The ancestral, millennia-old, erotic and sensual massages were invented in the 1990s

5 October 2026

In the world of erotic massage there is a lot of information that has been passed around from one place to another without being checked, and this has given rise to myths.

Warning: I'm going to break with some very well-established myths and beliefs. If you're not ready, you'd better stop reading.

This is something very human: someone wants to tell us a story and mixes images and texts from the past with what they want to convey in the present. It happens constantly in every human sphere, and erotic massages are no exception.

If this has made you want to try it: the tantric massage, without mysticism.

You will have had the opportunity to read the same text with different words in many centres: 'the tantric massage is an ancient technique applied to sexuality', 'from time immemorial men received massages in baths, saunas and other places, naked and without any taboo', 'in the East, nuru massage is a technique that comes from the ancient geishas'.

Even some centres, knowing that this is not true, keep it on their website because it has become so ingrained in the collective unconscious that pulling people out of their mistaken belief is difficult and even counterproductive for the business.

The reality is different and, as often happens with stories of this kind, it is much simpler and less pretty than what we are told.

There are two types of massage that end up being the stars in almost all centres: body-to-body massage with nuru gel, and a sensitive massage with the hands and a careful, delicate focus on the genitals, which is usually called tantra, lingam or similar.

The reality is that they are not ancestral or ancient techniques: we know perfectly well where they originated and why.

Nuru is the name of a seaweed, and also of a gel that has the particularity of not staining, not smelling, being very slippery and being very easy to handle. Most current gels have no trace of the seaweed, but they fulfil the same function. Later on I'll explain the history of the gel in more detail, but I can tell you in advance that it is a product found in almost all nappies in the world.

Geishas were not masseuses. They did accompany men, but through dance, conversation, music and basically their presence, being highly cultured individuals.

The real start of the erotic massage business in Japan came in 1956, when an ambiguous anti-prostitution law prohibited sex between people who did not know each other in exchange for money.

We humans have always tried to put gates on the countryside, and it hasn't worked out well.

In Japan there was a tradition of bathing places and saunas that adapted to this law and became soapland, which roughly means 'land of foam'. The idea is brilliant and simple: a woman could legally give a man a bath, massage him and caress him in these places, and after a session they were no longer strangers, and the law ceased to have effect.

Later they came to be called Turkish bath, but there were protests from a Turkish academic who did not want his country or its bathing ritual to be associated with this type of activity. So the massage ended up taking its name from the gel: nuru massage.

This massage consists of a body-to-body massage, where the masseuse interacts with the client with her entire anatomy and the client is forbidden to touch her. Logically, the limits of not touching her can be established in each case, but it is advisable that this be so, since it increases desire and greatly improves the final ecstasy.

The tantric massage exists, is not an invention, but like tantra has nothing to do with what you have been told.

Tantra is a very ancient spiritual current where sexual energy is very important, but it goes far beyond sex or massages. It is a way of life, a path. Many tantra purists have a hard time explaining that in their workshops one is not going to learn how to perform magical touches, but to work on oneself and one's partner through multiple tools, one of which is massage, and very rarely on the genitals.

What we have in the world of erotic massage is rather a 'neotantra', which is the reinterpretation of many Eastern concepts from the West. Here we can highlight the figure of Osho, who can be considered the main reference of this culture, which became popular in California around the 1970s.

We will also have an article on this subject, so I'll leave it there.

When you see a massage menu, if it does not explain it clearly, ask: each centre has given its own touch to these two terms and has created a large number of by-products.

But you already know that it is not an ancient technique. Beyond touch and caress, it is basically body-to-body massage or manual massage with bodily contact.