes with people where I was like, “Tell me what you want. What would feel best for you right now? I am totally at your service. Ask and you shall receive.”

Chris Rose: 06:45 And that was delightful for me. But then when those same people, my same lovers turned that attention on me and was like, “Well, what do you want?”

Chris Rose: 06:54 I was like, “Uh! I don’t know! I’m a survivor. I don’t know.” And that question is really scary.

Chris Rose: 06:59 And so this is part of the dynamic we want to talk about is, the fantasy of just giving and receiving with full attention and presence and one person can just lie back and luxuriate and receive. That’s a fantasy. How does the reality play out in your life when it comes to giving and receiving? Which one of these roles is easier for you? What emotions come up? And this is where the magic starts to happen within a relationship, where you can start working with this dynamic, giving one another deeper presence and attention, and going through all of the emotions and stuff that will come up during that process.

Chris Rose: 07:40 What was the transition like for you when you learned massage and then erotic massage skills? How did it change your sex life?

Charlotte Rose: 07:47 Hmm. I feel like I really got to see from the people I was giving massage to that there was a breadth of skillset to receiving. It was really interesting to guide people through a massage and then an erotic experience for eight hours a day and see people one after the other and see how… I was doing fairly similar things with each body, and different people could take that pleasure in to different extents. And that was really fascinating to observe and see the skill set of receiving. And also to be able to go deep into my role of giving, because the more that I meditated or danced beforehand to really get myself in my own body and in my own awareness, in my own presence, I was able to give from a deeper place, from a place where I could listen more with my hands. And then I was able to take people to higher levels of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 08:55 Right. So I just want to paint the training grounds of our erotic skills a little bit. Charlotte was doing erotic massage primarily on men for six to eight sessions a day, a few days a week. Meanwhile, I was doing all these sessions with survivors, with women, with couples and I’m teaching workshops where I got to see 20 people at a time, sometimes on massage tables. And when you see all of these bodies you get to see the patterns. And this piece of depth of role of giver and receiver was so apparent. And it’s one of these things that we can just bring right home to how we love one another. Because in each of these roles, giver and receiver, you can be distracted and barely there and going through the motions, or you can be so present that you feel the quiver of your lovers pleasure at the fingertips. It’s right there at every breath and you are riding that together.

Chris Rose: 09:56 And when you’re both dropped into your role, when you’re both dropped in, that’s where you meet, right? So it’s not this thing of we’re on separate experiences, you’re the giver, I’m the receiver, you’re doing something, I’m not. You’re meeting right there at the point of touch, at the point of breath where they arousal is growing and you’re right there sharing that experience. And I think if you think through your sex life, you’ve had these moments, whether you’ve done it purposefully or not, with skill or not. A lot of us have found these moments sometimes by accident and you find yourself right there and engaged with someone, and at that moment you’re like right in the pleasurable experience with full presence together and it feels fucking amazing. And we crave it and we try to recreate it and sometimes when it doesn’t happen, it can feel deeply frustrating or isolating or alienating. So this is a way of doing that on purpose by, as Charlotte said, splitting up these roles so you have one thing to focus on.

Chris Rose: 11:02 My favorite example of this is the ultimate distracting position is the 69 position, right? Where someone’s genitals are right in your face, your genitals are right in someone’s face. Sensation is really high. You’re trying to manage body positions, you’re trying to support your weight. You’re worried about, “Am I going to come too soon? Not soon enough?” All of those things streaming through you. And for most of us, most sex is that giving and receiving at the same time. Like pay attention to it all, a cacophony of sensations and feelings and emotions and distractions. It’s a lot to pay attention to. When we slow it down, when we say, “What do you want tonight? What can I give you tonight?” it allows you to focus on one thing at a time and therefore go deeper.

Chris Rose: 11:49 So there’s two ways to think about this giving and receiving. And when we paint the picture of the massage table, giving and receiving looks a lot like who is giving the touch and who is receiving the touch. Who is giving the touch and who is receiving the touch. And this was the basis of the Body Electric lineage. And out of that, this game that we’re going to share with you, the 3-Minute Game, came as an exercise of saying, “For three minutes, how do you want to be touched?”

Chris Rose: 12:23 And then you ask your partner that, they make a very specific request, “Please massage my arms with moderate to deep pressure. I have a sore elbow.” Right? So you lay out your request and then you spend three minutes just doing that touch. And we do this in massage classes, we do this as part of sex coaching. It’s a fabulous exercise because with three minutes on the timer, most people can focus on something for one to three minutes. And sometimes I even drop this to like one minute or 90 seconds.

Chris Rose: 12:55 But when you’re asked what do you want for three minutes, you then have to go into yourself and say, “I have a talented masseur asking me what I want for three minutes. What is my body craving?” So there’s that skill of articulating what you want and asking for it out loud.

Chris Rose: 13:14 A woman named Betty Martin, who was part of one of the very early sexological bodywork trainings that I was teaching with Joe Kramer, founder of Body Electric School, during that training started complicating this and saying, “Wait, wait, wait. Giver and receiver isn’t nuanced enough because you don’t always give for the receiver’s pleasure. Who is it for? Who is the touch serving? We have to start asking that question.” And thus she opened up kind of a new axis and what she now calls the Wheel of Consent. And for the past 13 years since I first met her, she’s been really developing this area and offers trainings on the Wheel of Consent.

Chris Rose: 13:57 And that asks both, in a 3-Minute Game, “How do you want to be touched, and how do you want to touch me?”

Chris Rose: 14:07 We start activating that access of, “Who is this for,” and, “What is it like to touch for my pleasure, to give touch for my own gratification?”

Chris Rose: 14:21 And I love this access. I love how she’s opened this up because it really opens up that conversation of, “Who is this for? Who’s pleasure are we centering?” And I think of this as whose desires are we centering for this erotic event? And I think this is what the kink community asks us, right? Because in the kink community there’s the top and the bottom, but whose desires are being centered is really important. Is the bottom, the submissive, on their knees because they like it, or because the top wants them on their knees? Or both, right? Because you can’t make that assumption, who is it for? So who’s doing what and who is it for, become the questions of giving and receiving.

Charlotte Rose: 15:05 And hearing that it’s possible to give touch so that you can take your own pleasure can be really challenging to hear because we live in a world where there is sexual violence and we’re really trying hard to not do that. And that’s why Betty Martin talks about the Wheel of Consent, that it’s so important to really have these explicit conversations and agreements made before you start any kind of touch so you both have agreed to whatever you’re doing and that there’s clarity around that. Because once you have clarity, then you can really say yes to something. Otherwise it can be really murky and not clear and it can start feeling a little crummy.

Chris Rose: 15:49 A classic example of this to me is when someone’s like, “Hey, do you want a shoulder rub?”

Chris Rose: 15:54 And you’re like, “Yeah, that sounds nice. I’ll take a shoulder rub.”

