How Race Sets Prices in the Sex Industry (and the rest of the world, too)
What I like about the sex industry, and why it’s such a fascinating industry to study, is that it’s often a microcosm of the way the world works in terms of sexuality, gender, race, economics, and class. The world it shows me is very rarely pretty, but at least it’s simple. I can present it to someone and say: See, that’s racism. That’s how racism works economically: your labor is devalued because of your race. I know immigrant women from East Asian countries performing sensual massage in New York City get paid less money than I, a white girl with a Canadian education and an American accent. We provide the same service, but one of us gets paid less. That’s racist, it’s sexist, and it’s what people mean when they talk about structural racism. Racism is embedded in the economic structure.
I always like to ask clients about their first time. When did you know this was right for you; that this was what you wanted to do on your lunch break from Morgan Stanley? A young man told me his roommate got him into it. His roommate took him to an Asian place because that roommate had an Asian fetish. He says, It’s good for him, y’know, because he’s into that – but me, I like white girls like you. I like girls who can speak English. It is so nice to have a conversation.
Clients are always so relieved when they can have a conversation with me. They are just pleased as punch. I wonder if they ever have conversations with anyone at all. I once brought a man to orgasm while he moaned about the fact I was reading Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. He thought that was just the neatest.
I ask the young man if he paid his masseuse at the Asian salon less, he says yes.
That’s fucked up, don’t you think?
He says yeah, kinda, in a slow drawl as if he’s never really thought about it before. I think he knows, but doesn’t want to dwell.
When clients tell me they’re so pleased to have a conversation with me, they are implicitly saying a lot of things. One thing they are saying is that they are surprised I am smart. They are surprised I can quote Henry Miller or quip at them in Latin. Another thing they are saying is that they don’t receive a lot of intimacy in their lives; that they have intimate and interesting conversations very rarely. The most important thing they are really saying is that they are glad I speak perfect English.
Yes, my clients are often racist.
There are a lot of white immigrant ladies working in the sex industry. They’re usually from former Soviet states such as Russia or the Ukraine, and they often make less than I do. They get paid the same hourly rate, but there are fewer of them working independently and the parlors they work at often take a larger cut. The general rule in the industry is that the split is 60 – 40. Which way this split goes varies. The first place I worked at, the one in the financial district run by the Iranian women where I met all the Eastern European mothers who had come here working on a cruise ship and had ended up staying, the madame there took sixty percent of the cut. The service provider only took home forty percent of what she made that day.
The place I settled in to working at had a better policy. She only took forty percent of our cut. This madame was strict about hiring All-American girls with some sort of an education. There, you worked one girl per shift. There was no bunny ranch line-up and no madame all up in your business. In fact, the madame was most often in her suburban house in New Jersey with her toddler. You answered your own phone, you wrote your own ads, and you decided your own boundaries. My madame was explicit about the types of girls she hired, yknow, smart girls. All American girls. She was explicit that this was not a ‘Russian place’. Her clients had standards. I had told one of the girls at my old place, a thirty year old mother from the Ukraine named Bella who showed me pictures of her fifteen year old daughter back home on her iPhone that I would ask if there were spots for her here. There weren’t. This place, with the sixty-forty cut instead of the forty-sixty cut and the non-crazy madame and the no touching between the legs policy, this place was for girls who passed as American.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Independent sex workers set their own prices. There are workers who deftly advertise their accent or race as exotic or cosmopolitan and who confidently capitalize on their exoticified features. But the existence of Asian-advertised spas charging almost sixty percent less than the going hourly rate of a sensual massage in New York is a clear cut example of the way race and gender puts a price tag on labor. The lower prices of Asian spas are a result of many things: the devaluation of a woman of color’s sexuality, the persistent construction of Asian women as demure and obedient workers who will accept being paid less, and a large labor pool of recently immigrated Asian women who, upon arrival in the United States, find it difficult to find high paying jobs.
“Experience a totally sensual massage by a attractive, petite and pretty Asian girls. We take the best care of you Because we love what we do and make you relaxed all over! Please call us at 347-XXX-XXXX to book your Appointment and let our incredible touch soothe you, relax you, invigorate you, and pamper you! Open from: 12:00pm-12:00am 7 days ====== We charge: $ 60 1 hour” -
-copy from a backpage ad, posted August 28th 2010 at 1:08am
The going rate of a happy ending massage in New York is $200 per hour. When I think abut the way these massage parlors advertise themselves, as a place that specializes in petite and pretty Asian girls, a lot of things come to mind. I think about the places in New York where you can go get a real massage for only forty-six dollars for the hour where mostly all the attendants are East Asian women. I think about how race-specific salons only exist for East Asian women, not South Asian or Middle Eastern or White Girls and how White Girls aren’t considered a fetish in this industry, whose client demographic is mostly white. I think about the clients who would ask me what I look like on the phone, no I mean like what your race is, and when I said white or caucasian in a flippant tone they would ask ‘like what? like Irish?’ and I would say ‘no, like Greek’ and they would say ‘you aren’t Russian, are you?’ I think about the woman from Korea who gives me my seven dollar manicure and the line up of all the white ladies in their massage chairs in Park Slope having their feet scrubbed by their Korean mani-pedicurists. I think about the Chinatown down the block from me, in South Brooklyn, touted as the ‘new’ Chinatown, and how a friend of mine revealed that a large population of Asian immigrants are concentrated there because it has one of the highest concentrations of sweatshops in Brooklyn. I think of my Wall Street clients and the way they keep labor cheap and stocks high and the money I could make as a manicurist, or a sweatshopist, or a real masseuse, and the money I could make giving handjobs for sixty dollars. I think about all the ways labor is made cheap in this world and all the ways people are devalued, and yes, it’s a simple economic flowchart:
One stock trader, one handjob, and three twenty dollar bills and I just made more in one hour than I would in the twelve hour day I worked at the Sunset Park sweatshop; where the pay is typically around one hundred to two hundred dollars a week.
This example of devaluation of labor offered by Asian massage parlors is useful because it shows how labor is priced in regards to race and nationality. The race and nationality are even on the menu as part of the commodity being offered. The usual arguments that say immigrant labor is cheaper because it’s largely unskilled (for instance, that seamstresses working in Sunset Park sweatshops are cheap because they’re unskilled) can’t be made. While I contend that sex work is skilled labor, there is no way to argue that the Asian-immigrant women working in the cheaper massage parlors have less skills than the mostly American and mostly white girls working in places with higher service charges. It’s a prime example of how little actual skill level has to do with the way labor is value, and how the ranking of low and high skill sets is often colored by factors such as race, gender, and nationality.
