By Caiden Kair
Where do I start with this one? That’s a good question. I could start with the first time I went to a parlour. I could start with the first or second time I saw a companion. Or maybe I should start with Autumn. The more I think about it, the more I realize that all of those experiences probably belong here, because while each one was different, there was something about them that was exactly the same.
The nerves.
That internal debate about taking my clothes off in front of a woman. Even when I had done it before, there was still that moment when I had to make the decision all over again. Do I really want to do this? What is she going to think? What is she going to see when she looks at me?
The first time was at a parlour. I was left in a room by myself and told to have a shower, lie face down on the table, and wait for my masseuse. The instructions were simple enough, but I remember what it felt like being alone in that room. There was a woman I had never met who was going to walk through that door in a few minutes, and before she did, I had to take all my clothes off and get onto that table. It seems like such a simple thing now, but at the time it felt like a pretty big step.
Once she came in, the experience itself was fairly mechanical. But I had done it. I had stood naked in a room and allowed a woman to see me.
The second time was at a different parlour, although it was more of a men’s spa. That experience started differently. I changed out of my street clothes and into a satin robe and lounge pants. I was technically dressed, but it didn’t really feel that way. The masseuse came to get me and took me to a private room, and this time she undressed me and invited me onto her table.
That small difference felt significant. The first time, I had made myself naked before the woman entered the room. This time, she was there for that moment. I remember the nerves, and I remember wondering what she was seeing.
I don’t think I ever really understood just how much of that wondering came from the way I looked at my own body.
I’ve carried a list of insecurities about it for a long time. I have two scars from childhood cancer that I’ve always been conscious of. Being circumcised has bothered me in ways I’ve never really known how to explain. I’ve worried that my testicles are too small. I’ve wondered what a woman thinks when she sees my penis.
None of these are necessarily things anyone else has ever pointed out to me. They’re things I’ve pointed out to myself.
And that’s probably the important part.
When I take my clothes off in front of someone, I’m not just exposing my body. I’m exposing all the things I’ve already decided are wrong with it. I’m imagining her looking at me, and assuming she’ll see the same things I see.
But maybe she doesn’t.
There was another time when I had to confront that same feeling of being seen, although this time it had nothing to do with sex. It was when I decided to get my piercing.
I had built that experience up in my head too. I knew I was going to have to take my bottoms off and expose a part of my body that I was already self-conscious about, and because I’d spent so much time worrying about what women might think when they saw me naked, I naturally assumed that this would feel much the same.
Except it didn’t.
My piercer was a man, and when the time came, he simply asked me to take my bottoms off and get onto the table. I found myself in a position where I was completely exposed to him, and for a moment I was very aware of everything he could see. But he wasn’t looking at me the way I had imagined someone might. He was looking at the spot he was there to pierce.
That was it.
There wasn’t any judgment. There wasn’t any lingering attention to the rest of me. There was just someone doing a job that required him to work with a particular part of my body.
And then it was over.
I remember thinking afterward that maybe I had been making this whole idea of being seen much harder than it actually needed to be. Maybe other people weren’t looking at me with the same critical eye that I had been using on myself.
And, oddly enough, that experience made me think that maybe I’d get more piercings.
If being that exposed could become that ordinary, maybe my body didn’t need to be something I was always trying to hide.
Then there were the two companion visits. Different people, different circumstances, and a whole different level of anticipation because I had expectations about what was supposed to happen afterward.
With one, I showered and chose a robe that I liked, knowing I was naked underneath it. She eventually suggested I take the robe off and get onto her table. There was a progression to the experience that I hadn’t experienced at the parlours, and with that came more anticipation and more nerves.
With the other, we sat in her living room and talked for a while before she suggested we get comfortable. We eventually got out of our clothes and spent time together naked.
In some ways, that was probably even more vulnerable. At the parlours, there was a service being provided and a fairly obvious structure to what was happening. With the companions, there was more of a sense of possibility. I had expectations about what would happen next, and those expectations made the whole thing more nerve-wracking.
Neither experience went the way I thought it would.