Chris Rose: 15:58 And you start getting the shoulder rub and then the hands start drifting to the breasts. They are changing the agreement and taking touch that they want for their hands, for their pleasure, without your agreement, right? And making that dynamic consensual turns out to be really important, and I think it’s so important we’re going to do a whole episode on it. Because this is that place of take, of “take and allow” is what Betty Martin calls it and so many of us want to be taken. The idea that someone finds our body so desirable that they want to touch it and eat it and fuck it for their own pleasure can feel really good if you want that person too. But being taken without consent and without mutual desire feels awful. So that’s a really important dynamic to get right, to do consensually for it to feel awesome.

Chris Rose: 16:57 Right now we’re focusing on this give and receive, where the touch is being done for and centering the pleasure of the person receiving. This dynamic is boundless in the pleasure it can bring you, because when we each start tuning in, “What does my body want right now? What would feel good to it right now?”

Chris Rose: 17:21 Given the current context, given where I’m just… As the right now appears moment to moment and we have a partner who has skilled hands and full presence and saying, “How can I serve you? What do you want?” the pleasure is endless.

Chris Rose: 17:37 Because you can start saying, “Oh, I just need to be held and listened to. Ooh, a shoulder massage would feel really good right now. I’ve had a long day at the office. My butt could use a lot of work. I want to be fucked really deeply and rough tonight. I just want tender, loving touch and maybe go down on me while I weep.”

Chris Rose: 17:56 Your vocabulary of once opens up because you’re invited into this experience in something as simple as the 3-Minute Game. And the 3-Minute Game, so we’ll set it up for you, and I think maybe we’ll record a practice of it and people can then try it on their own. And we’ll have that available in the show notes page of this episode. I’m just like, I throw these things in as we’re recording. Charlotte’s looking at me like, “Oh will we?” Yes we will. We will record a practice of this game because I think it’s a really important one.

Chris Rose: 18:29 And the 3-Minute Game often starts at the kitchen table. This is not in bed, this is just in a relaxed or on the couch. And you set a timer, which is an important tool. It’s not arbitrary. Having a timer allows you to focus and then allows that boundary of time. So you say, “For three minutes, how can I serve you? What do you want? What kind of touch would you like?”

Chris Rose: 18:54 And then the range of opportunity is there for the person to go inside and think about what would feel good and say it out loud, to ask for it. And then built into the exercise is a negotiation. So the person giving can have boundaries too. “Is that a touch you can show up for willingly? Are you available for that? Can you do that right now?”

Chris Rose: 19:18 And then you negotiate and you say, “Well I would love to stroke your hair. What position would feel good for us?” And you do it. You set the timer and you notice what three minutes can bring you. That is another gift of that is you notice in your body how three minutes of intentional, affectionate touch can completely shift your neurochemistry. And this is why, for example, in our couples massage course we have five minute follow-along guides because we’ve noticed over the years, five minutes can completely change how you feel in your body and open up whole new yeses.

Chris Rose: 19:55 So the 3-Minute Game, lest it sound clinical, right? Because some people can hear this and be like, “I don’t want to play a 3-Minute Game. I want to fuck,” right?

Chris Rose: 20:05 The 3-Minute Game as a practice to activate these skills, to show you the power of the giving and receiving role, then builds into things like, “Honey, what are you up for tonight? What are you into?” And that is such a different invitation than, “Can I get sex tonight?” This is a primary thing for so many couples and we’ve talked about it before so I won’t go on a huge rant, I promise. But for so many couples, any sort of affectionate touch is an assumption of intercourse. We’re going to start on this ride. It finishes with intercourse and if you’re not up for intercourse, you don’t get on the ride.

Chris Rose: 20:45 If instead, affectionate touch is just affectionate touch, which then may lead to more affectionate touch. It might lead to one of you getting off. It might lead to both of you getting off. It becomes just a starter. It becomes an invitation just to be in that moment together, just to touch for the pleasure and connection of that touch. It really changes everything. And it’s not clinical. You start this as a practice to build skills to become a more skillful lover.

Charlotte Rose: 21:15 Yeah. It’s such a wonderful opportunity to have this little game where you can practice and activate your communication. Asking for what you want, setting boundaries, making requests. They’re just such a wonderful skills that we can all use, developing. And it’s a short amount of time. It is powerful and it’s interesting just to see what comes up, to see what you discover about yourself, your partner and what feels good. No major sexual expectations, just an exploration. So I’m so excited for you guys to explore this.

Chris Rose: 21:51 And beyond the game. So as we build the skills through the game, through these experiments, through short little experiments, you then build these skills as lovers. And I want to paint the picture a little bit of what this looks like as lovers. Because the giving and receiving, it’s not just about the game for skills, it’s about a whole model of having sex together. Where it’s not, “We’re just going to fall together and collide and roll around and pay attention to everything at once,” and hope both people’s needs are being met.

Chris Rose: 22:24 Giving and receiving, when you break down the roles and you go into sex, and this can all be done very passionately, you’re kissing, you’re touching one another, and there opens this conversation of like, “What are you into right now? What do you want right now? Show me, guide me.”

Chris Rose: 22:42 And there’s this skill you develop where you trust one another, that taking turns is not waiting for your turn. I really want to say that again. It’s not like, “Let me get you off and then you get me off.” It’s not one for one. There’s no scoreboard. It’s just this open opportunity to be like, “I am here for you. Let me serve you right now.” And this can be… So session by session, you can devote a whole session, a whole evening, a whole weekend to centering one person’s desires and pleasure. What a gift that would be, where you arrange a whole arc of time centering and lavishing one person and your attention, getting their favorite takeout, making sure they feel loved and pampered and paid attention to, and then you arrange the whole sex around just pleasuring them. Whether or not you as a giver find pleasure in that, have an orgasm or not, all of those things are negotiable of where you fit into that, but you have centered their needs and desires.

Chris Rose: 23:50 This spirit of giving and receiving can also happen within the arc of one night. It’s like, “Let me take care of you first. We’re going to pamper you. We’re going to lavish you with touch. You are going to be in your afterglow. And then from that place you’re going to turn to me with all of your hunger and take care of me.”

Chris Rose: 24:09 And this is a model that works really well for partners where one person has a vulva and one person has a penis, and if that vulva needs longer, warm up and turn on and really likes all of that play in the beginning of the session, she receives first. And this is the premise of Ian Kerner’s timeless bestselling book, She Comes First. Focus on her pleasure first, unroll that, and then from that place of the person with the vulva being fully aroused, fully turned on, fully activated, ready, then you turn the attention to the penis. It’s a really useful template. Like this is not a script. It’s just a suggestion of an arc of events that rely on this skill of giving and receiving. Because when you’re turning your attention to the person that goes first or the person who’s a focus of attention for the entire night, you’re dropping into that role of giver. And I just want to give a shout out for that because it’s not like this clinical “I’m doing you,” distracted, like, “Blah, I’m not a part of this. I’m feeling bad about that,” kind of nonsense.”

