The beautiful stranger dropped her silk robe and lay down naked on the massage table in front of me. She said her name was Jenna. Then she put her hands behind her head, raised her knees, and arched her back like a classic pinup model.
This was my first time, but Jenna had obviously done this before. Her pose was meant to let me strike intimate parts of her body… with a brush.
My job: to paint almost every inch of her blue with white paisleys.
I’m a happily married man. It seemed strange to be alone with a naked woman who wasn’t my wife. But honey, this is art!
(Related: Can a Married Man Flirt with a Single Woman without an Ulterior Motive?)
Body painting has been practiced for thousands of years by tribal societies as a form of open expression. Granted, given the brushstroke bikinis in Sports Illustrated, our modern interpretations are a bit more risqué.
Hence, the question I’d come to answer: Is painting a beautiful naked woman as hot as we all imagine? Or is it just a torturous tease?
To find out, I called the famous body painting artist Craig Tracy and asked him to let me give it a shot. He agreed, with a warning: These projects can take 10 hours or longer, so you need to stop ogling and get to work.
Early on, things went slowly. I was nervous, sweating even. My heart raced and, surprisingly, I felt too self-conscious to even look at Jenna’s entire physique. Instead, I pointed my airbrush at her thigh and spurted a few quick blasts of blue paint all over it.
Jenna seemed disappointed with my offering. “It’s looking a little spotty,” she said.
After about 20 minutes, she was coated in blue and I traded the airbrush for a bristle brush to add the paisleys. Strangely, I wasn’t aroused. But I wasn’t notaroused either.
I was in an odd kind of sexual purgatory. Touching her skin felt exciting. But painting a naked woman isn’t like being taken to the champagne room at a strip club. In some ways, it’s more frustrating.
As I moved up her thighs, stroking inches away from her exposed ladyhood, I knew this would be the limits of our interaction. Talk about extreme sexual tension.
Eli Coleman, Ph.D., a sex therapist and professor of human sexuality at the University of Minnesota, says there’s a word for how people might interpret this situation: foreplay.
That’s why some psychologists encourage couples to paint each other, for playfulness and intimacy. (For more ideas, check out the 33 Simple Sex Tips to Turn Her On.)
But as sometimes happens with actual foreplay, all my stroking started to feel like work.
“You’re doing great,” Jenna said to keep me motivated. But by hour seven, I noticed I was draping my arm across her navel to complete a paisley below her throat.
Her perfectly shaped double Ds were less objects of lust than mountains to climb: It’d take about two and a half paisleys—at least a few more hours—to cover them completely.
When it was over, I left with a strange sexual moral: the harder I worked on her, the more Jenna seemed to appreciate me.
My wife didn’t seem to mind, either. After all, you come to appreciate female beauty more after slaving over the canvas.
(So her clothes are off and you're at a loss for words? Be prepared and read The 30 Hottest Things to Say to a Naked Woman.)
