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!
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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 our supporters on Patreon for helping to make podcast transcripts possible!
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.
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