Vagina (37 page)

A series of intimate questions confronts the site’s visitor: “Do you hold back from being in a relationship?”; “Do you feel there is more to sex but aren’t sure what it is?”; “Do you feel unable to enjoy sex?”; “Do you have difficulty experiencing orgasm?”; “Do you want to reclaim the innocence of your sexuality?” But the ecstatic testimonials—all from women—quickly neutralize any potential threat.
⁵
“Thank you for holding me so skillfully in my vulnerability,” Ms. D; “After seeing you, I hear my heart beat, I feel so alive—a real woman . . . Thank you,” Ms. S; “Thanks, Mike. I feel grace and courage, feminine, protected, clarity, focused . . . a serene smile on my face,” and so on. And there at the bottom of the page, as if Heartdaka.com were any old business, was a link to Lousada’s Facebook profile, complete with his photo: a handsome man with a beard, seated on a rock, gazing out into the middle distance, and wearing hippieish trousers.

So, after some hesitation, I called Lousada and made an appointment. I learned that he charged a hundred pounds an hour (about $150).

He explained that his mission was to empower women sexually, and that he also focused on healing women sexually—via yoni massage—who had been erotically traumatized. His client base included women from all backgrounds and of all ages. His track record is impressive, to say the least: he has restored the orgasmic potential in hundreds of women.

Wow, I thought, this was a lot more explicit than the vague “workshop” and nebulous “massage” I had anticipated. I explained that since I was in a relationship I would not be open to actual yoni work, and he soothingly assured me that he would respect my boundaries. The fact that I was going to interview a male sexual healer/yoni guru also wreaked havoc on my judgmental feminist reflexes about the sex trade and its morality.

I was fascinated by my own reaction and the reactions of my women friends and colleagues after I committed to seeing Lousada. Not a single female friend expressed horror or aversion; they were either totally captivated, or annoyed that they couldn’t go too. E., a happily married mother of two, kept e-mailing me: “Well? Have you gone yet? What was it like?” We did not maturely consider this notion; our responses were not enlightened or politically correct. Rather, we all regressed to an almost adolescent state, with the feminine equivalent of locker-room chatter flying back and forth among us.

And yet, Lousada did not seem like anyone’s victim or predator; with what intellectual cudgel could I beat his decision to enter an aspect of his sexuality into a market economy? I was brought to a standstill, in relationship to the issue of prostitution, by the very fact of him.

“Do you consider yourself a sex worker?” I asked, in our initial conversation.

He said that he preferred the term
sexual healer
(though now, a year later, as he has started to address a more mainstream and medical audience about his successful techniques, he identifies himself as a “somatic therapist”). He went on to say that he works clothed or unclothed, as the client wishes, and that the client can be dressed or undressed, as she likes, as well. Images flashed through my head—I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to encounter my first yoni empowerer or, as I mistakenly saw it then, male sex worker catering to women. Did women seeking out someone like Lousada mean that women are just as “horny”—awful word, but there aren’t a lot of good substitutes—as men have been so long portrayed? Or did it, rather, testify in a small way to a widespread sexual sorrow among Western women? Were women who could afford to, really seeking sexual encounters with hired men regardless of how the men described themselves—encounters that they could guide, and for which they could set the pacing—because their sexual lives with their own partners were not working well?

Lousada’s “studio” is actually a charming renovated cottage near Chalk Farm, an area of north London. He opened the door. As in his photo, he was a fit, golden-skinned, curly-haired man who, alarmingly, immediately offered me a hug. Tantra must do wonders for the system, since he was forty-three, but looked a decade younger. I nervously sat on the floor, as he indicated, and looked around: we were in a warm sitting room with piles of red and orange pillows, a shrine to the Hindu goddess Kali on a low table, and candles and incense burning around us. To my horror, a male photographer was there.

