When veteran massage therapist Kathie Lea first hung out her shingle in the mid-1980s, she had to endure a lot of jokes and overcome the stigma long associated with the business of giving people rubdowns.
“People thought I was an old hippie or a prostitute,” Lea tells Business Report in its new cover story, “The Rub,” which zeroes in on the proliferation of late-night—and sometimes unlicensed—massage parlors in Baton Rouge. “It was years before they would take me seriously.”
In the decades since, Lea has built a successful career as a therapist and massage has gone mainstream. The practice has become an accepted—and, indeed, sought-after—treatment by millions as a way to relieve stress, sore muscles and minor sports injuries.
But Lea and others in her industry are alarmed by a trend they’ve noticed over the past few years: the proliferation of massage parlors with late-night hours that heavily advertise Asian masseuses. Since 2010, more than a dozen such establishments have opened in Baton Rouge, as they have in markets around the U.S., setting up shop in suburban strip malls and keeping business hours that run curiously late into the night.
Getting a handle on these establishments is tricky. Most are licensed by the state and present themselves as legitimate businesses. Some actually are. But several of these particular massage parlors appear to be erotic massage parlors, or at least advertise themselves as such online.
The websites they use make no bones about the services they offer. Ads for local establishments on the online classifieds site Backpage.com show scantily clad young women—“Asian Princess HOTTIES”—who will “treat your body like a king” and “rub your stress away.” An ad for one local massage parlor promises, “You never had so good girl before.”
Another online site provides a comprehensive list of more than 12 massage parlors that market a female Asian workforce in the Baton Rouge area, complete with their hours of operation, customer ratings and, for a fee, explicit, first-hand reviews. That site, Rubmap.com, bills itself as the Internet’s “No. 1 site for erotic massage parlors,” where users will “find your happy ending.”
Such ads are not illegal. They are, however, deeply troubling to Lea and others in her industry, who aren’t so much worried about losing market share to these massage parlors as they are about losing the good reputation they’ve worked hard to establish over the decades. These establishments make the whole industry look bad by association, critics say, and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
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