And that affected me much more deeply than I expected. It wasn’t simply disappointment about what did or didn’t happen. I ended up in a depressed state, and eventually I saw a psychotherapist because I realized there was more going on inside me than just the sexual side of things.
That turned out to be another kind of being seen.
I wasn’t naked in front of her. In fact, physically, I was probably more covered up than I’d ever been in any of those other situations. But sitting across from another person and talking honestly about things I had kept inside for a very long time was its own kind of exposure. There was something strangely familiar about it. I still had that feeling of wondering what she was seeing when she looked at me, except this time it wasn’t my body I was worried about.
It was me.
Then came Autumn.
The first time I saw her, there were still plenty of nerves. I got undressed in the bathroom, with the door mostly closed, and walked out naked. She was in lingerie, and I got onto her table. I was still very aware of being naked in front of another woman and, like before, there was that awareness of being looked at.
At some point during the massage, without me knowing it, she undressed too.
After the massage, though, something happened that I remember much more clearly than the fact that either of us was naked.
We talked.
We were both still naked, but we weren’t really paying attention to that. There was no sense of eyeing each other up or examining each other’s bodies. We just talked in an open space like two people having a conversation.
I don’t think I fully appreciated what was different about that at the time.
Now, when I see Autumn, the nudity is almost incidental.
We talk before our sessions. I go to the washroom, and the door stays open. I shower, then walk into her playroom. We talk some more. Things happen as they normally do. Sometimes I even ask her for a hug while I’m still naked. Then I have another shower, again with the door open, and that’s it.
If you had told me during that first parlour experience that one day I would be completely comfortable doing all of that, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.
But I don’t think what has changed is that I’ve somehow become comfortable with being naked.
I think I’ve become more comfortable with being a person who is naked.
That may sound like the same thing, but to me it isn’t.
Because when we talk before and after our sessions, I’m not thinking about whether she is looking at my body. I’m not thinking about my scars, or whether I’m circumcised, or what my testicles look like, or what she thinks about my penis. I’m just talking to her.
I’m me.
And I think that may be one of the most important things Autumn has taught me.
She hasn’t taught me through some great conversation where she explained that I should feel better about my body. She hasn’t needed to tell me that I’m more than my physical appearance.
She’s taught me through her presence.
Through the way she talks to me.
Through the way she treats my nakedness as something that doesn’t need to be an event.
Through the fact that we can talk, laugh, hug, or simply exist in the same space without my being naked becoming the most important thing about me.
She sees me as a person.
And I’m beginning to understand how different that feels from the way I’ve sometimes imagined being seen.
I still want to see a companion. I still want to experience sex in the way that I want to experience it. That hasn’t gone away, and I don’t think it should. There are still things I want to explore, and I’m sure that when the opportunity comes, the nerves will probably come with it.
I may still have that moment where I’m standing there with my clothes on, wondering whether I’m really going to take them off.
I may still wonder what she’ll think.
I may still have all those old insecurities come rushing back.
But maybe I can take something different into that experience now.
Maybe she isn’t looking at a body and deciding whether it measures up.
Maybe she’s looking at a person.
A person who happens to be naked.
A person who has insecurities and hopes and expectations and fears. A person who has a history written on his skin. A person who has spent a long time wondering what other people see when they look at him.
And maybe being seen doesn’t have to mean being evaluated.
That’s something I’m still working on.
When I look back at all of those experiences now, I don’t think I was simply learning how to become comfortable being naked in front of a woman. I think I was learning something much bigger, although I didn’t have the words for it at the time.
I was learning how to let myself be seen.
And maybe those are two very different things.
Being naked is physical.
Being seen is something else entirely.
I’m still learning what that means.
But I think I’m beginning to understand that the goal was never to stop being nervous about taking my clothes off. Maybe the goal was to stop believing that once my clothes came off, the only thing left for someone to see was my body.
Because there is so much more of me than that.
And perhaps the hardest part of all of this isn’t allowing someone to see my body.
It’s allowing myself to believe that there is a person there worth seeing.