I had arranged with the
Sunday Times
to write an article about my visit to Lousada. A photographer from the paper was supposed to arrive at the end of the session. But Lousada explained that he had asked him to come at the beginning, to spare me from revealing myself too much. “I was thinking of your well-being,” he explained. “Things happen in a session,” he continued. “It can be overwhelming. You may have awakened trauma; you could become ecstatic, or shout—or you might have been crying.” I felt taken aback, and a bit stage-managed. Wasn’t one’s personal sexual healer supposed to keep one calm, rather than stress one out by upending one’s professional arrangements?

Lousada then consulted with the photographer about possible shots, and suggested that I get into the “yab-yum” position with him. He gestured toward a statue that showed Shiva ecstatically entwined with a goddess, her thighs wrapped around his waist, their groins touching. “I’m not going to do
that
!” I burst out. As a compromise, the photos ended up being Lousada and me simply seated in the lotus position, face-to-face.

Before we began the session, Lousada explained that many of his clients had been sexually abused as girls, and as a result experienced aftereffects ranging from a deep rage against men, which manifested sexually, to an inability to feel deeply or to be orgasmic. Sex with him—he used his hand, for the most part—helped them, he claimed, heal their rage and depression.

Lousada soon began to guide me in Tantra 101. He had me sit before him on a cushion and engage in breathing exercises. We faced each other, inches apart. He had me visualize each chakra, from my head to my “root chakra,” which in Tantra is the sex center (and which, I now know, corresponds to one of the three branches in the female pelvic nerve): “Feel your root chakra extend into the earth. . . . Feel it growing strong. . . . Your yoni is extending roots into the earth . . . now the roots are splitting rock.”

I burst out laughing. The photographer snapped away.

“Nervous?” Lousada asked. “That’s okay.”

“No,” I said, barely able to contain myself. “It’s just funny.”

But somehow the thought of a mighty earth-splitting yoni—in a generally yoni-hating and yoni-insulting culture—was . . . not unpleasant funny, but nice funny; still laughing, I pictured, as if in an animated movie, a mighty yoni superhero—a yoni avenger.

Then Lousada had me stare deeply into his eyes while we breathed in unison. At this point, I was checking my gut to see if he was a cad, a predator, or just a poseur. But in fact he met my gaze levelly and I had to admit, I trusted his motivations. My judgments were flying out the window, and when I considered his repeated mission statement—that his life work was to heal women who had been sexually harmed—it was very difficult to find a reason to dismiss or deride his work.

At the end of the breathing session, he smiled and said, “Welcome, Goddess.”

And I couldn’t help smiling, too. I thought of all the women in loveless marriages, women who were verbally ground down daily with disrespect or simple disregard. I thought, too, of the “whore with the heart of gold” stereotype, and the frequent report that many men visit female prostitutes just for the experience of someone listening to them or praising them. For many women, Lousada’s acknowledgment of the sacred feminine in every woman could alone be worth the price of admission. How many exhausted moms, or taken-for-granted wives, wouldn’t be at least as tempted by an apparently sincere “Welcome, Goddess” for only a hundred pounds, as they might be by a great new outfit or hairstyle?

“How exactly,” I asked him, “do you heal women sexually?”

“I engage in ‘yoni-tapping,’ ” he said, to address the trauma stored in the genitals. For various reasons—including the fact that a body worker can’t get a license to touch the genitals—body workers don’t usually look at trauma in this part of the body, he explained. “But I start with massaging the body. . . . Then I move into working on the yoni. First I work externally. When it’s appropriate I ask if it’s okay to enter [the client] with my fingers. The yoni is a sacred space. It is the holy of holies of your body. No one may enter without your permission. I ask: ‘Goddess, may I enter?’ If I get the consent, I check with the yoni to see. I place my fingers at the entrance to the yoni. If the yoni is ready to receive me, it will draw me in. There is no need for me to push my fingers, or ‘insert’—it will actually draw me in, with a kind of reaching out or suction, if a woman is ready to receive.

“If this [reaching-out action] doesn’t happen when a woman is having sex, she is actually dishonoring her own yoni.” He went on to say that he advises men never to go with what a woman says verbally about her readiness—never to enter “if the yoni doesn’t say yes, too.” I thought that would be good advice to give to young men, as part of their basic sexual education.