Chris Rose: 25:27 This is a deeply erotic role of turning all of your life force attention, all of your skills, all of your energy, all of your force, all of your power perhaps, onto the desires and needs of your beloved. Even if it’s casual, right? This person you are choosing to share this erotic experience with and you’re like, “I am here for it. I am here for this.” Can you tell I love giving, and receiving is a little harder for me? Giving for me is like the purest form of eroticism, where you’re bringing your entire humanity in the service of pleasure. And it’s through that place, endless pleasure can stream through your body and you can get incredibly aroused and feel so powerful. So when I say being of service, that’s not necessarily submissive, this can be an incredibly powerful role too.

Chris Rose: 26:24 And I hear from a lot of guys that they love to do this. They love to turn their attention onto a pussy, onto a vulva or onto a cock because gay men are just like this too. But a lot of us love to do this, turn all of our attention onto our lover. For a lot of people, the bottleneck in this is people’s ability to receive.

Chris Rose: 26:45 And so I just want to circle back to what you were saying about your massage table and what our capacities are. Because all of those guys were in the presence of one of the most skilled, erotic masseuses in the San Francisco Bay area, probably the world and other galaxies too. And how much pleasure they could receive was up to them. And this is true for so many of us at home where our partner is willing. And this is not true for everyone, like shout out to the people whose partners aren’t willing. There is a different set of things there. But so many people’s partners are willing and we cannot show up and receive. And I know this so intimately because for me when I entered this erotic massage world and I found myself not one erotic masseuse, but surrounded by a room full of them who loved me and were ready to give me any kind of touch.

Chris Rose: 27:36 And on my Friday night I was in a kinky community where I could ask to be strung from the ceiling, my nipples set on fire while I was fucked by three men if I wanted to. That was available for the taking. And all of a sudden I hit this point of like, “Uh, I don’t know how to receive.”

Chris Rose: 27:56 There’s so much to say here about survivors and trauma and if that is true for you, we will have a resource on the show notes page, our free survivor’s toolkit that addresses a ton of this. But it’s also just true for so many of us because we’ve never been asked by a passionate, generous lover with full presence. And we haven’t had the practice of centering our own needs and desires. How often in life do you get to say from this deep place of what’s inside you “This is what I want.” It’s a really advanced skill and so that’s why we start small in the 3-Minute Game, right?

Chris Rose: 28:35 We don’t say, “What do you want? All your sexual fantasies?” That is too big a question for most of us. If we roll it way back, and this is, “I learned this playing the 3-Minute Game in massage classes,” all of a sudden you can get specific. You’re like, “Yeah, my shoulders feel hella tight. Just rub them out.” And you trust them to stay boundaried and so within that boundary, all of this abundance is possible. Within that boundary you can get met fully because you don’t have to be guarded within yourself of what else might happen. What are they going to try? Because they’re not taking, they are giving.

Chris Rose: 29:11 And so if you can say to your lover, “Oh, all I need right now is a long back rub. And then I’m going to clamp my vibrator to my clitoris and have an orgasm and fall asleep. Is that okay?”

Chris Rose: 29:19 And they’re like, “Hell yeah baby. I’m here for it. Let me get the massage oil. Get your vibrator plugged in, let’s go!” You have a clear boundary and you can give yourself fully to that experience. And then tomorrow night there’s a new boundary and a new experience and you talk about it and you open it up and you play together. Woo!

Chris Rose: 29:43 So there’s more to say about giving and receiving. We’ll link to some relevant podcast episodes and resources on the show notes page. We’re going to record the 3-Minute Game practice for you so you have us guiding you. And we hope this conversation has been helpful to you as you integrate this, whether you play the 3-Minute Game or just try it in your bedroom and try to center your lover’s pleasure for a little while, you will notice emotions come up. Emotions about giving, emotions about receiving. And those can be really complicated to unpack. Resentment can rear its head, like, “Why would I give to him? What does he give to me?” And it will reveal shit about your relationship. And this is also why we do these practices, because they give us opportunities to pay attention to things, right?

Chris Rose: 30:32 This practice of centering one person’s desires at a time, of dropping into the role of giving and receiving will reveal stuff not only about yourself. Like I said, as a survivor, it was very hard for me to receive and say what I wanted and trust that I was safe in that. There’s also all of these emotional, relational issues that come up as you do this. And you’ll notice, giving and receiving happens not only in the bedroom but in the relationship, in the family home. What energy, what is being given and what is being received within the relationship, your life? What is your role to giving and receiving in your profession? If you’re a giver all day long, if you’re a social worker, you might want to come home and just be taken, right? And that’s, so many of us, we balance our social life with our sexual fantasies and desires.

Chris Rose: 31:34 But then there’s all these other questions that might come up. And as you are thinking through this, there’s some useful questions to ask about the touch, about the roles of giving and receiving. Questions like, “What is the intention of this touch? Do you want to be relaxed or do you want to be aroused?” Great question to ask.

Charlotte Rose: 31:55 While you’re receiving, a great question to ask yourself is, “What are you paying attention to? Are you paying attention to the sensations in your body? Are you paying attention to your lover’s hands on your body? Are you paying attention to your thoughts?” And you want to redirect your attention back to the sensations in your body or to where the fingertips are touching the contours of your skin.

Chris Rose: 32:21 And as a survivor, sometimes my intention going in was, “I’m just going to pay attention to my breath and stay calm while someone gives me a back massage.” And that was enough to pay attention to and I felt some vague sense of pleasure happening behind that. But my main job was just staying calm and present.

Chris Rose: 32:41 So if you find yourself often distracted during sex, checking out during sex, playing the 3-Minute Game and saying, “Stroke my hair and all I’m going to pay attention to as a receiver is staying calm and present,” that is enough. And that is a noble goal.

Chris Rose: 32:57 And then those things change and all of a sudden you be like, “I want your hands inside me and I want to pay attention to my cervix and what sensations we can find there.” And that takes us back to the erotic massage episode. And you can see how these skills layer upon themselves and start serving you.

Chris Rose: 33:15 When we learn how to pay attention to our lovers hands as they’re massaging our feet, and our foot massage tutorial by the way, is available for free in our Erotic Essentials course. When you can learn how to pay attention to your lover massaging your feet for three minutes, you are developing a really powerful skill that will serve you not only in sex but in your whole life. Because then, as they’re going down on you, if you’ve consented to that and they’re giving all of their attention with their mouth and their breath and their hands to your pussy, you can pay attention to that for three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, stay with it and notice how much pleasure is available to you.

