Wow, not only is Gina Russel a terrible person but so are a bunch of her family members. If I were to go to any of my family and try to get help to commit a crime I would find myself reported to the police. And rightly so as I would report any of my family trying to do the same thing. Too many assholes in this world.
"For actual decades, James Randi offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove any kind of supernatural ability and no one ever won it."
I was able to attend one test, at The Amazing Meeting, a skepticism con that Randi would organize every year in Las Vegas.
The applicant in this case was someone who, as I recall, said she had the power to sense internal organs or some such (non-invasively). IIRC they brought out three or four test subjects and asked her to guess who only had one kidney. She looked and listened and, I don't know, felt their auras or whatever. The audience remained absolutely quiet the whole time, so as not to disturb her. It was amazing.
In the end, unsurprisingly, she couldn't do it. (One of the testees said that due to a genetic abnormality, he was born with one kidney).
Aside from being done in front of an audience, this was a fairly typical case. Lest anyone think the methodology was rigged or unfair, it was developed in coordination with the applicant, and both the applicant and the Randi Foundation would agree that this was a fair test of the applicant's powers.
Most people who applied for this weren't con artists. Those stayed away, because they knew that an honest test would expose them. Generally, applicants were just people who honestly thought they had weird powers or abilities.
I hate that some outfit calling itself “California Psychics” advertise on the SiriusXM version of MSNBC to which I listen (for entertainment purposes only) in my car.
Please don’t confuse legitimate Tarot readings for this bullcrap. The cards are beautifully designed tools for discussions that can help people study their life situations, often leading to helpful insights. They are not properly used for fortune-telling, which is a form of fraud.
Ta, Robyn. I love my Tarot deck. I'm a visual learner, and it's a great tool for meditating on next life steps. A long-departed friend taught me the Work spread, and it's my go-to. After the roommate died, I broke out the new deck (same as the old deck by Barbara G. Walker, which was so worn I knew what some of the cards were without turning them over), and asked "What now?"
The deck showed me abundance, alliance, and love. After laying out a couple of rows of all this rosy news, I exclaimed, "These are not my cards!" and put the deck away. Well, here I am about to marry a smart, sexy, beautiful, kind, compassionate man, whose mountain aerie I now share, just as he shares my east village tenement. They WERE my cards, and the reading has come true. YMMV.
Tarot readings are a great tool for introspections. They can be used to allow you to think about your current life from different angles. They CANNOT predict the future. They most definitely cannot tell you that terrible things are going to befall you if you don't give all your money to someone else.
Actual hotline psychics? If they're not even starting with a tarot card reading, it's fraud all the way down to the turtles.
There is no such thing as psychic powers! All psychics are frauds! Some may be self-deluded frauds, but they are all frauds! The whole scam should be outlawed!!!!
[Hopefully we can figure something out, though, because you don’t have to be clairvoyant to see that this industry hurts people a lot more than it helps people.]
Religion. You've just described religion.
And I'm religious. I aspire to be religious in the way Jimmy Carter is religious, but fuck if I don't think some days the world would be better off if we were all atheists... I know it's not true... rotten shitty people would come up with a new justification for being rotten and shitty, but it does feel that way some days.
"rotten shitty people would come up with a new justification for being rotten and shitty"
Yes, they will. But maybe we don't have to make it easier for them than it has to be?
This is a bit like "People who want to shoot someone will always find a way to get a gun". Yes, they will, but we can make it harder for them to do so.
There will always be shitty people with or without religion. Apart from religion, though, there's a larger question: why do people believe things that are certainly or almost certainly untrue?
"why do people believe things that are certainly or almost certainly untrue?"
Because our mammal brains, while absolutely amazing cognition engines, are also chock full of deficiencies that make us believe things that aren't true. That the earth is flat, and that the sun is small and orbits the earth, for instance. Or that in a room with 60 people, you're unlikely to find two people who share a birthday. Or that because you can easily think of examples of some event, it must be common.
Our brains weren't designed to discern truth. They were kludged together over many generations to be good enough to allow the bearer to live long enough to have kids.
We fear the reality that we have very little control over... well... most everything... but specifically, the future... and death.
