You're reading: Couples find joys of erotic massage

Heat and sensuality sometimes peak about the same time in Kyiv – usually around July. Rather than just cooling off with a nice refreshing glass of ice-cold lemonade, some couples choose to heat up their private lives by getting erotic massages - together.

While a regular massage can take the kinks out of your neck and back, an erotic massage is a bit kinkier. Both recipients and masseuses can be fully nude during the massage, which often has a climactic ending, sometimes for all involved.

Ukraine’s police are amazingly tolerant about the erotic massage industry. In the opinion of a police spokesman, as long as sexual intercourse doesn’t happen between the masseuse and patient, the trade is not worth disturbing.

But Ivan Babayev, an Interior Ministry spokesman, acknowledges that “sometimes salons mask their services as ‘massage’ when they are, in fact, places of [prostitution] where sexual contacts are present.”
Numerous websites of Kyiv massage salons promote erotic services along with candid photos of almost naked massage specialists, both male and female. The customer can make his or her choice and then get ready for pleasure.

Margarita Golchenko, administrator of the massage salon Rakuena, says couples are frequent visitors.
An erotic massage costs Hr 1,000 per hour for a couple and is meant to help break up the monotony of their sexual lives. “I understand this wish of couples,” Golchenko says. “Man and woman, having being married for 10-15 years and now undergoing a crisis in their intimate relationship, come to arouse eroticism.”

Young, unmarried couples come also.

“These need sexual diversity, seek some new impressions,” says Golchenko, an attractive brunette in decollete dress, says. “Age doesn’t matter. Massage is for everyone.”

Margarita Golchenko from Rakuena salon prepares a room for the next massage session (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)

Couples usually prefer young women as masseurs.  “Females are more delicate, tactful,” Golchenko says. The women of Rakuena, besides having good massage skills, must be good-looking and sociable. They also need to be good psychologists in order to find the right approach for each client.

According to Rakuena’s administrator, the salon hires only qualified masseurs with certificates in courses after studying different massage techniques.

Daria Biben, one of the owners of entertainment center Egoist, which also offers erotic massage, adds that all masseurs have regular medical checkups and upgrade their skills with on-the-job training from more experienced colleagues.

Nervous, first-time visitors are shown the room where the session will take place and told what will happen. Masseurs offer aromatic body oils believed to enhance the sensitivity of the skin and open “energy channels.” Candles are lit. Calm music is played.

After applying oil to a visitor’s body, masseurs begin to use a mixture of Thai, tantric, ayurvedic and other Eastern techniques of massage. Attention is paid to erogenous zones.

“The couple leaves satisfied, happy,” Golchenko says. “The masseuse teaches a man with a woman how to touch each other, what points to caress, what oils to use. So they get both satisfaction and experience.”

In Rakuena, female masseurs work in underwear. Some other massage salons choose the “completely naked” method. Egoist offers two masseuses, mirrored rooms and a bubble bath.

“An erotic massage for two is a more interesting thing than a session for a single,” Biben says. It especially appeals to the voyeuristic side. “Some intrigue comes when one partner watches how another is pleased,” Biben adds.

While women are sometimes reluctant to have another naked woman massaging their men, Golchenko says that usually women are usually satisfied after the sessions. Men, however, are more strongly opposed to have another naked man massage their wives or lovers.

The end of the session is euphemistically called relaxation. Metaphorically, it’s the fireworks at the end of the show. Directly, the masseuse might bring the client to climax.

“Our massage is, of course, a release of tension and, at the same time, a way around the routine in intimacy, a method to add colors to relationship of man and woman,” Biben says. “A married man wants diverse sex but he doesn’t want to betray his wife. So she comes with him and participates in an erotic session. Thus it is not unfaithfulness.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Denis Rafalsky can be reached at [email protected]