Chris Rose: 33:57 Because this is the thing and this is that secret, back to the massage table and then we should sign off. But on our massage table, boundless pleasure was available to these bodies. And some were only available to a certain amount. They had a certain capacity. And then they hit their pleasure ceiling and they checked out or they ejaculated. They found a way to distract themselves. We often use distraction when we hit our pleasure capacity. Or we just ejaculate, we orgasm and we end it. We can learn to stretch that pleasure capacity and that is a full body act of paying attention and letting in more pleasure, learning how to build more arousal. And that is all a skill of paying attention to your body in increasing states of arousal and pleasure until you can hold more and more pleasure and ride more and more arousal and you build this skill. And you can build it alone with masturbation. You can build it relationally with your partner.

Chris Rose: 35:06 All right, so the 3-Minute Game, do not undersell it. Because it comes from a lineage that has explored the outer bounds of human erotic capacity and we’re reporting back. So this is not a little clinical exercise that should be taken lightly. It’s easy, it’s simple. You step into it wherever you’re at. With hands at the kitchen table, with feed on the couch, with stroking hair and back and shoulders, and then build up your trust and capacity with one another until you are taking one another on epic, erotic rides.

Chris Rose: 35:42 All right. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, all of our resources are there; pleasuremechanics.com/love to support this show. Show your love for what we do in the world and help us keep going. And pleasuremechanics.com/free to get started with our free online course.

Charlotte Rose: 36:01 And all of our other courses are available at pleasuremechanics.com.

Chris Rose: 36:04 Yes, and you can use the code, “speaking of sex” for 20% off the online course of your choice. Get on our newsletter, all the things at pleasuremechanics.com. We are here for and with you. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 36:17 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 36:18 We are the Pleasure Mechanics-

Charlotte Rose: 36:20 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Falling In Love With Erotic Massage

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Erotic massage is one of the most exquisite erotic experiences we have ever known – and it is how we fell in love with one another!

Ready to unlock the power of your erotic touch skills? Click here for the Erotic Touch Mastery bundle (with a secret podcast only discount!)

In this episode, we share our love story with erotic massage. For the years before we met, we were both in the San Francisco Bay Area, immersed in the world of erotic touch.

Chris was living in queer community, giving erotic massages to a community of friends and lovers. Meanwhile, she was training and teaching with Joseph Kramer and the Body Electric School, leading groups workshops and developing the Sexological Bodywork training.

Meanwhile, Charlotte was a full time erotic masseuse, offering one way touch to men in a beautiful massage studio in the bay area hills. She initiated hundreds of men into the pleasures of erotic massage, prostate massage and full body extended arousal.

When we finally met in 2006, we were both proficient in the skills of erotic massage. When these skills merged with the new energy of falling in love, we realized we wanted to share this experience with the world, and Pleasure Mechanics was born.

Podcast Transcript for Episode 347 : Falling In Love With Erotic Massage

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose: 00:00 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:04 We are the Pleasure Mechanics, and on this podcast, we have explicit and soulful conversations. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive. While you are there, go to pleasuremechanics.com/free for our free online course, the Erotic Essentials. Get started with some of our favorite techniques and strategies right away. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free. On this episode, we are going to be sharing our love story with erotic massage. On the past two episodes, we shared the story of Joseph Kramer, our great erotic mentor, and if you haven’t yet listened to those interviews, I highly recommend it to hear the story of how erotic massage was born into this world.

Chris Rose: 00:55 In this episode, we’re going to share the story of how Charlotte and I both found ourselves in the San Francisco Bay Area, and at the same time before we even met one another, both fell in love with erotic massage, and then it brought us together. We met, fell in love, and here we are today. Charlotte and I both graduated college, myself from Vassar College, Charlotte from Wesleyan University within a year of each other. We both found our way to the San Francisco Bay Area. The lightning round version of my story and then I really want to focus on Charlotte’s amazing relationship with erotic massage.

Chris Rose: 01:42 The lightning round version of my story is I graduated college where I had met Annie Sprinkle through producing a sex magazine on campus. Annie Sprinkle introduced me to Joseph Kramer. By day, I was working in Joseph Kramer’s office, producing erotic massage videos, helping him in the business of eroticmassage.com, and then I was going to all sorts of trainings, being trained in the Body Electric style of massage. Then I was part of this kinky, poly community, and so I lived with a bunch of queer men. I was part of this kinky community, and so I was just giving erotic massage to anyone who wanted one.

Chris Rose: 02:22 I had open hands. That was even my email address at the time. I had open hands and an open heart for anyone who wanted to experience this, and so I was giving lots of erotic massage to lots of different bodies, mostly queer bodies, trans bodies, lots of gay men and then teaching classes. My context for erotic massage was very communal, friendship based and then in the classroom leading groups of 24 in erotic massage rituals. Meanwhile, in the same hot city of San Francisco, really just a few blocks away at moments, we’ve kind of mapped our years, and it’s kind of like, “How did we not meet each other sooner?” Charlotte was falling in love with erotic massage in her own way.

Charlotte Rose: 03:15 I had been in the social work field and was working with at-risk youth, and I was getting burnt out. I went to massage school, and then I became a traditional massage therapist. As a woman who’s always loved sex and been curious about exploring it more and in different facets, I got curious about erotic massage. I saw an ad in a paper, and I called the number, sort of for an informational interview to try and learn what this really meant.

Chris Rose: 03:45 I love the naivete in that, like just calling a s** worker’s phone number and being like, “Can we talk about your profession?”

Charlotte Rose: 03:53 Like, “Tell me about it. Do you like it?” That is totally what I did. Through that conversation that was initially hostile but due to my continued naivete ended up being very friendly, and I was invited to come work. I went, and I got a job as an erotic masseuse having never given any kind of erotic massage before.

Chris Rose: 04:14 You had never really given hand jobs before.

Charlotte Rose: 04:17 I had never given hand jobs before because I was always like, “Well, I’m here. Let’s do other things, and you can do that on your own.” I didn’t see any value or importance in that sex act.

Chris Rose: 04:29 Which I highlight because I think that’s kind of the attitude about hand sex. It’s kind of like, “Well, you can do that yourself, so why would I bother doing that?” You had had lots of sex with lots of men …

Charlotte Rose: 04:39 Totally.

Chris Rose: 04:39 … but when you were invited to do erotic massage the next day, you were kind of like, “Uh.”

Charlotte Rose: 04:45 I have no idea what to do. I went, drove home, and on the way home, there was a sex store. I pulled over and stopped and got out all the videos that I could possibly find about erotic massage. This is a kind of fun fact that we learned later. These were videos that were by Joseph Kramer that Chris had sent there as part of her job with Joseph Kramer, so that’s kind of a fun fact. I got all these videos out. I took them home, and I got multicolored marker pens, and I took notes with drawings of all the different strokes and had index cards. Then the next day, when I went to my first erotic massage, I studied the index cards before my sessions and off and away. I had a wonderful five-year career as an erotic sex-

Chris Rose: 05:36 Okay, whoa-whoa-whoa bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. All right, first of all, I just want to slow it down because your ability to take notes and create flashcards speaks to Joseph Kramer’s teaching. He had broken down this erotic experience into a teachable skillset.