I am a coward in that regard. I don't want to end. If I do end, I want to end believing that I will wake up in a wonderful world where my father continues to exist, young and healthy as I remember him, and he will hug me and tell me, "I told you so" and we will laugh at my folly. And if all I do is fall into dark, dreamless sleep forever, then so be it.
So yes, I fear the end. An end that is much closer to me now that I would prefer. And my rational mind tells me it's stupid and foolish, but my heart wants me to keep hoping anyway.
Religion is paint. Paint doesn't care if it goes on the wall of a nursery or a torture chamber. Religion doesn't care if it provides justifications for the nurse or the torturer. It's what's underneath that counts.
I like to think of religion as a powerful engine in a car with no steering wheel. It provides motive and justification for people to do big things. Sometimes the things are good, but often they're bad.
Honestly, though- Hollie Nadel sounds like somebody who shouldn't be living in a big city; it's hard to believe she could walk down the street without getting gulled out of her life-savings.
If you have not heard the radio ads for "California Psychics"...well...you must. They are both very clever and very terrifying. And for the same reason. The series of radio spots that I've heard on high rotation on a few of the Sirius/XM channels I listen too offer a very polished, sometimes humorous introduction to the idea that seeking out over-the-phone advice from "talented psychics" is just another consumer experience, as valid as dietary supplements. Maybe as valid as actual therapy! Maybe they're right to sell it that way. Who knows.
Last time I was in Atlantic City, I saw so many signs for psychics. I wanted to go into one of those shops and ask them why they aren’t in the casinos making bank at the roulette table.
For the sake of my already high blood pressure, I’m going to stay out of this conversation. Already seeing too much supernatural woo-woo bullshit here for my very short temper to tolerate.
Last year when my cat was so sick—dying, really—and I had taken her to or consulted with seven different vets, including specialists and nobody NOBODY had any answers, or rather they had answers that didn’t help and I spent I-never-added-up-how-much money on x-rays and an MRI and was ready to do another MRI and was at the point where if someone had told me to stand outside under the full moon and turn around three times and she would be healed, you better believe I would have been out there. Darling little cat slipping away in front of me and nothing was helping.
That was the point where someone said, “Have you tried working with an animal communicator?”
I had not. I have a strong sense of intuition, and am pretty good at hunches, and picking up a feeling of a place or about people, and that probably kept me alive when I got in a truck with someone who later turned out to be a serial killer, but that’s a story for another day. My first thought when I heard that was that it was pretty open to flip-flam, but I was multiple thousands into looking for answers and no closer and was honestly what the hell.
So I went looking online, and picked out someone (by aforementioned intuition) and set up an appointment for the following Monday. That Friday I took her back to her vet who said, “I don’t know what we’re looking at, but whatever we do, we have to do it soon.” No shit. And an older vet at the clinic who had been going to school at a place where the research was being done on FIP said that she thought that was what was going on. It was dry/neuro, which is not as prevalent, and that was probably why people had missed it.
Vet suggested bloodwork, I said yes. Friday afternoon means the FedEx planes had already left for the weekend, so it would be Monday before the sample could go out. Talked the vet into giving me more narcotics for her (I could only get a three-day supply from any of them, so I was running from clinic to clinic like a junkie).
Monday, I had the appointment. Met with this woman on Zoom, clicked with her down-to-earth style, then she turned off microphone and camera and my cat, who up to this point was uninterested in her, started twisting in my hands looking up at the corners of the room, at the doors, listening like she does when there’s a stranger in the house. Except instead of being afraid and hiding, she was completely engaged and curious. And then after about three minutes of that, she got a little smile on her face and leaned me (like a pre-toddler in the arms of the parent leans towards something they want) to the big bay window in the living room.
I took her over there, and she went to the corner, and sat like a sphinx facing southeast, ears alert, for about twenty minutes. And all of that time, the only thing moving on her was her tail, which tocked back and forth like a clock pendulum, like cats do when they’re watching a robin.
And then the woman came back on the zoom call, and my cat relaxed, curled up, and started grooming herself, and my world got a little bit bigger.
