I really stepped into some shit when I first got licensed. Educating and *de-se-x-ualizing the perception of massage therapy in the public eye is turning out to be a life-long struggle. Ever since I first started massaging with my feet in 2003 up near Seattle, Washington, there’s been a lot of snide remarks thrown at me about my chosen profession and specialty style of bodywork. My natural reflex at first to deal with that was to make a few controlled jokes at myself to create conversation and then redirect their ideas back around to something real.
Here’s my story about my sarcastic approach to standing up for my profession while keeping it light.
(Even though the pressure is deeper than deep.)
I’m a massage therapist who just happens to massage with my feet… that’s all. When I started my massage career, I wanted to stand out from others with a different service somehow, but also find some existing “something” that I could bring with me into the profession to give me a leg up despite my newness. To stand apart, I found a certain barefoot massage technique while still in school, learned it early, then moved deeper into the idea and just kept learning more and more about barefoot massage. It turned out that my own personal history in modern dance translated well to my ability to choreograph a seamless massage through my body and down into my feet – and it helped me recognize alignment and movement queues in my client’s gait patterns. Now I literally had a leg up and could stand apart, for reals.
So, new profession, weird approach: I knew there’d be jokes. I knew there’d be comments and snickers… there’s enough bad jokes and assumptions about Massage Therapists in general anyways, let alone all the ignorant (and sometimes very rude) comments that come up once the idea of “back walking” is mentioned… so I got ahead of it and started to draw attention to my big feet before they did. I mixed jokes with real news. I talked about how much more surface area my feet could cover compared to fingers, hands, and elbows. (Even though proportionally, all of our forearms are just about exactly the same length as our feet!) I got a tattoo on my foot so you’d look at it. I basically incited the nickname “big foot” on myself, and also was known as “the girl who massages with her feet.”
Real Sasquatches throw rocks at unwanted solicitations. I’ll throw rockin’ bad puns.
When I relocated to Texas, it was even trickier. It’s a different animal down here, so I had to step up my game to beat the old mindset. I came up with a pun-ny funny (but accurate) business name “Heeling Sole” because although I didn’t see attaching what I felt as a pretentious word like “healer” to myself, I knew I was the “sole” Heeler that could help change some minds about massage here. So I would steer the conversations away from racist or *se xist comments and deflect them back into little jokes about my feet, even if it was self-deprecating. I’ll let you laugh about my feet now, but then when you feel their awesomeness later you’ll think twice about making fun of me and my profession. I’d bring up facts about the figurative footprint of pressure that I could leave on their lives by helping reduce their chronic pain. I referenced my dance training, and how that helps my coordination to create a session that was as good from my feet as it was from my hands. I continued to find loopholes to legitimize the idea of barefoot massage in their heads by stepping myself away from their preconceptions about back walking, foot *fe tishes, and so many things about how massage is portrayed in movies/TV. (Think Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels in her massage scene with Tim Curry...)
When I started teaching Barefoot Massage in 2009, I wore big Bear Foot slippers to classes that had fuzzy feet with claws: and I got a human-sized Foot costume that I wore to conventions. (Big Foot, get it!?) I also created a “Sasquatch Marketing” class, which was a riff on Guerilla Marketing. I kept my toe on the pulse of the genre and helped grow the use of the phrase “Barefoot Massage” over trade names that misrepresent the history of this work. My continuing education company is working to normalize Barefoot Massage within the industry so that it’s easier to spread all of our collective (and talented) toes into the public eye. Not your average imagery associated with the ‘luxury’ of massage, right!? That’s the idea. Along with trying to change San Antonio’s idea of what they thought massage was, I was also working to help Massage Therapists around the world find clever ways to step away from typical marketing, find their functional niche, and keep the future of massage afoot.
“We can HEEL that” ™ (Yep: I have that trademarked.)
In 2012 I started to bring employees onto my team at Heeling Sole, (which, by the way, made massage industry history, as Heeling Sole was the 1st ever multi-therapist massage clinic that ONLY used their feet to massage… no hands-on techniques by any of the staff!) I decided to put my Northwest Flair on it and call the staff “Sasquatches.” If I’m BigFoot, then they’d be the ‘Squatches. Whenever we did offsite event massages, I called it a Sasquatch Sighting. I have always hated when people “pick” their massage based on what the person looks like – it’s not the looks that matter, it’s the knowledge, training and skill. So trying to get the image of a mystical furry, stanky creature in people’s heads, rather than their idea of how cute is the “massuese” is who’ll be touching them wasn’t that hard, actually… as long as you make it a punny-funny joke. I stopped posting profile pictures of the team, and started pasting that iconic Sasquatch silhouette into all Heeling Sole’s advertising. I’m constantly blocking *fe tish followers on social media, and I’ve maintained a strong “don’t mess with me” boundary in person when it comes to inappropriate behavior directed at my Sasquatches – anything beyond the bad joke that we can throwback at them with an equally strong fact check on what massage therapy really is. Don’t mess with the woman who stands on your spine, you know?
All across the field of Barefoot Massage, I see other LMT’s using the “Bigfoot” or Sasquatch idea, too. My best friend’s business halfway across the country has a Sasquatch as her logo, even. Big Foots and Sasquai are easy connections to draw between anything foot-related, honestly. It’s quirky, it gets stuck in your head, and I’d MUCH rather find fun ways to educate my local community about what Barefoot Massage is and why I do it if I can deflect the inevitable reference to something *se xual and demeaning with a pun. Maybe one day there’ll be more foot-puns than there will be *h appy en ding jokes. No one wants to bang a Sasquatch, so the joke can end there and I don’t have to deal with it. (I shouldn’t have to anyway.)
So how do I help educate my community about Barefoot Massage and help to *desexualize massage therapy? I put my stank on the way I show it to the world, and then prove their bad jokes wrong with the skill of my big feet. Jokes on them, I’ve won best massage in town 7 times so far, and I’m working with hundreds of other Barefoot Massage nerds across the nation to step up and evolve this kind of massage.
Barefoot Massage is the new normal. Our feet are just a tool that we’ve trained to use to massage with – just like how someone uses hands, elbows, stones, cups, or blades.
(*PS, I know there’s a few typos in here… that’s by design. If I actually type in certain words here on my blog, Google will crawl it, index it, and then when people search for certain things, my site shows up. So I can’t actually type out variants of the ess-ee-eeex word, or the jubilant finish phrase, or else I’ll be battling waves of unwanted solicitation for stuff I don’t do.)