Charlotte Rose: 05:51 With names of strokes. It was awesome.

Chris Rose: 05:54 Right. You were like, “All right, the corkscrew.” You gave your first erotic massage. This is a great moment to talk about what we mean when we say erotic massage because we’re now taking it from the classroom context to the professional context. The truth is so in the 40 years Joseph Kramer had been teaching erotic massage, all around the world, professionals had sprouted up, offering the erotic massage experience as a form of sex work. What people mean by that varies greatly. Do you want to tell people kind of what a typical session looked like and what you meant when you were offering erotic massage to perhaps a thousand men over five years?

Charlotte Rose: 06:37 Sure. Yes, we calculated lightly at one point. I was like, “Oh, it was over a thousand men that I gave erotic massage to.” It feels quite substantial.

Chris Rose: 06:47 You never got a golden phallus for that achievement.

Charlotte Rose: 06:51 They would arrive. I worked in this space that looked like a traditional massage studio. There were massage tables in each room. There was music.

Chris Rose: 06:59 Candles, crystals.

Charlotte Rose: 07:01 California-

Chris Rose: 07:01 It smelled good.

Charlotte Rose: 07:02 … what can you say? They would arrive. I would give them warm and welcoming hugs, kind of invite them to drop into being in their body with a big hug, also California style, and then bring them into the massage room. We would chat a little bit about what they wanted, what they needed. They would undress. I would undress. They would get onto the massage table. I was naked. They were naked, and I was giving them a full body massage, one-way touch. Even though I was naked, I was not being touched. I was focusing my touch on their body. I had to learn some boundary skills there, but I did.

Chris Rose: 07:43 That part is important because the essence of the erotic massage is the one-way touch experience because this allows the recipient, in this case the men, to drop into their own experience. The guys would like reach for you, and I did this work just enough to know the patterns. The guys would reach for you and try to touch your boobs or try to go for your pussy and try to reciprocate, and you completely bring them back to “This is for you. This is your experience. Rest your hands, breathe, and feel.”

Charlotte Rose: 08:16 I think that’s definitely part of the magic of the erotic massage experience because men especially so rarely get to lie back and receive. In the bedroom, I think some people get oral sex and that’s part of the pleasure of that, but to have longer times where they are just asked to receive is really precious.

Chris Rose: 08:39 Especially in the presence of a beautiful, naked woman and all of this sexual energy. They’re getting aroused. There’s a beautiful woman, and they are training themselves to feel that arousal within their own body, circulate it, and feel it as theirs. It’s beautiful work, and I know your work well enough. You would kind of power into it because you would often have like a 50-minute hour with these guys, and so you would power in with this full body massage and really like work out the kinks in their back. When you do a massage, you kind of go into this like beautiful, spirally pattern.

Chris Rose: 09:15 Anyway, so you’d give them a really good back massage, butt massage, really get the tension out, flip them over, and then you’re doing full body massage on the front of the body, the thighs, the chest, the belly, and then the cock. You start raising that erotic energy. Sometimes they’re already hard when they flip over. Sometimes they’re not. Either way, it’s okay. That’s the other big lesson here is that over the 50 minutes, and sometimes we do 90-minute sessions or two-hour sessions, but usually an hour, arousal would come and go. Erections would come and go. What are some of the ways the men would respond to erections coming or going or kind of their scripts around their arousal as you took them into this kind of altered state and this different erotic experience you were offering?

Charlotte Rose: 10:10 There were so many different responses to that, and often I would just let it be fine and then move to other parts of the body with touch and then return again. Often, the erection would return, and if not, just continue stimulating the soft cock and then going back to the rest of the body. They can still experience so much arousal, and pleasure. If I responded like it was non-problematic, they could kind of relax a little bit because of course, there’s so much anxiety about that. It wasn’t a huge issue. Either way it was fine and great.

Chris Rose: 10:50 Well, it being a nonissue is a change of pace for a lot of people. We would do these erotic massages in the traditional Taoist erotic massage that Joseph Kramer taught and especially in the classroom setting, we would end erotic massages with what we called the Big Draw. This was a non-ejaculatory climax moment. You’d be breathing, breathing, all this arousal flowing, and then you’d clench all of the muscles of your body all at once and release. This especially in the classroom context is a way to get 24 people into a climax at the same time. It was also originally a non-ejaculatory technology during the AIDS crisis so we could have this group erotic experience without 24 ejaculations and the fear associated with fluids.

Chris Rose: 11:43 The Big Draw is an extraordinary, extraordinary, amazing experience. I teach it in the mindful sex course because I think it’s a great erotic tool to use in all different contexts, but in professional erotic massage usually in the one-on-one setting, these guys were coming. They would finish their session usually with an ejaculation. Especially because you are a very popular erotic masseuse, you had a lot of regulars. You had a full schedule. If you knew another guy was coming at 3:00 and it was 2:40, how did you kind of become the architect and work with these guys to time that and create satisfying sessions?

Charlotte Rose: 12:32 Part of what I really loved to do was see if I could pack in as much pleasure and arousal as possible within that session, but also getting them out on time.

Chris Rose: 12:44 We have to say now, you no longer offer this service. We are not available for one-on-one work. We don’t do hands-on work anymore.

Charlotte Rose: 12:51 For years.

Chris Rose: 12:51 We’re going to tell you next how we adopted all of this technique and technology into tools to use at home, but do go on. We’re packing as much pleasure and arousal into that hour according to what each individual body can hold.

Charlotte Rose: 13:09 Yes, but it’s interesting because even new bodies that you’ve never touched before, there is a pattern to how arousal looks in the body, to how after touching so many bodies, I was able to detect the signs of when a man is getting close to inevitable ejaculation. Watching for them and then as soon as they’re getting close to that stage, pulling back and moving the touch all around the rest of the body so you’re spreading the orgasmic and intense arousal around all the rest of their body.

Charlotte Rose: 13:44 It ends up creating a much more powerful orgasm and ejaculation when it’s time, instead of just letting it happen as quick as possible, which is often what we do in the bedroom. I would go back and forth many times sometimes, five or six times, getting them to the point of intense, almost ejaculation, and then return to moving around the body. It ended up being really intense for men.

Chris Rose: 14:14 Then you would bring it up to a climax and kind of bring the intensity of strokes to a point and allow an ejaculation.

Charlotte Rose: 14:22 Totally. Then I would decide when they had an orgasm and when they had an ejaculation and would create that occasion.

Chris Rose: 14:30 That sounded a little domme-y of you, and I suppose it was in moments. You had that co-created climax, and then the guy would get up, shower, go back to his day. This experience, you kept really contained. S** workers offer a wide range of services. It’s up to each individual s** worker about what they offer and the legality of what they offer in their area. You offered this very specific experience over and over again. What did you hear from your clients, from these guys about how this erotic experience fit in to the rest of their sex life? Why did they choose this when they could’ve had traditional boning with the woman down the hall? Do you know what I mean? We’re in the Bay Area. There’s s** workers everywhere. Why did they pay for this?