My question for her was a simple one: does she want to be released? And I got a lot more than I asked for. She said the cat said she wanted to live, three times, in three different ways. She said she had an infection in her brain, spine, and nervous system, there was a medicine for it, and she needed that medicine. There was more, but that was the pertinent stuff.
Later that day, I got an anonymous call—assuming from someone who worked for the vet—giving me the name and number of someone, and was told, just call that number. It was a connection with someone who had medicine available that couldn’t be prescribed in this country, so it’s complicated.
I thought about everything I had learned and experienced over the last couple of days, and the next morning put in an order for the meds. Wednesday I got a call from the vet saying the bloodwork had come back, and it was negative—but false negatives were very common, especially with neuro. I told her I had already ordered the meds, and they would be in the next day, and I was going to start them. Because, I did not add, what the hell else was I going to do? And she was silent for a moment, and then said that was what she would advise.
I got the meds in Thursday, and she pulled herself from my lap and into the pile of meds like she knew what they were for. And Saturday night she woke me up purring, having pulled herself up onto the ottoman next to my bed and then onto the bed, after weeks of my carrying her from one place to another. And she purred and PURRED and when I started to go back to sleep, she woke me up purring some more. She knew! She was also really sick that weekend, because her immune system was flatlined and I told the vet that she was coming down with a sinus infection and they said no, she’s fine, so she didn’t get the antibiotics she needed until the next Monday. She spent the weekend sneezing and shivering and running a fever—damnit—but she lived. I think that cold would have taken her out if she hadn’t started the meds.
And it was a long fight, but she lived (thank you, again, Wonkette community, for all the hand-holding through that). And I have no answers still, but the world became a little bigger, a little more possible. The vet told me later that she thought that if I’d waited to order until the bloodwork came back, it would have been too late.
And there are a couple of cats up here that are alive because of what we’ve learned, and that is all I will say about that.
I had a sorta-friend tell me, “Kittens are cheap.” Everyone is going to look at this through their own lens. You do you. I could have kept this experience to myself to avoid contempt, but what happened, happened. I can still remember the feeling of my cat twisting her spine around to try to figure out where that voice was coming from, and then seeing the little `ah, I get it now!’ grin on her face before she asked to go sit in the window. Like the man in the video, I was desperate, and people who are desperate are vulnerable to scams. It took a lot to save that cat, but I will not deny how important a part the animal communicator played in saving her.
I've been a registered massage therapist in my state for nearly 30 years and during that time have had many people tell me my massages are "sensual". I pretty much agree because it's just my style and I don't feel comfortable doing a lot of deep tissue work that many clients seek out because they believe that a certain amount of pain or discomfort in a massage is necessary and indicates how effective any given massage will be. It pisses me off that so many people associate massage therapy with "happy endings" and other bullshit like that though I recognize that it's been that way for decades and will likely continue for decades more. That mentality makes so many massage therapists feel hesitant or even unsafe with some clients and no matter how many times it happens, dealing with people like this is a real pain. So fuck these people, especially ones like Deshaun Watson who use their power and money to harass therapists, though I haven't and wouldn't touch him with a 10 ft pole.
It should be straightforward - a massage therapist should just be able to say something like "just to be clear, this is therapeutic massage, not 'sensual' or erotic" and have that be that. No knock on those who do provide those services, of course.
Wow, not only is Gina Russel a terrible person but so are a bunch of her family members. If I were to go to any of my family and try to get help to commit a crime I would find myself reported to the police. And rightly so as I would report any of my family trying to do the same thing. Too many assholes in this world.
"For actual decades, James Randi offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove any kind of supernatural ability and no one ever won it."
I was able to attend one test, at The Amazing Meeting, a skepticism con that Randi would organize every year in Las Vegas.
The applicant in this case was someone who, as I recall, said she had the power to sense internal organs or some such (non-invasively). IIRC they brought out three or four test subjects and asked her to guess who only had one kidney. She looked and listened and, I don't know, felt their auras or whatever. The audience remained absolutely quiet the whole time, so as not to disturb her. It was amazing.
In the end, unsurprisingly, she couldn't do it. (One of the testees said that due to a genetic abnormality, he was born with one kidney).
