Why More And More Women Are Paying For Erotic Massages

“I was turned on in all senses—mentally, physically, emotionally.”

By Arielle Domb

Published: Oct 25, 2024 6:30 AM EDT

When Laura,* a New York City-based artist, turned 63, she noticed something shift in the world around her: She was beginning to feel invisible. She’d be at a restaurant or the hospital or the bank and she’d ask a question, but staff would dismiss her, or brush her off dismissively, like she was an idiot. One day, sick of feeling ignored, Laura began researching tantra and came across something called yoni massage. ‘CLOSE YOUR EYES, RELAX, AND PREPARE YOURSELF FOR ECSTASY,’ read one website, belonging to a man who went by YoniMaster Rick. He was a New York-based provider of yoni massage, erotic massage, and tantric massage. Laura was intrigued. She booked herself an appointment.

Laura is one of a number of women who have opted to pay for a yoni massage from a male provider, fulfilling a variety of needs otherwise lacking in their daily lives. As dating app usage declines and movements like 'boysobriety' proliferate, many women are looking for alternate ways to experience pleasure and intimacy with others, without having to invest time in dating. Others, like Laura, are in relationships, but find that paying for sensual services is empowering—enabling them to fight back against misogynistic norms that can make them feel unsafe, unseen, and unsatisfied.

Yoni massage usually involves a sensual touching of the entire body, with a specific focus on the vulva area, however the practice tends to differ slightly among providers. There is no official accreditation for yoni massage therapy in the United States, according to Medical News Today (hence the importance of reading reviews or getting recommendations to find someone trustworthy).

For YoniMaster Rick, each session begins with a breathing exercise and a conversation about consent. (Even if women say they have no boundaries, Rick makes sure to have this conversation.) Then, after signing some forms on an iPad, Rick prepares the hot oil, puts on some music, and begins a full body massage. After about an hour and a half of caressing his client's body, Rick edges towards their intimate parts (always asking permission before he moves to this area). The yoni massage has two components: a gentle massage of the external part of the vulva—the labia and the clitoris—followed by a 360-degree massage of the internal parts.

"I was on fire. I was soaking wet and my heart was racing."

I first heard about YoniMaster Rick on Reddit. A flurry of his clients were raving about his services on the r/TantricMassage thread. “I was on fire,” Chloe,* a 40-year-old commodities broker on Wall Street who first reached out to Rick in May last year, told me over the app. “I was soaking wet and my heart was racing.”

At the time, Chloe was dealing with a lot of anxiety. She was the main breadwinner for her husband and two children, but was going through a difficult period where she worried about her job security. Meanwhile, she felt like she and her husband were drifting apart. After a long day, one or both of them would usually be too tired to have sex. They floated the idea of trying something adventurous together, like having a threesome or swinging, but ultimately decided not to; they were worried about the impact sexual connections with other people could have on their feelings towards each other.

A few nights later, lying in bed, Chloe’s husband showed her Rick’s website. Chloe remembers him telling her that as long as she didn’t run away with him or fall in love with him, he was okay with another man giving her orgasms, especially if it led to them having more sex.

Chloe arranged to meet Rick at a Midtown hotel on a Wednesday. She was nervous, but felt relieved when Rick opened the door to the room. They chatted for around twenty minutes before he began the massage. Rick’s hands on her body felt electric. Chloe felt close to orgasm before he’d even touched her vulva. When he began the yoni massage, she orgasmed at least four times. “I was not prepared for how my session with Rick impacted my libido,” she says. Afterwards, Chloe began having sex with her husband every night and twice a day on weekends. “Not only is my libido back, but I feel more connected with my body, my husband, and my kids,” she says. “I’m performing better at work and have so much more energy.”

When I speak to Rick (not his real name) over Zoom, he’s sitting in his car, wearing sunglasses. He is warm and softly-spoken. “I’m very guarded about my identity,” he explains. “America is a very conservative place… I'm so protective of this [work] that there is only one person close to me in my life who knows that I have this operation.”

Rick first ventured into the world of sensual massage around fifteen years ago, when his wife became seriously ill. At just 30 years old, she began going through menopause, which “killed her sex drive.” Together, they tried everything to rekindle their once-fiery sex life—from medications to hormone treatments—but nothing worked. That was, until Rick took a yoni massage course in Japan and, after mastering the skill, tried it out on his wife. “It did more for her libido than anything modern medicine did,” he says.

