Just before noon on a Thursday, a police cruiser sits on the corner of 40th Road and Prince Street in Flushing, New York, with its lights whirling. A few paces up 40th, sandwiched among a barber shop, a dumpling restaurant, and a travel agency, is a narrow stairway that leads to an Asian day spa and body work business. Dark and humid inside, a man is getting a foot rub as he leans back in his chair. The woman at his feet whips around as soon as the door opens and asks the guy who walks in, “Massage?”
Flushing’s 40th Road is known for its massage businesses, yet the small street is notorious for its parlors that offer more than just a back rub. It was on this small strip where Song Yang, a Chinese immigrant, fell off a balcony and died while trying to get away from police during a prostitution sting in 2017.
Back at the police cruiser, the officer rolls down her window: “We’re parked here to make sure no incidents happen,” she says. “We just want an increased presence to protect and deter crime, hate crime specifically, post-Atlanta. We’re here to make sure everything is kept orderly and nothing happens.”
On March 16, a gunman killed eight people at three Asian massage businesses in the Atlanta-metropolitan area. Seven of the victims were women; six were Asian. After his arrest, the suspect claimed he was motivated to kill the women because he was a sex addict and viewed massage parlors as a “temptation” he to had to remove. (There is a call from many in the Asian American Pacific Islanders community to declare these actions as a hate crime, however investigators have not yet made an official determination.) There is no evidence that the women who were killed—at least two of whom were licensed massage therapists—were actually sex workers. Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, has said that the local police department believes the two spas in her city were legally operating and were not on their radar as illicit businesses.
In fact, most massage businesses in America are not illicit, yet the recent massacre, which has sparked protests against anti-Asian racism and in support of sex workers, has forced Americans to recognize that the intersection of racism, sexism and classism often converge. And women, particularly immigrant women of color, must often take low-paying and dangerous jobs as they build a new life for themselves and their families.
According to a 2018 study by the nonprofit Polaris Project, the illicit massage industry in America was estimated to generate about $2.5 billion in revenue a year. Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, a human trafficking expert and author of the book Hidden in Plain Sight, puts that number considerably higher now—as much as $4.5 billion in annual revenue (including what customers spend for a massage and sexual services), or about one-quarter of the overall $16 billion massage services industry.
In a typical scenario, a customer pays about $60 for a one-hour massage and then anywhere from an additional $50 for manual release to around $200 for intercourse. The erotic massage economy has become ubiquitous in American culture and touches every socio-economic stratum. In February 2019, Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, was caught in a massage parlor sting in Florida. Along with 24 other men, Kraft was charged for soliciting prostitution. He pleaded not guilty, but issued a public apology. The charges were dropped last fall.
Danger Zone: A memorial outside the Gold Spa in Atlanta, where four women were shot and killed in March.
Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post
Illicit massage businesses—which often use euphemistic terms like “body work” and “body rubs” to get around licensing laws—can be found in every state, from remote strip malls to bustling cities. In 2018, the Polaris Project estimated that there were at least 9,000 illicit massage parlors in America where customers can pay extra for manual relief, oral sex, or intercourse. That number is almost certainly too low by at least half: RubMaps, a review site for “happy ending” massage parlors, lists more than 25,000 businesses in the United States.
“Most Americans can find one in a short driving distance,” says Mehlman-Orozco.
Although definitive data on the industry doesn’t exist, academics, experts and activists have found that while sex trafficking allegations may grab the headlines, most massage parlors that do offer extras provide an opportunity for low-skilled immigrants to earn a better living—unlike a low-paying job at a nail salon or a restaurant. According to a 2019 study involving 116 illicit massage parlor employees in New York and Los Angeles, 83% of women interviewed said they were not forced or coerced to give erotic massages.
Wu, a sex worker in New York and a core organizer of Red Canary Song, a grassroots group that provides resources and support to Asian immigrants (particularly sex workers), says that not all massage workers offer sexual services—and for the ones who do, it’s usually about putting food on the table.
“People who work in massage are doing their best to survive and provide for themselves and their families and they deserve to do that without disturbance,” says Wu, who did not want to provide her last name. “They do not need to be rescued from that industry, they just need to be able to go to work and not worry if they’re going to be killed.”
Randy Park, the 22-year-old son of Hyun Jung Grant, one of the Atlanta shooting victims, told The Daily Beast that he didn’t know what his mother did for a living for much of his life.
“These women are mostly undocumented immigrants and don’t have good English language skills,” says John Chin, a professor of urban policy at Hunter College who co-authored the study about the illicit massage industry in New York and Los Angeles. “They end up at massage parlors because there are very few other options for them.”