Aside from being done in front of an audience, this was a fairly typical case. Lest anyone think the methodology was rigged or unfair, it was developed in coordination with the applicant, and both the applicant and the Randi Foundation would agree that this was a fair test of the applicant's powers.
Most people who applied for this weren't con artists. Those stayed away, because they knew that an honest test would expose them. Generally, applicants were just people who honestly thought they had weird powers or abilities.
I hate that some outfit calling itself “California Psychics” advertise on the SiriusXM version of MSNBC to which I listen (for entertainment purposes only) in my car.
Please don’t confuse legitimate Tarot readings for this bullcrap. The cards are beautifully designed tools for discussions that can help people study their life situations, often leading to helpful insights. They are not properly used for fortune-telling, which is a form of fraud.
Ta, Robyn. I love my Tarot deck. I'm a visual learner, and it's a great tool for meditating on next life steps. A long-departed friend taught me the Work spread, and it's my go-to. After the roommate died, I broke out the new deck (same as the old deck by Barbara G. Walker, which was so worn I knew what some of the cards were without turning them over), and asked "What now?"
The deck showed me abundance, alliance, and love. After laying out a couple of rows of all this rosy news, I exclaimed, "These are not my cards!" and put the deck away. Well, here I am about to marry a smart, sexy, beautiful, kind, compassionate man, whose mountain aerie I now share, just as he shares my east village tenement. They WERE my cards, and the reading has come true. YMMV.
Tarot readings are a great tool for introspections. They can be used to allow you to think about your current life from different angles. They CANNOT predict the future. They most definitely cannot tell you that terrible things are going to befall you if you don't give all your money to someone else.
Actual hotline psychics? If they're not even starting with a tarot card reading, it's fraud all the way down to the turtles.
I’m not as nice as Robyn, so I will shout it out:
There is no such thing as psychic powers! All psychics are frauds! Some may be self-deluded frauds, but they are all frauds! The whole scam should be outlawed!!!!
"But there has to be some happy medium…"
I see what you did there 🙋♂️
Loved that, too.
https://i0.wp.com/musingsofamiddleagedgeek.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/499full.gif?resize=706%2C386&ssl=1
At first I thought, "how can you give your money to physics?"
"...has to be some happy medium..."
ISWYDT
[Hopefully we can figure something out, though, because you don’t have to be clairvoyant to see that this industry hurts people a lot more than it helps people.]
Religion. You've just described religion.
And I'm religious. I aspire to be religious in the way Jimmy Carter is religious, but fuck if I don't think some days the world would be better off if we were all atheists... I know it's not true... rotten shitty people would come up with a new justification for being rotten and shitty, but it does feel that way some days.
"rotten shitty people would come up with a new justification for being rotten and shitty"
Yes, they will. But maybe we don't have to make it easier for them than it has to be?
This is a bit like "People who want to shoot someone will always find a way to get a gun". Yes, they will, but we can make it harder for them to do so.
There will always be shitty people with or without religion. Apart from religion, though, there's a larger question: why do people believe things that are certainly or almost certainly untrue?
"why do people believe things that are certainly or almost certainly untrue?"
Because our mammal brains, while absolutely amazing cognition engines, are also chock full of deficiencies that make us believe things that aren't true. That the earth is flat, and that the sun is small and orbits the earth, for instance. Or that in a room with 60 people, you're unlikely to find two people who share a birthday. Or that because you can easily think of examples of some event, it must be common.
Our brains weren't designed to discern truth. They were kludged together over many generations to be good enough to allow the bearer to live long enough to have kids.
We fear the reality that we have very little control over... well... most everything... but specifically, the future... and death.
I am a coward in that regard. I don't want to end. If I do end, I want to end believing that I will wake up in a wonderful world where my father continues to exist, young and healthy as I remember him, and he will hug me and tell me, "I told you so" and we will laugh at my folly. And if all I do is fall into dark, dreamless sleep forever, then so be it.
So yes, I fear the end. An end that is much closer to me now that I would prefer. And my rational mind tells me it's stupid and foolish, but my heart wants me to keep hoping anyway.
Yep, that's the big one.