Charlotte Rose: 15:24 A lot of men reported that it felt better than sex, and yes, I had great skills, but also, I think the modality is phenomenal because what we’re talking about here of extending arousal is such an unusual experience for men in the bedroom. We are so used to thinking men can ejaculate so quickly. Let’s just get it done. I don’t know. We don’t cultivate men’s arousal and give it a lot of space and try and play with it and extend it. That experience, I think, is incredibly nourishing for men because they get to lie back, not be in charge of anything, not be responsible for anything except for receiving and feeling their own body and their pleasure and arousal. That is a gift, and that is why I get so excited about people bringing this home.

Chris Rose: 16:13 I do want to talk about how we started talking about bringing these techniques home and how Pleasure Mechanics was born out of that. Can you talk for a moment about the role of anal and prostate massage in your practice? Roughly what percentage of sessions involved butt play and prostate play?

Charlotte Rose: 16:33 I don’t know what percentage, but I ended up initiating hundreds and hundreds of men.

Chris Rose: 16:37 Give me a ballpark. Was it like 1 in 100?

Charlotte Rose: 16:40 No. It was probably 50%, I would say I had some kind of butt play. I also had never done that before in my personal life, so I also went back to Joseph Kramer’s videos, by the way on that.

Chris Rose: 16:53 Which were the DVDs I had produced with Chester then trained Charlotte into this art.

Charlotte Rose: 16:59 Later when I met you.

Chris Rose: 16:59 Love it.

Charlotte Rose: 17:00 It’s amazing. It’s so cool. That I learnt through video and then practiced, and I had the joy and honor of initiating hundreds of men into their first anal and prostate experiences. That became my specialty in a way because I loved it. It was so amazing, and it’s so amazing to see the pleasure and the amount of pleasure that they could feel and the surprise that so many of them felt, like, “Oh, I had no idea. Oh, oh.”

Chris Rose: 17:33 That moment, so that’s something I really miss. We’ve given up all of this work to do online work, and the moment of having a 45-year-old man or something suspended in disbelief about what his body is capable of because we are touching parts of him that have never been touched before and waking up parts of his sexual system that have been ignored, shamed, lain dormant or violated and harmed in some way, but like giving pleasure back to the full sexual system, it was addictive. I think there was a quality to it that was so exciting to me. I think I’m an initiator, but I don’t know. I’m just remembering that, and like that feeling of power that would come back into their bodies. Sometimes I felt like they would walk out of sessions different guys.

Charlotte Rose: 18:25 Well, it’s so interesting to be introduced to a part of your body at 45 or 50. I mean, as you said, that’s so profound, like, “Oh, oops, wow, I had no idea.”

Chris Rose: 18:38 That’s true of the erotic massage and the prostate massage, just being introduced to a new way sex can feel. It can be this expansive, relaxed, full body experience that in that expansive relaxation, you build way more arousal than you ever knew possible, and you start vibrating and humming with this feeling that before like you’ve only felt in a few square inches of your body is revelatory. It’s amazing. All right, so we are both in the Bay Area. You are giving erotic massages to men. You would work a few days a week and do a few sessions a day.

Charlotte Rose: 19:20 No, hang on. I would work three days a week, and I worked four to eight sessions a day.

Chris Rose: 19:25 You were kind of a beast.

Charlotte Rose: 19:25 I was a beast, yeah.

Chris Rose: 19:28 When I met you, you’re like, “Sometimes I just sleep under my massage table and just in the meditative state and then go back to it the next morning.” To paint the picture, the guys that were the clients for this were high level, Bay Area executives but also like grocery store managers. A big piece that we’ll talk about next is most of these guys were in relationships and were touch starved. In my practice, so I was doing all of my friends and doing lots of queer and trans fun massage, doing my workshops, but then I was also seeing a lot of folks for trauma recovery. I was doing these like four-hour long sessions, bringing sensation back to numb genitals. We were both kind of just immersed in this work.

Charlotte Rose: 20:17 Immersed in genitals, if you will.

Chris Rose: 20:19 Immersed in genitals, fists deep. Then you came to the Sexological Bodywork training. Where were you in your practice that made you pursue Sexological Bodywork training and walk through my classroom door? That sounds lecherous. We didn’t date for many months after you were a student in my program. I’m just going to say that upfront.

Charlotte Rose: 20:40 Yeah, I really liked to add that she had incredibly excellent boundaries. We hardly even talked, and it was many months later, and I asked her out.

Chris Rose: 20:47 We did meet in the Sexological Bodywork training, so what brought you there?

Charlotte Rose: 20:54 I studied sociology at college, and I could not help but ask these people on my table, “Why are you here? What brings you here?” I was just always curious about humans. A lot of the answers that I got over and over and over again were men who reported loving, loving, loving their wives and their family, but after they had kids, their wife stopped being interested in sex and touch, and they were in 20, 30-year touchless relationships. For them, this was a way of getting their erotic needs met without any kind of relationship. For them, it felt like not cheating. I understand that’s a broad category, not everyone would agree with that. For them, because it wasn’t about personality, it was just about release.

Chris Rose: 21:40 It was a one-way erotic experience, and they weren’t going to bring home any diseases. They weren’t going to bring home messy affairs or relationships.

Charlotte Rose: 21:48 They weren’t buying flowers. It was just about having an erotic release. I just heard this over and over again, and I felt like I kept thinking about the women. I was like, “Well, how are the women doing in this whole scenario?” Some of them are getting mani-pedis. Some of them are once in a while getting massages, but they are also probably touch starved. This is not a great scenario.

Chris Rose: 22:10 I want to emphasize here, this is the story we heard again and again, and it’s not just sexless relationships, or they don’t have as much sex as they want although that is also true for a lot of people, and there is real loneliness in that. What we kept hearing is five, 10, 15, 20 years of not being touched. They sleep in different beds. They sleep on different schedules. There’s no affection. There’s no cuddling. We hear this. We continue to hear this so much that I just want to affirm that. That if that is part of your reality or you have experienced seasons of that, there can be an incredible loneliness and hunger that arises in your body.

Charlotte Rose: 22:53 Yes, there are many people who experience that. Hearing those stories over and over again is what made me feel like I wanted to go get more training. There was work to do in this world of sexuality. I loved being in erotic massage, but I was clear I wasn’t going to do that for all of my life, so what kind of further training could I get to deepen in my work in sexuality. I was exploring online different graduate-level sex related programs, and I found the Sexological Bodywork program. I was thrilled. I had my first conversation with Joe Kramer while I was in my massage studio, talking to him about Sexological Bodywork, and I signed up.

