The “conventional wisdom” is that these rashes of busts tend to occur in election years, when the mayor is running for re-election and wants to rack up some easy “lawn-order” arrest statistics he can brag about.
Another clue to happy-ending (or even better) “massage” shops can often be seen in the advertising, which commonly features photos or simple line-drawings of scantily-clad young females, and perhaps also scantily-clad clients, often with some risqué or semi-explicit double-entendres in the text. Legit massage providers would not have ads like that.
Here’s a Pinterest page full of legitimate-looking massage ads: (You can scroll down a bit to see more without signing in, but after a while it asks you to sign in to see more.)
In contrast, if you do an image search for “happy ending massage advertisements”, you will see the distinct contrast in the kinds of ads shown in comparison with the above.
Note that “legitimate” (strictly non-erotic) massage professionals and businesses are EXTREMELY sensitive over the popular conflation of massage work with sex work – for the obvious reason that sex work so often fronts as massage work. In professional massage work, there are very strict and specific ethics rules about what may and may not happen. Not only are the specific rules about what parts of the client’s body may and may not be touched, but there are also strict rules against nudity – parts of the client’s body that may not even be uncovered, let alone touched. (Except possibly in some clothing-optional new-agey resorts, like Harbin Hot Springs, where people are routinely naked already anyway.)
I have it on good authority (from a professional masseuse and massage school instructor) that a legit spa or massage studio places extreme importance on this. A newly-minted massage practitioner might be forgiven for giving a mediocre massage, but let them be caught with just a hint of excess nudity, and that’s an instant firing offense!
Any professional massage trade school would teach these rules.
Ask me how I know that.
/Senegoid/, CMT (Certified Massage Therapist)
(yes, really)
If they’re unconstitutional, the people with the strongest standing to challenge them are those affected by them - sex workers. Legislators can of course change laws if they consider them to be unconstitutional (or for any other reason that seems good to them) but I don’t think they would have standing to challeng in the courts the laws which they themselves have enacted.
Georgia has had a prostitution problem for decades i remember the gold club trial and people saying there were dozens of such places more or less around Atlanta and other big cities
There’s a much easier way… not sure if it’s done anymore, but the Atlanta papers used to have a half-page devoted to massage parlors. It was always in the sports section, which was supposedly the tell that these were sexualized businesses. It seems reasonable enough given that they all advertised that they were open 24x7 and most of them had some reference to “oriental ladies.” When I took the newspaper in 2006-ish, this section looked to have about 20-40 listings. The local alt-paper had those same advertisements, plus additional racier ones that didn’t leave much to the imagination.
I reckon that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and I don’t know if Atlanta has more of this than other towns. I’m just noting that it’s widespread and obvious, so people were not incorrect to assume it was a sexualized business. Local papers are now reporting that some of the shooting victims had prostitution-related priors in Georgia. There’s nothing at all wrong with saying these women were probably sex workers, and that sex workers are people, and they don’t deserve to get killed under any circumstances.
I think we should be careful about saying stuff like that. Yes, Atlanta often has high-profile busts of sex businesses. I’m not convinced that indicates anything other than a city with a regular amount of sex work, and a convention businesses that benefits from that sex work, and voters that collectively want to have both of those things plus highly dramatized busts of sex work, which also serve as advertisements of sex work.
But it’s incontrovertible that Atlanta is a town where if a messed-up young man wakes up one morning wanting to kill some Asian prostitutes, before lunchtime he’ll be able to source a gun, ammunition, and a victim with no special connections at all.
The middle example is traffickers who arrange for the girls to come to North America promising some legitimate job, possibly even on some legitimate temporary visa, then hold on to their passports and threaten them with being deported by the authorities; and of course, they can’t go anywhere without their passports. Meanwhile, they are expected to work to pay off the large debt they incurred by being transported; and best case, the threat is their family and village will be told what they did if they are returned home - worst case is bodily harm to family back home.
There are even stories of domestic servants receiving the same “locked up passport” treatment. It’s an intermediate form of coercion.
I suspect the line between the two situations you’re describing is pretty vague. Sure, there are extremes that are easy to identify. But in the middle?
Say someone is an unskilled worker, not represented by a union, on a construction site, and his employer is not paying him overtime, because the employer can get away with it.
As far as I’m concerned, that employer is a gangster.
At the other end, a woman is kept working in a “massage parlor” by gangsters who hold her passport and claim that she owes a massive debt that she must work off.
It’s legal to have sex with a stranger. It’s legal to give money to a stranger. The only thing that’s illegal is to say out loud that the two are related.
A gangster? It’s a minor violation of law, there’s no coercion involved. I don’t think that’s on the spectrum we’re talking about. The lowest level here is just an undocumented worker who is only afraid of being found by immigration. That person may simply fear returning to poverty and far worse conditions than found in these massage parlors. And remember that the boss at the massage parlor may also be coerced somehow as well.
I think cheating workers out of their just compensation makes one a gangster. Just because the law favors employers who cheat their employees doesn’t render the issue unimportant, or “minor.”
But, as I said, it’s a spectrum, not a clear line.
Yeah, that’s what makes prostitution “employment”. It’s constitutional to criminalize certain types of employment.
The courts seem not to be buying the “unconstitutionality” argument:
There are all sorts of laws restricting the nature and conditions of voluntary employment. For example, you’re not legally allowed to employ people to work in a facility that doesn’t comply with the relevant safety codes, even if your would-be employees are willing to take the risk in exchange for payment. Those legal restrictions are not unconstitutional, and neither are legal bans on prostitution.
If the legislature chooses to repeal laws forbidding prostitution, they can. But as the above-quoted judge noted, the courts can’t overturn such laws on constitutionality grounds.
Because if he doesn’t consent to something illegal (not being paid overtime) , he loses his job. That’s coercion, in the same way that a foreman making all the employees “kick back” part of their paycheck to keep their job would be coercion.
It’s only coercion if you think he is entitled to that job. I don’t think he his. That doesn’t make it right, just not coercion any more than the boss saying he’ll be fired if he doesn’t work harder. The illegality of it doesn’t turn it into coercion.
And let’s not argue this out here, it has nothing to do with the situation at massage parlors. I regret bringing it up in this thread.
Can you point to where this is specified in The Constitution (as opposed to a George Carlin quote)?
I always find it amusing when people declare something is “unconstitutional” because they feel it violates their concept of “freedom” without a clear understanding what is and is not defined in the actual Constitution.
And yes, saying “fuck you, you complain, you’re fired” is a form of coercion. It’s a threat. If a worker is compelled to accept wage theft, unsafe working conditions and whatever else the employer may be done, or lose his job, his means of support, yes, he’s being coerced.
And not paying wages to which a worker is entitled is theft. Which makes the employer doing that a gangster.
Yeah, because massage parlors are legitimate businesses. Hand & Stone or Bliss Spas found in W Hotels are massage parlors. So are “rub & tugs” found in Koreatown in Manhattan. Now I assume the NYPD can Google as well as the next person, so I’m not really sure why the later are allowed to remain open.