Rick’s wife tragically passed away, but he was touched by the impact yoni massage had on those last few months of her life. Two years ago, he decided to set up a yoni massage business in New York.

For Carla,* a 29-year-old woman who has ADHD, being touched by Rick helped her get out her head and focus on her body. It was her last day on a solo trip in New York City, and she’d booked a room in a hotel near the airport, having found herself increasingly put off by the culture of straight men who “want to have sex with women but do not like women… they don't care about our experience.” Paying for an erotic massage felt like reasserting her autonomy in an increasingly misogynistic world, like she was flipping the patriarchy on its head. “Rick told me that after [the session] my libido would go crazy, and it did,” Carla said, “I came home and I could not focus on anything else but sex. I was jumping my situationship multiple times a day.” She kept thinking: Is this what men feel like the whole time?

The massage also changed Carla’s thoughts around sex. Since the appointment, Carla has developed some ground rules when it comes to hooking up. Firstly, “No one is entering me with their penis until I've had my first orgasm,” and secondly, “Two minutes of foreplay is not enough. You need an hour.”

For Pauline Marie-Antoinette, a Berlin-based erotic poet who is on the marketing team for Sensuali (a sex-positive platform that offers paid sensual services), erotic massage allows her to experience pleasure without the usual pressure of reciprocation—or even the pressure of orgasm. “Tantra massage is like a meditation where you just surrender to someone's touch,” she says. “Often in our society, we're so goal-driven in our way of self-pleasuring; in our relationships.” Paying for an erotic experience, on the other hand, helps her focus on the here and now.

While erotic massages can induce several orgasms, London sensual massage therapist Rubens Abreu emphasizes that this is not the goal of his services, rather learning “what kind of sensations and pleasurable feelings that [the client’s] body is capable of.” The experience is akin to “getting a deep tissue massage to your vulva,” he says, “I'm pretty much worshipping the whole body for that period of time.”

The erotic masseuses I spoke to differed in how they viewed their relationship to their clients. Some providers would have oral or penetrative sex with their clients (if both parties wanted to). One provider went on to date one of his clients. Rick, on the other hand, says he likes to maintain a clear professional boundary during his services. He usually wears medical scrubs during appointments, finding that they create “a subliminal barrier and an appreciation that I am there to provide something, not to engage in a personal relationship.”

Still, that’s not to say the sessions don’t move him on an intimate level. Once, Rick said he received a call from a woman who wanted to book a session with him the following night. He remembers her explaining that she’d never had a fulfilling sex life, that she wanted to experience something memorable. But she was anxious. She had scars over her body and thought that she looked much older than she was. When she showed up the next night, Rick was surprised by her young face and reddish auburn hair. After they did a breathing exercise, the woman removed her wig and asked Rick to turn off the lights.

As Rick began massaging her body, the woman told him that she’d been fighting cancer. Three weeks earlier, she’d told her doctor that she was done with chemotherapy. She wanted to die at home. After she orgasmed, Rick said that they hugged for over ten minutes. The room was dark but the city light was flooding into the room through the window, casting a warm glow onto her smile. “That was perfect,” he remembers her whispering into his ear. “For the last time.”

“These intimate moments we share with people are very, very special,” Rick says. “We all need to appreciate them, because most of us will never know what's our last time.”

There were unique reasons and life circumstances that brought each of the women I spoke with to erotic massage. Yet they all described a similar experience during it: a feeling of being wholly in the moment, the buzz of life’s anxieties fading away. There is an irony in that, for many women, it took paying for a service to escape the confines of capitalism; the feeling of always needing to be somewhere, to be busy, to be pretty, to be optimally performing.

“One thing that Rick said to me is that [as] women, we are conditioned to always be aware of how the other person is feeling,” recalls Laura. “You're looking at yourself being looked at… it's very hard to get that narrative out of your head.” During her appointment with Rick, Laura felt turned on “in all senses—mentally, physically, emotionally.” She found the experience “life-affirming.” It made her think, “Wow, I'm alive. I'm being. I'm this age. I can still do this. I've got a lot left in me.” She was 63, and finally, she was being seen.

*Names have been changed to protect anonymity.