Lois Takahashi, the study’s co-author and a professor at the University of Southern California, says 69% of massage workers they interviewed had children and 32% of the study’s participants said they worked at illicit massage parlors by necessity, 19% by choice, and 49% cited both factors into their decision.
A phrase many Chinese clients use to describe their experience at massage parlors is “沒 辦 法”—or “no other way.”
Some women are working to send money back home, others are paying their children’s tuition, while some are paying off debt owed to smugglers who brought them into the country. “These are working women,” Takahashi says. “At some point you must make decisions on how to best provide for your family.”
Offering sexual extras during a massage can be the difference between making ends meet, or not. Working as a manicurist or a waitress pays between $200 to $2,000 per month, sex workers say, while illicit massage workers can make $200 on a good day or around $1,000 a week.
Amy Hsieh, the deputy director of the Anti-Trafficking Initiative, a pro bono legal service connected with nonprofit Sanctuary for Families, represents survivors of labor and sex trafficking and helps women who’ve been arrested at massage businesses. Out of more than 1,200 clients—mostly undocumented women who have emigrated from Asia—Hsieh says that 1 out of 5 says they have been trafficked or have experienced some level of coercion. While many of her clients say they chose to work at a massage business, Hsieh doesn’t really consider the decisions many immigrant women must make to be free choices. A phrase many of her Chinese clients use to describe their experience at illicit massage parlors is “沒辦法”—or “no other way.”
Many massage workers in Chin and Takahashi’s study described a gradual slide from massages into sex work. One participant came to the U.S. through a snakehead—a person who smuggles undocumented immigrants—by entering a contract to pay back the $30,000 fee. She soon started working at a day spa. “In the beginning, I guessed I was just going to provide regular massage service,” the worker told Chin and Takahashi. “However, I realized I was getting very little money for just providing regular massage service. The owner told me if I want to get more tips, I should provide hand jobs for the clients…. I was in need of money.”
Of course, this story is not only about Asian immigrants. In 2017, an undocumented Honduran immigrant named Maya Morena started working at an Asian massage parlor in Flushing after responding to an ad on Craigslist. Morena, who is 27, says she got into sex work to help pay for college. “The vast majority of people do sex work for quick cash,” she says.
Morena says that the typical arrangement for a massage worker is this: If customers pay $60 for a massage, the house keeps $30. Most of the time, the worker keeps whatever she charges for the sexual extras, for which she sets the price. Of course, not all massage workers at the local parlor provide sexual services—many regular customers would never know that some clients in the next room are paying for sex.
Body Shop: The Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida, where billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was caught in a 2019 sting operation.
Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
But massage workers are at risk whether they provide sexual services or not. Mehlman-Orozco says most of the women who work in the licensed massage industry have been harassed by clients. “Go talk to someone at Massage Envy,” she says, citing a popular national spa franchise. “The majority have been propositioned.”
As for the owner of the business where she worked, Morena says he wasn’t part of a vast criminal enterprise—he was also just trying to pay his bills.
“It was a mom-and-pop shop—he had a wife and kid,” Morena says. “People have this perception of the horrible person trafficking people into slavery. From my experience, most sex massage parlors are run by normal people.”
According to a sex economy study by the Urban Institute, there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that most erotic massage parlors are run by organized crime syndicates.
Federal and state agencies paint a different picture of the industry, however. A retired law enforcement agent who spent his career investigating human trafficking cases says most of the women he encountered wound up working at an illicit massage parlor through deception and the businesses were run by “sophisticated criminal networks” running “big money” operations.
A significant number of women in the illicit massage industry have also been sexually assaulted. Yet, undocumented immigrant women are typically too afraid to go to the authorities. “Police means deportation,” says Takahashi, who found that 40% of their study participants have been raped on the job.
Because immigrants are more vulnerable in these situations, many sex workers and advocates support decriminalization, which would make it easier and safer for workers to earn a living without fear of being arrested or deported. “As long as it’s a crime, you’ll have bad people, bad cops, bad actors who extort people who are willing to engage in sex for money,” says Norma Jean Almodovar, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and a former sex worker turned advocate.
Ronald Weitzer, a professor of sociology at George Washington University and the author of Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business, believes legalization is the best path forward. “Legalizing sex work and regulating it could make it safer for everyone involved and reduce trafficking,” he says.
Morena, who left the massage parlor after about a year, says the police, nonprofits and the media like to dramatize what’s going on behind the parlor curtain. “The message on the other side is that we’re slaves, but that’s not it,” she says. “It’s like working a dead-end job, if given the resources, eventually you’ll leave.”
She thinks if more people had access to higher education, healthcare and housing, that people in difficult situations wouldn’t go into sex work in the first place. Morena says her two little sisters have citizenship, and everything is different for them—they’ll grow up with many more options than she had. “They’re never going into sex work,” says Morena. “I would never allow it.”