Stop Making It So Weird

In elementary school we showered after PE and Mrs. Fast supervised to make sure we actually got clean. In junior high and high school, post-gym showers were just part of the day. Pool locker rooms, communal changing areas, women of all ages and all bodies moving through various states of undress like it was completely unremarkable.

Because it was.

Then I joined the Army. Communal showers. Communal bathrooms. At one point, outhouses that were just a wooden board with multiple holes cut side by side — Roman-style, completely matter of fact, no big deal.

I grew up understanding that bodies are just bodies. Nudity is just nudity. Neither one is inherently weird, inherently sexual, or inherently anything except human.

Then I became a massage therapist and discovered that a lot of people did not have this experience.

Here’s what I understand about why.

American culture has a particular and complicated relationship with the body —

simultaneously hyper-sexualized and deeply puritanical, which is a genuinely exhausting

combination. We’re surrounded by bodies used to sell things, and simultaneously taught that our own bodies are private, shameful, not for public consumption. Nudity gets collapsed into sexuality almost automatically. And sexuality, for a lot of people, has a complicated relationship with safety.

So when someone walks into a massage therapy room and is asked to undress, they’re not just taking off their clothes. They’re navigating a lifetime of cultural conditioning about what bodies mean and who gets access to them. They’re doing a quiet risk assessment. They’re asking themselves — sometimes consciously, sometimes not — is this safe? Is this person safe? Do they have intentions I haven’t consented to?

That’s not irrational. That’s a reasonable response to being a body in America, particularly if you’re a woman, particularly if you have any history that gave you reason to ask that question.

I want to name it plainly because almost nobody in this field does: I know some of you walk in wondering if you’re about to be assaulted. And I want you to know that I see that fear, I understand where it comes from, and it deserves a real response rather than a breezy reassurance.

Here’s the real response: getting licensed to practice massage therapy is a significant

investment of time, money, and ongoing continuing education. Maintaining that license

requires professional conduct, ethical practice, and adherence to standards that exist

specifically to protect clients. It’s not a perfect system — predators exist everywhere, and no credential eliminates that entirely. But someone with predatory intent has a lot of easier options than years of training and the ongoing weight of professional licensure. The infrastructure around this profession exists, in part, as a filter. It’s worth knowing that.

What you actually are on my table — underneath the cultural noise, underneath the fear, underneath whatever story you’ve inherited about your body — is a series of interconnected systems held together by a microbiome so vast that you are technically more microbe than human.

You are fascia and fluid and electrical signals and decades of accumulated tension patterns.

You are the place where your nervous system lives. You are genuinely, structurally

remarkable.

You are not a naked person.

You are an ecosystem.

The draping stays. The important bits stay covered. And the rest of it — the softness, the asymmetry, the parts you’ve spent years apologizing for — that’s just tissue. That’s just where you’ve been storing things. That’s just the body doing what bodies do, which is hold everything you’ve ever lived through until someone gives it permission to let go.

I’ve noticed something over the years. The clients who are most reluctant to let me work on their abdomen — who tense when I approach it, who say oh, not my stomach with the particular tone of something long protected — those clients, once they’re willing to try it, almost always ask for it again.

Every single time.

Because the belly holds things. We know this intuitively even when we can’t articulate it.

And being met there — carefully, without judgment, without agenda — does something that’s hard to describe and easy to feel.

That’s what the table is. Not a place where your fears were wrong to exist. A place where you can, for an hour, set them down.

Stop making it so weird.