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Key points
- Popular culture and the media equate "sex" with vaginal intercourse.
- But great sex involves much more than just intercourse.
- The foundation of satisfying sex is gentle, leisurely, playful, whole-body mutual massage.
- Massage-style touch also provides many other physical and psychological benefits that enhance sex—and life.
What exactly is sex? On TV and in the movies, it involves a little kissing and hugging, then almost always a quick plunge into intercourse. In romance fiction, it’s passionate, obsessive, all-consuming love that leads to intercourse. In pornography, it’s almost entirely fellatio and intercourse, with maybe a little cunnilingus. But across entertainment genres, most sex focuses on vaginal intercourse. That’s the basis of procreative sex, but most sex is less about having children than enjoying pleasure. Consequently, focusing on intercourse is erotically myopic.
Fifty years of sex research show that sex—at least mutually orgasmic, satisfying sex—rarely results from intercourse, but almost always from leisurely, playful, mutual whole-body massage that eventually, after 20 minutes or so, leads to genital play that may or may not include vaginal intercourse. Sex educators, counselors, and therapists talk themselves blue in the face about the fact that sex is more about mutual whole-body loving touch than intercourse. A recent analysis of 212 studies should aid their efforts. It shows that gentle massage not only enhances lovemaking but also offers many other physical and mental health benefits.
The Study
German and Dutch researchers reviewed several decades of touch/massage research involving some 13,000 men, women, and children. Most studies compared those who received gentle, massage-style touch for around 20 minutes with those who did not. Some compared people who touched things like kittens or stuffed animals with those who did not. Touch recipients and touchers experienced what the researchers called “massive” benefits. “The evidence is clear and robust that touch is beneficial across a large number of physical and mental health conditions, for all ages, and both healthy individuals and those with diagnosed conditions.”
In the studies:
• Twenty minutes of gentle touch consistently reduced blood levels of the stress hormone, cortisol.
• In people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease who were agitated and difficult to control, 20 minutes of massage a few times a week, calmed them.
• Massage improved the mood of people suffering a broad array of medical conditions, notably pain and breast cancer.
• Massage or petting animals improved mood and increased happiness.
• With daily massage, infants born prematurely gained more weight faster and were able to leave pediatric intensive care units sooner.
• Regular massage consistently helped relieve anxiety and depression.
• Massage reduced blood pressure.
• It also hastened recovery from fatigue induced by strenuous exercise.
For all age groups but one, it didn’t matter who administered massages. The one exception was newborns born prematurely. Compared with massages administered by medical personnel, for reasons unknown, those infants benefited more from being touched by their parents.
Massage produced significant benefits for everyone, but the greatest life enhancement accrued to those with diagnosed physical or mental health conditions. The researchers advocate incorporating massage routinely into clinical care.
The Only Sense We Cannot Live Without
During the 19th century, long before safe, effective contraception and legal abortion, many hapless young women delivered unwanted babies and abandoned them at churches, hospitals, and police stations. These children were sent to foundling homes and infant orphanages, where most quickly died, presumably from disease.
New York physician Henry Dwight Chapin, M.D. (1857-1942), closely observed hundreds of foundlings. At first, most appeared healthy, then for no apparent reason, they became listless, lost weight, wasted away, and died from a condition he dubbed “failure to thrive.”
Chapin surveyed foundling homes in 10 cities and documented death rates of a ghastly 95 percent for infants under age 1 and around 50 percent for those from 1 to 2. Chapin and his wife, Alice Delafield, a pioneer in the field of social work, suspected the culprit was malnutrition. They importuned foundling homes to serve better food, but when they did, their infant death rates hardly budged.
Next, the couple compared care at facilities with different death rates. At the most lethal homes, infants were left in cribs except during feedings. But at the facilities with lower death rates, nurses cuddled the infants. As cuddling increased, deaths decreased. The Chapins discovered that gentle, loving touch is crucial to infant survival.
Failure to thrive rarely occurs after infancy, but death from lack of touch at any age demonstrates the profoundly vital power of gentle skin-to-skin contact. It turns out that touch can be considered an essential nutrient delivered through the skin.
Touch and Sex
While massage helps everyone, the study showed that compared with the men, the women participants benefited much more. It should come as no surprise that during sex, women crave massage, which is often called foreplay. Many women wish for a great deal more foreplay than many men provide. But the word foreplay is problematic. It implies things that happen before the main event, intercourse. A focus on gentle, leisurely, playful mutual massage fits neatly into lovemaking before intercourse, during it, and after. Consequently, most sexologists prefer the term loveplay.
Attention, gentlemen: You’re likely to enjoy better sex and get better reviews as lovers if you spend at least 20 minutes kissing, hugging, and gently massaging your partner from head to toe—before you reach for her breasts or elsewhere. Many sexologists recommend foot massages as especially marvelous. However, in the study, foot massage did not produce the greatest benefits. That distinction went to the massage of the face and scalp. Try five to 10 minutes of massage mostly above the shoulders before you touch much below them. If you do this, by the time you progress to genital play, you’re much more likely to function at your sexual best and enjoy the eager, responsive lovers you desire.
References
Packheiser, J et al. “A Systematic Review and Multivariate Meta-Analysis of the Physical and Mental Health Benefits of Touch Interventions,” Nature Human Behavior (2024) 8:1088. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-01841-8.