Does he ever have intercourse with his clients? “I don’t generally have intercourse with my clients unless it is extremely therapeutic.” He restated that he generally worked with his hands. I asked if his clients ever became addicted to him; he replied that he is careful to keep appropriate boundaries, and that his intention is to free the client from addictions. He admitted that they could develop emotional attachments, but that he handled that situation as any therapist would handle transference. He added that he had a girlfriend, who also does sexual healing work, sometimes in concert with him.

“Do your clients have orgasms?” I asked.

“Generally,” he replied, “but that’s not the goal. I have three types of clients. Women who come to me because they are not happy with their relationships, with their own masculine or feminine. They yearn for a masculine man but they’re not attracting that because they are ‘in their masculine’ [forced to live in an unbalanced way and drawing too much on the masculine side of their personalities] themselves.” He spoke about the pressures of modern work life on women—how it rewards them for becoming unbalanced in this way and discourages their drawing on the feminine within them. When they see him, he claimed, they restore a feminine balance and start to attract grounded, responsible, protective, masculine men. I was skeptical, and he offered to put me in touch with some of them. Lousada said that a man’s task in relation to a woman is to “hold her” as a wineglass holds wine. By now I had heard variants on this Tantric idea that a man’s role in sex is to hold and support the wildness of the woman. “The true state of women is oceanic bliss,” he said; a man needs to let a woman “move and breathe” so that she may enter “her flow.”

This was getting a bit oceanic for me, so I asked him about the second category of client. Category number two, he said, “Are women who have suffered severe abuse or trauma. And they want to deal with it because it is ruining their lives.”

Category three? “Sometimes my clients are women who just want to experience pleasure.”

“What if you don’t find them attractive?” I asked.

“There is always something beautiful about a woman,” he said, rather endearingly. He explained that some of these clients are in their fifties or sixties; some are physically challenged in various ways, or disabled; many are alone in their lives. “In a session,” he said, “I can always see something.”

He says that he typically takes two or three hours for the yoni massage; he wants the woman to feel that there is no rush.

This timetable struck me profoundly, as did the descriptions I had heard from the Muirs’ workshops’ time allotment (an hour and a half) for “yoni massage” alone. This was obviously a completely different idea of the relationship of female pleasure to the allotment of time than the one we inherit in the West. “Isn’t that a little long?” I asked. “I can imagine that if you tell an average man that he needs to take two or three hours to pay attention to the woman in that way, he will immediately look around for the remote control,” I joked.

“That’s why I need to teach men,” Lousada responded seriously.

I was sold, at least on Lousada’s sincerity. On to the massage—or the amount of it I was comfortable with.

He led me upstairs, into a seductive little bedroom. The photographer had left by then. The bedroom was lit with candles and fragrant with more incense. There, once again, we got into a negotiation: he was intent on a yoni massage. It was such a frankly sexual situation, with none of the lotus-y deniability I had imagined when I first looked at his website and thought it would involve some vaguely sensual massage—I couldn’t go there. I was in bed with an attractive stranger and there was no way to pretend that what he was proposing would not be a form of sex. The nice monogamous Jewish girl in me once again drew a line.

“Can’t we do some . . . body work?” I asked. He also had a Reiki qualification. “Reiki?” I added, hopefully.

He looked insulted. “Yoni work is what I
do,
” he said, with professional pride.

Finally we agreed: he would work with me nonsexually and I would keep my shirt and sarong on. Well, within thirty seconds I was in a state of—yes—oceanic bliss. Within five minutes I was laughing, and within ten minutes I was in an altered state.

What was he doing?

“What are you
doing
?” I asked. Lousada explained that through a great deal of training he could project his Shakti (male) energy into every part of his body—including his hands, his fingers—and that that was what caused the effect of his touch. He was tracing, he explained, the meridian lines of my body—lines of energy, or
chi,
that Eastern medicine believes form a network between chakra points—with the tips of his fingers. There was some inexplicable kinetic charge. Our session lasted for an hour, and, yes, even though it was not a sexual exchange, there was something electrifying and life-enhancing about physically “receiving” in that leisurely, agendaless way, for an hour.