The RentMen Problem

There is a version of my life that people are comfortable hearing about, and I have published it.

The mania. The wards. The medications. The letter. All of it under my own name, on a national broadcaster, and people were kind. I was called brave more times in one week than in the previous thirty years combined.

Nobody has ever called me brave for the other thing.

I have an account on RentMen.

That's it. That's the other thing. A username, a photograph, five hundred characters and a monthly fee. There's an assumption that comes with that address, and it isn't an unreasonable one. It just isn't accurate, and I've stopped expecting anyone to make the distinction, because why would they. You're on RentMen or you aren't.

What nobody assumes is how dull the reason is. I'm there because of an advertising problem, which is really a paperwork problem wearing a hat.

Most of what I do is massage, or the closest thing to it I'm permitted to call it, so the obvious move is to advertise as a massage therapist on a proper site. Problem is, that title is protected, held by people who did the training and answer to a college. I've been at this two years, formal training included, and none of it counts toward registration. There's no college that would have me, and none that could remove me either. So it isn't mine to use, and neither is therapeutic, which takes half the vocabulary with it.

Masseur is available. But the only place I can advertise as a masseur to the men I actually see is RentMasseur, which is RentMen's sister site. Same company, same audience, same assumption hanging over it, just whispered there instead of screamed. Changing the address doesn't change the neighbourhood.

Some of the rest of what I do is listening. A man sits across from me and says things he has never said to anyone. Marriages that are lonely. Fathers who died before anything got settled. Grief that never got a funeral, because the relationship it belonged to was never disclosed. The names for that work are counsellor, psychotherapist, social worker. All spoken for. None of them mine.

What I have instead is a man's confidence, unguarded in a way no therapist is ever given. Something to do with attraction, maybe, or with knowing I'll be in another city by Monday. Men simply tell me things. What's left is companion, which sounds like a euphemism a lawyer drafted, and provider, which sounds like a utility company.

So every honest description of the work belongs to somebody else. And when there's no accurate word available, people don't wait around for one. They assume.

Here's what I'd say if I were allowed to. I offer massage, and something close enough to therapy, in a room where some closeness is possible, from a man who has been through enough to know how to listen and is trained in how to touch. All of that needs a title, a college, and an exam I haven't sat. The only one I could claim without anybody's permission is life coach.

I'd rather be on RentMen.

Nobody has ever built a college for men with RentMen accounts. No exam. No designation. No insurance requirement, no continuing education, no board that convenes to decide whether I'm any good at this.

Which produces something absurd. The same hands, on the same man, in the same room. Call it massage and the state has opinions about my training, my title, my premises, my paperwork. Call it a RentMen listing and the state has no opinion at all.

It would rather not know. Nobody comes knocking.

Which leaves the question of where a man advertises any of it. Not in a directory, which wants a registration number. Not on a card in a window, which wants premises. Not on the ordinary platforms, which want a credential at signup.

The only places that will run an ad for hours of a man's attention, from someone with no college and no licence behind him, are the sites where everybody else is offering something more specific. So that's where the ad goes. And an advertisement does what advertisements do. It puts you next to your neighbours, and it lets people draw their own conclusions about the street.

On RentMen, every door has a name on it but none of them are mine. If you scroll that site you'll notice I'm not playing the same game as the men around me. No nudes on my profile. Nothing on it that would trouble anybody's terms and conditions. And I'm not winning on the body. The competition is largely Greek statuary and I'm an ordinary man in his thirties who sits at a desk for a living.

What's left is my face, my smile, whatever I've managed to write in five hundred characters, and reviews from men saying the massage was good. If somebody books me off that page it's because he read something and liked the sound of the person who wrote it. There's no other reason to book me. Strange way to advertise on a site like RentMen.

And the massage, when he books it, is usually the point of entry rather than the point. It gives him something to have booked. Asking for company sounds like admitting you're lonely. Asking for anything else sounds like a confession you can't get it elsewhere. Massage is respectable. Refined, even.

He can say he wanted his shoulders fixed. He doesn't have to say he wanted somebody in the room, and just wanted to be touched.

Because touch is the thing almost no adult man gets. Especially from another man, and gay men are not exempt. Not the handshake or the clap on the back. Not the random encounters where the skin on skin is incidental to something else. Actual touch, warm and given for its own sake. Ask a man when he was last touched with any real intention in it and watch how long he takes to answer. A fair number can't come up with a year.

And it does something. Warm hands on a man's back, slick with oil, no rush, staying long enough to mean it, and his breathing changes before either of us has said a word. Twenty minutes in, something goes out of him and I feel it let go under my palms. It isn't relaxation. It's closer to being put down.

Most massage runs one way. A body on a table, professional hands, a clock, and a strict understanding that the client receives and does not participate. I don't use a table and I'm not a technician. No sheet, no draping, no sequence, no clock. Hands stay where they land. Head to toe, nothing skipped. Skin is warm on both sides of it.

And a man can touch back, which is the part nobody expects to be allowed. The first time it happens it's tentative. A hand on my forearm, half a question. Then it stops being a service performed on him. It becomes something exchanged.

What a man books and what he's after are rarely the same thing. Mostly he can't put what he wants into words. Culture handed him a binary, everything or nothing, and no language at all for the enormous territory in between. What he needs is a third option. Something with a name he can say out loud, a time and a price and a confirmation email, that ends with him having been touched and held for a while and doesn't require him to file himself under lonely or creepy to get there.

Which is my problem exactly, from the other side of the room. Neither of us has the vocabulary, so both of us get assumed about instead.

What I'm selling is permission. To be who he wants to be, to do what he wants to do, and possibly for the first time in his adult life, to stop. An hour in which he isn't performing for anybody. It's the most straightforwardly useful thing I've done as an adult, and I've had day jobs that genuinely mattered.

For what it's worth, the assumption doesn't fit me either. Not that I'm better than the other men on RentMen. I've met some of them, and they're sharper about risk than most people and considerably kinder than the internet has decided.

I mean the picture it paints isn't me. Thirties, doctorally educated, a decade into a professional job with a pension. Two children. A mortgage. Before this, the most conventional life imaginable. I came to it at thirty-four, after that life came apart in a way I've described elsewhere, and for the reason most people take a second job.

I never did find a home for it. So I built my own. A website, and a name I chose myself. The Travelling Wellness Companion. Two words of almost no meaning bolted to a third that just says I move around. Nobody has ever asked me a follow-up question about it, which was precisely the design brief.

On RentMen the assumption arrives before I do. A man knows what he thinks he's looking at before he's read a syllable I wrote, and everything after gets read through it. On my own site there's nothing sitting above the page telling him what to conclude, and no photographs. Whatever he decides about me, he decides from sentences I wrote. That gives more of me away than any photograph would, and it leaves us something to open with when he first arrives.

The RentMen ad stays up, though. It's the only place that will run it. On paper I'm a RentMen provider, which is a category invented by a website rather than by Parliament, and it's the heading that makes everything underneath it findable. Even if the hours themselves look nothing like whatever anybody assumed.

There's another reason it stays up. A man who wants what I actually do doesn't have the words for it either. So he types the only word there is, and it takes him to a page full of men who are nothing like me, and somewhere down that list he finds a smiling face and a paragraph and thinks, uh, maybe this one.

That's the entire business. Two people with no vocabulary between them, meeting on a site neither of us would have chosen, under an assumption neither of us made, to exchange something neither of us can quite describe.

And then he arrives, and takes his coat off, and for an hour nobody is assuming anything at all.