An old high school buddy from the 1970s recently sent me a screen shot from some forum thread with the title "Shower Thoughts". One poster wrote this:
𝘐𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘥, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘶𝘱 𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘤𝘪𝘳𝘤𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘧 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘣𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶 "𝘚𝘰 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘯?"
I had to laugh.
Thing is, religion doesn't seem to put any kind of brake on shitty people.
Religion is paint. Paint doesn't care if it goes on the wall of a nursery or a torture chamber. Religion doesn't care if it provides justifications for the nurse or the torturer. It's what's underneath that counts.
Doesn't religion exist in order to guide behavior? So if it sucks at that, what's its purpose, exactly?
Other than giving some people a lever with which to control other people I mean.
I like to think of religion as a powerful engine in a car with no steering wheel. It provides motive and justification for people to do big things. Sometimes the things are good, but often they're bad.
Honestly, though- Hollie Nadel sounds like somebody who shouldn't be living in a big city; it's hard to believe she could walk down the street without getting gulled out of her life-savings.
If you have not heard the radio ads for "California Psychics"...well...you must. They are both very clever and very terrifying. And for the same reason. The series of radio spots that I've heard on high rotation on a few of the Sirius/XM channels I listen too offer a very polished, sometimes humorous introduction to the idea that seeking out over-the-phone advice from "talented psychics" is just another consumer experience, as valid as dietary supplements. Maybe as valid as actual therapy! Maybe they're right to sell it that way. Who knows.
Last time I was in Atlantic City, I saw so many signs for psychics. I wanted to go into one of those shops and ask them why they aren’t in the casinos making bank at the roulette table.
Acceptable answer: "I'm a medium, not a clairvoyant. The ghosts don't know the colors either."
Then play poker. Nothing stopping the ghosts from looking over the other players’ shoulders.
"You ever try to hold a seance in the middle of a poker table? It's a good way to get kicked out of a casino, as it turns out."
For the sake of my already high blood pressure, I’m going to stay out of this conversation. Already seeing too much supernatural woo-woo bullshit here for my very short temper to tolerate.
Long story here, so pass or get comfy.
Last year when my cat was so sick—dying, really—and I had taken her to or consulted with seven different vets, including specialists and nobody NOBODY had any answers, or rather they had answers that didn’t help and I spent I-never-added-up-how-much money on x-rays and an MRI and was ready to do another MRI and was at the point where if someone had told me to stand outside under the full moon and turn around three times and she would be healed, you better believe I would have been out there. Darling little cat slipping away in front of me and nothing was helping.
That was the point where someone said, “Have you tried working with an animal communicator?”
I had not. I have a strong sense of intuition, and am pretty good at hunches, and picking up a feeling of a place or about people, and that probably kept me alive when I got in a truck with someone who later turned out to be a serial killer, but that’s a story for another day. My first thought when I heard that was that it was pretty open to flip-flam, but I was multiple thousands into looking for answers and no closer and was honestly what the hell.
So I went looking online, and picked out someone (by aforementioned intuition) and set up an appointment for the following Monday. That Friday I took her back to her vet who said, “I don’t know what we’re looking at, but whatever we do, we have to do it soon.” No shit. And an older vet at the clinic who had been going to school at a place where the research was being done on FIP said that she thought that was what was going on. It was dry/neuro, which is not as prevalent, and that was probably why people had missed it.
Vet suggested bloodwork, I said yes. Friday afternoon means the FedEx planes had already left for the weekend, so it would be Monday before the sample could go out. Talked the vet into giving me more narcotics for her (I could only get a three-day supply from any of them, so I was running from clinic to clinic like a junkie).
Monday, I had the appointment. Met with this woman on Zoom, clicked with her down-to-earth style, then she turned off microphone and camera and my cat, who up to this point was uninterested in her, started twisting in my hands looking up at the corners of the room, at the doors, listening like she does when there’s a stranger in the house. Except instead of being afraid and hiding, she was completely engaged and curious. And then after about three minutes of that, she got a little smile on her face and leaned me (like a pre-toddler in the arms of the parent leans towards something they want) to the big bay window in the living room.