Chris Rose: 23:30 I was probably sitting in the room taking notes or packing a box full of DVDs. The Sexological Bodywork training, I won’t go into it a lot here. That was Joseph Kramer’s work that I was supporting him in and co-teaching with him in about creating a profession for this one-way, hands-on sex education because what we were seeing in so many erotic massage sessions and this network of erotic massage professionals were these patterns of the ways these techniques could help people learn new skills, discover new things about their body, remedy struggles, right? There are so many applications to this work, to hands-on touch, to somatic sex education, so body-based sex education.

Chris Rose: 24:22 People have been asking for the part three of the Joseph Kramer interview, and this is what it would be about. For the past 15 years, Joseph Kramer’s been developing the professional and educational applications of this body-based work. Charlotte and I met in Sexological Bodywork, and many months later, she asked my boyfriend out on a date. That’s the truth of how it started. I was in an open relationship with this great guy, and Charlotte had met him also through the training. You were interested in him and asked him out on a date.

Charlotte Rose: 25:02 I was also interested in you, but you guys were poly, so I didn’t what the polite version here was. I was like, “Bring Chris if you want.”

Chris Rose: 25:10 The three of us went out on a date to-

Charlotte Rose: 25:12 Falafel.

Chris Rose: 25:13 … falafel restaurant.

Charlotte Rose: 25:14 In the Mission in San Francisco.

Chris Rose: 25:16 Charlotte and I couldn’t stop talking. I made the choice to part ways with my lover and walk you back to your car safely and put my hand on your hip as I did, and that was that.

Charlotte Rose: 25:27 Yes, the hand went on my hip, and I was like, “Oh. Oh. Oh.”

Chris Rose: 25:30 This is where it’s going.

Charlotte Rose: 25:32 It’s like a whole world of knowing.

Chris Rose: 25:33 With the power of touch again. We started dating, and this was October. By February, we were starting our business together because in those first few months of dating, we were having so many conversations about your work, about my work, about our sessions. We did a lot of sessions together, which was really fun and interesting to watch one another work. We were talking about all these patterns we were seeing and just realizing the feeling I had at the time was that no number of sessions or classes would ever reach the number of bodies we wanted to reach. At the time, YouTube was just starting, online video was just starting. I was in San Francisco, so I was watching all of this happen.

Chris Rose: 26:22 I was just like, “Fuck it, Charlotte. We have to bring these techniques home to people. We need to teach people how to touch one another with this skill, with this reverence, and allow these skills to be brought home through online video. That was our mission statement. That’s what we set out to do all these years ago. Our first project was about prostate massage, called “The Healthy Prostate.” This is what we’ve been doing ever since is translating these amazing skills and other technologies and theories that we gather from so many different fields into strategies that people can use to change their own relationship to sexuality because we were both professionals in the field and giving people these like aha, amazing, erotic, transformational moments.

Charlotte Rose: 27:15 Which I think can happen when you get to touch so many bodies, you develop skills of course, and so you can create these peak erotic experiences for people.

Chris Rose: 27:26 We knew that this experience and the initiation into this different way of thinking about sex, the different way about relating to our bodies, and the incredible erotic experiences that we were experiencing and witnessing could not be relegated to professionals alone. It had to be accessible, and so we left the Bay Area, and we set out on this adventure to teach these skills online. That’s what we’ve been focusing on ever since. There’s a ton to say here about pleasure mechanics and the foundations of what we teach because this is kind of the lineage roots of it, Charlotte as an erotic masseuse, me as community explorer, pioneer, and teacher in these classroom spaces.

Chris Rose: 28:16 Our conversations in those first months of dating, in and out of bed. I want to set aside the whole conversation of bring these techniques to the masses and spreading them all around the world and how delighted we were when we started spreading these techniques to rural areas and seeing the map light up. Meanwhile, we were falling in love and having a lot of sex. We were in that early, lusty phase of our sex life. You were working as an erotic masseur and then would leave your studio and come to me, or I would help you gather up your laundry, and then we’d go home together. Our lovemaking was so infused with the language of erotic massage.

Chris Rose: 29:03 This was also one of the huge inspirations for me because I had been doing all of this community erotic massage and playing at kink parties and fisting people and using my hands in all of these ways and using breath work and discovering the edges of what was erotically possible. Then I fell in love. Then I fell in love, and I got to use these skills as an expression of love and of devotion and of taking care of you and of pampering your body, and especially because you were doing this erotic massage work and then come home to me, all aglow, and then give yourself to me to take care of. I got to give you the full body massage, and I had a massage table set up right in my house, and so I got to just put you on the table and then bring you to bed.

Chris Rose: 29:53 It became so clear to me that the way I would have sex and the way I would make love was forever changed. That now for me, massage was this language of love, and every time I touched you, I was giving you a massage. We’d be sitting next to each other, we went out to eat a lot in those early days flush with cash from doing sex work in the Bay Area, we’d be waiting for our sushi. I’d reach across the table and give you these few moments of massage, and we’d sink in together. We were just saturated in this world of touch and pleasure, and I wanted to teach that too. The ways that touch and love fit together started becoming so clear to me.

Chris Rose: 30:41 Then we would have these conversations with people, like, “Oh yeah, we’re dating. This is Charlotte and Chris. Hello. Oh, we both do massage.” It would come up in conversation that we were both in the erotic massage field, and people would just go gooey. Over and over again, people would be like, “Oh, wouldn’t that be nice?” We kind of started being like, “Yeah, it is nice, and we should share this skill. Every couple should know how to massage each other because it’s amazing to be massaged by your lover.” There was a difference for me. I had been getting tons of massage. I had been going to massage classes almost every weekend.

Chris Rose: 31:15 I was not touch starved. I was in a community of talented hands, right? The difference for me of being massaged by my lover in the context of a relationship and the way that we would massage each other and talk and get to know one another and lie in bed and massage each other’s butts while hearing about what was hard that day was just so beautiful and really was the foundation of this inspiration of let’s bring quality massage skills and touch skills into the experience of love. Let’s bring that back. Let’s reconnect the experience of love and touch.

Charlotte Rose: 32:00 Yeah, the experience of giving touch all day and then receiving touch from a person that I was loving and cherishing was exquisite. To be given that kind of care and love and reverence was so nourishing, was so important.

Chris Rose: 32:22 We have been doing this now for 13 years. We have been in it. When we started, it was our first Valentine’s Day together when we signed our business contracts, and we were kind of like, “Well, this will work, and we will have this grand love laboratory and touch laboratory to teach from. We’re just going to fall in love and teach the world from this place of being in love, or it will be a grand catastrophe, and we’ll break up.” Here we are, 13 years later, and we’ve been teaching from this place of wanting to share quality erotic touch, the presence of erotic massage because that’s also the skillset that we focus so much on the touch and on the breathing and all of the things like that opens up.

Chris Rose: 33:12 I’m just going to say here, it’s a whole conversation, but notice how this is all the technologies of mindful sex, which is the current kind of lexicon for this, but what we were really developing was a set of techniques to pay attention. The skills you develop giving erotic massage are the skills of deep presence. You’re spending hours at a time paying attention to someone’s body and paying attention to them with such exquisite attention that you notice a little muscle flicker in their thigh, and then you can bring your touch there, or you notice when your touch has gone too deep, and you bring it just a little back to just right.

