Body Shops

They have names like Ecstasy Unlimited, the Velvet Touch and This Is Heaven. They are in business mostly as "massage parlors," but when police try to shut them down, they squirm into some new designation--rap parlors, escort services, schools of sexual technique, nude encounter groups and even nude weight-lifting centers.

Some are legitimate enterprises, some offer vague sexual titillation, and many are simply brothels. Parlors that advertise or hint at "full sexual services" are spreading across the country as fast as fast-food stores.* Indeed, the massage-parlor phenomenon is an American twist on the world's oldest profession: merchandising women's bodies in storefronts, complete with ad budgets and payment by credit card.

More than most businesses, massage parlors are constantly adjusting to new --and unusual--market conditions. Los Angeles County attempted a crackdown by requiring masseuses to pay $300 for a two-month training course and produce letters of recommendation from five solid citizens. One result: a switch in operations to nude encounter groups, an "indoor nudist colony," and "outcall massage" services like Hollywood's Chick Delight, which advertises "finger-lickin' good" women who home-deliver "snack boxes of breasts, thighs, white meat and dark." Another L.A. outcall service sets prices according to the skills and dimensions of the woman (one staffer was discounted to $25 because she was seven months pregnant).

Sex on Wheels. A favorite gimmick to avoid police harassment is to set up shop outside city limits. Eighteen massage parlors just over the city line of Tucson, Ariz., were raided last June by Pima County police. Since then, five new ones have opened.

Agile parlor operators stand ever ready to stay one jump ahead of the law. When Chicago parlor operators learned that state prostitution statutes made no mention of masturbatory acts, masseuses legally provided such services until the city uncovered a state obscenity statute that could be applied. The owner of Milwaukee's Touch of Class, who claimed to be running a legitimate business, closed down after the city passed a massage-parlor law. Then he threatened to reopen as a photographic-arts studio. The city discovered it also had regulations covering photo studios, so Touch of Class is now a nude-sketch studio. Milwaukee is currently trying to pass restrictions on all "body studios." San Francisco operators metamorphosed their businesses from bottomless bars to topless restaurants, massage parlors and now nudie encounter groups. In once staid Des Moines, which has some 20 sex-service businesses, a ban on outcall massage produced a new industry: outcall nude modeling.

Yet in some areas imaginative citizens are fighting massage parlors and succeeding. Residents of Fremont, Calif, picketed two parlors and publicized the license plates of customers. After two weeks, one parlor closed, and the other agreed to turn into a legitimate massage service. Now the group plans to picket the town's seven remaining parlors.

One of the common legal tactics for controlling parlors is strict "regulation." Falls Church, Va., a Washington suburb, requires massage parlors to pay a whopping $5,000 annual fee and masseuses to take 1,000 hours of training. Since such requirements are clearly open to legal challenge, some cities are attempting to use zoning laws as weapons. New York City, which has some 70 parlors in Manhattan, may soon try zoning with a twist--massage parlors would be legal in the western section of midtown only if attached to a community facility or a hotel with 200 rooms or more. Even then, however, such mutations as rap parlors and sensitivity-training centers would not be affected. San Francisco, which has tried numerous regulations, is considering a stronger zoning law but has decided to await a U.S. Supreme Court decision on Detroit's authority to control porn shops and theaters through zoning.

Chicago is one of the few cities that seems to have the parlor operators on the run. Police have conducted 246 raids in three years, arresting whores and customers alike. By last October, when a new ordinance required parlors to be licensed and all employees to be fully clothed, the number of Chicago's massage establishments had dwindled from 35 to 14. Now only five are left. Says Sergeant Bob Baker of the city's vice squad: "For some strange reason, we seem to be winning." That reason may not be the law, which has failed elsewhere, but the power of the man who ordered it enforced: Mayor Richard Daley.

* To avoid confusion, many legal massage establishments stress that they are licensed.

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