I took her over there, and she went to the corner, and sat like a sphinx facing southeast, ears alert, for about twenty minutes. And all of that time, the only thing moving on her was her tail, which tocked back and forth like a clock pendulum, like cats do when they’re watching a robin.
And then the woman came back on the zoom call, and my cat relaxed, curled up, and started grooming herself, and my world got a little bit bigger.
My question for her was a simple one: does she want to be released? And I got a lot more than I asked for. She said the cat said she wanted to live, three times, in three different ways. She said she had an infection in her brain, spine, and nervous system, there was a medicine for it, and she needed that medicine. There was more, but that was the pertinent stuff.
Later that day, I got an anonymous call—assuming from someone who worked for the vet—giving me the name and number of someone, and was told, just call that number. It was a connection with someone who had medicine available that couldn’t be prescribed in this country, so it’s complicated.
I thought about everything I had learned and experienced over the last couple of days, and the next morning put in an order for the meds. Wednesday I got a call from the vet saying the bloodwork had come back, and it was negative—but false negatives were very common, especially with neuro. I told her I had already ordered the meds, and they would be in the next day, and I was going to start them. Because, I did not add, what the hell else was I going to do? And she was silent for a moment, and then said that was what she would advise.
I got the meds in Thursday, and she pulled herself from my lap and into the pile of meds like she knew what they were for. And Saturday night she woke me up purring, having pulled herself up onto the ottoman next to my bed and then onto the bed, after weeks of my carrying her from one place to another. And she purred and PURRED and when I started to go back to sleep, she woke me up purring some more. She knew! She was also really sick that weekend, because her immune system was flatlined and I told the vet that she was coming down with a sinus infection and they said no, she’s fine, so she didn’t get the antibiotics she needed until the next Monday. She spent the weekend sneezing and shivering and running a fever—damnit—but she lived. I think that cold would have taken her out if she hadn’t started the meds.
And it was a long fight, but she lived (thank you, again, Wonkette community, for all the hand-holding through that). And I have no answers still, but the world became a little bigger, a little more possible. The vet told me later that she thought that if I’d waited to order until the bloodwork came back, it would have been too late.
And there are a couple of cats up here that are alive because of what we’ve learned, and that is all I will say about that.
https://substack.com/profile/1687878-1d57a1d5931d/note/c-63174368?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=106di
https://substack.com/profile/1687878-1d57a1d5931d/note/c-63174678?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=106di
Looked into more about this topic. Found this woman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvwHHMEDdT0
I had a sorta-friend tell me, “Kittens are cheap.” Everyone is going to look at this through their own lens. You do you. I could have kept this experience to myself to avoid contempt, but what happened, happened. I can still remember the feeling of my cat twisting her spine around to try to figure out where that voice was coming from, and then seeing the little `ah, I get it now!’ grin on her face before she asked to go sit in the window. Like the man in the video, I was desperate, and people who are desperate are vulnerable to scams. It took a lot to save that cat, but I will not deny how important a part the animal communicator played in saving her.
Yeah. I had a similar experience with a dying cat. I saw the cat react in ways I'd never seen him do in twelve years. And it was good.
I've been a registered massage therapist in my state for nearly 30 years and during that time have had many people tell me my massages are "sensual". I pretty much agree because it's just my style and I don't feel comfortable doing a lot of deep tissue work that many clients seek out because they believe that a certain amount of pain or discomfort in a massage is necessary and indicates how effective any given massage will be. It pisses me off that so many people associate massage therapy with "happy endings" and other bullshit like that though I recognize that it's been that way for decades and will likely continue for decades more. That mentality makes so many massage therapists feel hesitant or even unsafe with some clients and no matter how many times it happens, dealing with people like this is a real pain. So fuck these people, especially ones like Deshaun Watson who use their power and money to harass therapists, though I haven't and wouldn't touch him with a 10 ft pole.
If I'm getting a massage, it's because I need the knots in my shoulders melted out. There is nothing sexy about my frozen trapezoids.
It should be straightforward - a massage therapist should just be able to say something like "just to be clear, this is therapeutic massage, not 'sensual' or erotic" and have that be that. No knock on those who do provide those services, of course.