MASSAGE PARLOR-PANIC

A POTENT COMBINATION OF PURITANISM, RACISM, AND POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM IS PUTTING ASIAN MASSEUSES AND THE PEOPLE WHO SUPPORT THEM IN NEEDLESS DANGER.

- ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

THE WEBSITE RUBMAPS describes itself as being devoted to “erotic massage parlor reviews & happy endings.” Users who pay for membership can write and read reviews of massage parlors. Some reviews are predictably racy, and some are, perhaps surprisingly, more PG-rated. The site lets clients know what to expect from massage parlors—and also what not to expect, offering clarity about which services are on offer and guidance about how to behave.

Increasingly, however, it also serves another purpose. Police have begun monitoring the site on the theory that, as a 2016 article in the magazine Prosecutor’s Brief asserted, a good Rubmaps review “indicates that the location is a brothel.” And when police and prosecutors take an interest, so do politicians.

Rubmaps entered the Congressional Record in March 2015, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) was speaking about the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act. Feinstein cited Rubmaps as one of 19 sites that supposedly “act[ed] as purveyors of child sex trafficking in this country.” Those sites, she said, “ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

It was Feinstein who should have been ashamed. During her extensive remarks, she offered no solid evidence that these sites were in fact facilitating child sex trafficking. Yet her push to shutter them played directly into a social panic that has been building into a legal crusade against sex work and the web platforms that enable it. Within a few years, Rubmaps—then one of the lesser-known sites Feinstein mentioned—would become a key target in this dubious fight, aided by America’s long history of discriminatory opposition to massage businesses operated and staffed primarily by Asian immigrants.