Chris Rose: 33:59 That kind of presence starts infusing your relationship. When we talk about developing massage skills, you also develop these presence skills, and I don’t know how many thousands of times we’ve been driving in the car, Charlotte, and I’m just like, “What are you thinking about right now?” because I notice a little quiver of tension in you. I notice a flicker of stress. I’m not even touching you in that moment, but that’s how attuned we are. I think this is another thing massage brings to people. We could go on, and this is the story of the first many years of our relationship and developing Pleasure Mechanics and starting to create our videos and our teachings together was like being so blown away by how powerful these skills are and how many benefits they start opening up in people’s relationships.

Chris Rose: 34:54 Learn massage together as a couple, and great, you’re giving each other really satisfying back rubs. Awesome. That in and of itself is a great outcome, and then what we would hear from people is like, “Oh, we started talking again. Oh, I got to cry out that tragedy that happened three years that I’ve been holding onto, and my husband was rubbing my back, and I got to weep. He kept touching me, and then we had the best sex ever.” We’d hear these stories of what it opens up when you’re really touching one another, spending the time to do that, and paying attention to one another. It’s fucking phenomenal.

Chris Rose: 35:34 Anyway, I feel like spending the past few weeks editing the Joseph Kramer interviews and having that conversation with him and reconnecting with those stories and thus remembering our origins, right, because those interviews brought us right up to the point of meeting one another, has brought me into deep gratitude with these teachings, with everything we learned in those years leading up to meeting one another and then everything we’ve discovered together in our 13 years of continued immersion and a more devoted immersion because what we did is we left the Bay Area. We stopped being part of the kinky, poly community.

Chris Rose: 36:18 We turned all of our erotic energy to one another. You pretty quickly stopped doing erotic massage, right? You and I were both very expansive erotic creatures. We fell in love, and for 13 years, primarily have been exploring that with one another and figuring out what that means. What does it mean to be an expansive erotic creature in a devoted erotic relationship and then have a family and illness and life come up because we’re not 26 in the sexual wonderland of the Bay Area anymore? We’ve been really talking a lot about that. Where are we now? We’re a young family. Our daughter’s about to turn five. My health is better. I went through this health crisis the past few years. I’m better. We’re now fully middle aged together. We-

Charlotte Rose: 37:10 What?

Chris Rose: 37:10 … have this kind of established business. We are not on this endless adventure anymore. We are in life and also wanting erotic expansiveness, also wanting experiences of erotic transcendence, also wanting to tap into those peak erotic experiences that we were so familiar with in our wild and crazy 20s in San Francisco. Right? What’s delighting me is that we know the skills. We know how to get there in our own bodies, and I think that’s what we get to explore more deeply now and with you all as a community is what these skills look like to bring to life in our own erotic lives, at home, in our busy lives, in the context of this world that is on fire.

Charlotte Rose: 38:04 Yeah, just in this exploration with Joe Kramer, hearing about all of his stories, I also feel so much gratitude to him for all of his work, all of his wisdom, all of his generosity. Because when we left the Bay and when we were wanting to create our own teachings, he gave us blessings. He wanted his students to go on and teach other people in their styles, in their own way. What we’ve created is different than he has created, but it is deeply inspired by his lineage. I’m really grateful to him that he as a person experienced such generosity that he wasn’t proprietary in the way that a lot of other people could have been and really gave us his blessing, and that’s so beautiful.

Chris Rose: 38:49 We are so grateful for our entire lineage that brought us together in 2006, San Francisco. It has been the love story of a lifetime. I love you, my darling. We’re so grateful for technology that has come to a place where we can sit here in our home and share this conversation with you all, all around the world. We are so grateful that you all are here and trusting us to be part of the conversation in your most intimate lives, so thank you. We’re looking forward to going onwards and continuing to explore erotic embodiment, pleasure, joy, love, and what this all means in these deep, loving relationships of our life.

Charlotte Rose: 39:39 Yeah, how do we do that solo and then how do we bring that to our partners? How do we keep going and deepening our erotic embodiment, pleasure, joy? It’s an exciting adventure.

Chris Rose: 39:51 In all different contexts, whether or not your partner is willing, there is more pleasure available to you.

Charlotte Rose: 39:55 Totally.

Chris Rose: 39:56 Whether or not you have a partner, there is more pleasure available to you.

Charlotte Rose: 39:59 There is so much-

Chris Rose: 40:00 Right?

Charlotte Rose: 40:00 … to explore solo, and that is so important.

Chris Rose: 40:03 Thank you for sharing this conversation with us. We will be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex. If all of this got you curious about the erotic touch experience we are talking about, please remember we have captured our teachings about erotic touch in our couples massage course and our foreplay courses. For the first time, we have bundled all of our erotic touch education, so it’s the full body, head to toe, for all bodies into one course bundle. I’m going to link to it in the show notes page.

Chris Rose: 40:38 It’s only available through this link, and it’s available at a lovely, beautiful discount because we really do want to make these teachings accessible and available and put them in your hands so you can learn how to touch one another with more skill and confidence and reverence and experience the kind of delight we know is possible in your flesh. We love you. We are here for you. Visit us at pleasuremechanics.com and check out the show notes page for that link to the bundle. If you want to get started with some erotic touch training, just wait.

Chris Rose: 41:19 I got an email the other day that was like, “I’ve loved you and Charlotte on the podcast, but oh my God, I saw Charlotte touch and that was just a foot, and I am so excited for what’s coming next.” I love hearing from couples who are tapping into these touch skills and experiencing it together. It really makes my day. Check out the show notes page. Jump into the courses if you are excited to explore more touch skills, and join us next week for another episode of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 41:50 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 41:51 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 41:53 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

The Resilient Edge of Resistance (A Sexual Superpower, Revealed!)

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The Resilient Edge of Resistance is a concept that guides how we approach massage, erotic touch and even relationships!

The Resilient Edge of Resistance is all about finding that magical place of “just right” – in touch, in sex, in love. It means using not too much force and not too little, offering full support without smothering, being fully present without being overbearing. When you find that place of “just right” so much opens up – more pleasure, more arousal, more connection, more responsiveness to your partner’s changing needs.

In this episode we talk about how to develop the skill of finding and riding the resilient edge of resistance, and how to apply it in every day life, in and out of the bedroom.

The Resilient Edge of Resistance is a concept we inherited from our amazing teacher, Chester Mainard. Chester was a pioneer of erotic touch, gay spirituality and the creator of the anal massage techniques we teach. After a few profound years as Chester’s student and then co-teacher, Chris lived with Chester for 9 months as he died of brain cancer. Chester’s work continues to live through our teachings, and those of so many of his other students.