Stress Relief
A brief personal history of strange massages, and the delicate art of brothel detection
The practice of massage dates back more than 5000 years, originating in India, travelling over time to Southeast Asia, Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome. At university, when I was so strapped for cash that I’d spend 10 minutes in front of the freezer case at Kroger deciding whether to spend $0.50 on a individually sized cheese pizza or splurge on the $0.60 premium version, I could never have afforded spa treatments, but I thought about them a lot, because I was minoring in Greek and Roman art and archaeology.
Who knows why certain topics stick in one’s mind from school or university days, when so much of what we learn goes in one ear and out the other? My instructor for many of my classes was a bearded, Teutonic man called Professor Wolf Rudolph. His descriptions of the ancient Roman baths were extraordinarily vivid - I can picture it now. People playing ball in the gymnasium with green-painted inflated animal bladders. People rubbing the athletes’ naked bodies with olive oil after their exertions, scraping the oil off with a curved metal implement.
I remember what that tool was called, a strigil, just as I remember the vocabulary, architecture, and amenities of the baths: the baking hot calderium, the more balmy tepidarium, the cold-plunge fridigarium. Walls and floors were adorned with patterned tiles or more elaborate mosaics; fountains, paintings, statuary, and music soothed and delighted the senses; and a variety of seats and loungers were available in the relaxation rooms, as well as light snacks. The engineering in these places, the systems that pumped heat underneath the floors and pushed water through the pipes, was so sophisticated. I’ve lost those details now, but as a 20-year-old I could have told you all about it.
These days, when I can manage the occasional spa day or even weekend, I close my eyes in a steaming hot tiled room, or lie back on a lounge chair in a tepid relaxation room with its drifting music and pleasant smells and imagine myself an ancient Roman. And, doing as the Romans did, I often get a massage.
(For some reason, when I’m on the massage table, I often imagine that I’m a dead ancient Egyptian being prepared for mummification, four alabaster canopic jars standing by to receive my stomach, intestines, lungs and liver. I don’t know why this is. It’s probably a post for another time or fodder for some serious psychoanalysis.)
But back to the baths of Ancient Rome, where massage was popular. Jokes about women and their male masseurs were common, and like most jokes, they probably contained some truth. From the art and graffiti found adorning the walls at the buried city of Herculaneum and elsewhere, we know that for some visitors to the baths, the relaxation or satisfaction they experienced there was of a sexual nature.
Since my skint university days, I’ve had lots of massages in my life:
Reflexology in Hong Kong, which bruised my feet enough induce a two-day limp, but which I found so compelling once I found the right level of pressure that I remain an ardent devotee.
Indian head massage, which I didn’t receive in India but in Nepal, the orgasmic nature of which might have just about made it worth having straggly, oily hair the rest of the day, but I was on the fence about that.
Thai massage, performed clothed and featuring such vigorous limb-stretching that I thought my arms and legs would pop out of their sockets.
Acupressure, about which I was so sceptical that any placebo effect I could have derived from it was nonexistent.
Reiki, which hardly seems to merit the word ‘massage’ at all, so I left angry.
A massage in an upstairs room in East London surrounded by Buddha heads and Asian esoterica, where the massage therapist unexpectedly held both my feet in her hands at the end and sang, You love you and you love your life…you love you and you love your life, which caused me such bodily strain and tension from trying not to laugh that I nearly needed another massage afterwards.
A massage in Hungary at the hands of a burly woman with upper arms like whole hams, wearing a severe white high-necked uniform with her hair scraped into a bun that looked like a boulder sitting on top of her head, an experience I can only describe as being severely beaten up and left for dead.
Then there was the experience I had at my erstwhile health club in London many years ago. After a punishing series of exercise classes, mostly Body Pump, to which I was then addicted, I had massages to relax my wound-up hamstrings and back. One week the lady wasn’t there, and I was welcomed into the room by a male masseur instead. He claimed he’d learned a special massage method in Costa Rica, its movements inspired by the animals found there.
For the next 50 minutes I lay there, becoming increasingly uncomfortable as he went through the beasts of the Costa Rican air, sea, and land, complimenting various parts of my body as his hands became the animals. And this is the jaguar, clawing at your very nice thighs. And is the crocodile, gnawing at your beautiful arms. The toucan, he is hopping across your chest. I was conscious of the heat rising from his own body as he stood too close, and yet I felt frozen to the spot. When it came time for the yellow-bellied sea snake, though, I snapped into action, gathering the towel around me and fleeing the room.
I wasn’t put off for life, although I never again had a male massage therapist, if indeed that is what the man in the previous anecdote was - sometimes I wonder if he was just a chancer with made-up credentials. I think part of the reason it took me so long to discern and react to what was happening is that I didn’t expect it, couldn’t quite process what was happening. I was in a fairly posh gym in central London. But I should have remembered that some of the ritziest baths in Ancient Rome are known to have offered sexual services - or, to make a less highbrow reference, I might have recalled that episode of Sex and the City where Samantha hears about a hot male masseur doing ladies favours at a high-end spa and gets herself into hot water when she takes the initiative with him.
Being a person in the world, I’m of course aware of places where something quite different is meant by ‘massage’, and ‘spa’ looks nothing like the spas I’m used to. I’m familiar with some of the signs that mark out such a place - the frosted or otherwise covered windows, or the windowlessness, or something about the kind of neon sign they’ve got, or the colour of the light emanating from within. I’d always found these signifiers fairly straightforward to interpret.
But a fortnight ago I found myself confronted, for the first time, with a certain ambiguity. My good friend once had a massage in a conveniently located place just up the road, an astonishingly good massage, she said, for a reasonable price. The price seemed even keener given that we’d just been for a spa weekend outside London, where the treatments were eye-wateringly expensive. At these prices, I should treat myself every week! she’d said. I’d been intrigued, but then the pandemic lockdowns happened, and no one was getting any massages for a good while.
So when two weeks ago I’d been doing some deadlifting with a trainer, and had also been hunched over the computer too much, finishing my book in a state of great mental and physical tension, I remembered her glowing review. I just needed to relax, wanted to treat myself, but I didn’t have much time. Something just up the road would be ideal, I thought.
The entrance and the hallway leading to the reception desk were quite narrow; the proprietress sat behind plexiglass. The room I’d passed by when I entered looked more or less like the usual thing, though - massage table, flickering battery-powered candles, batik-printed textiles draped here and there, including over the table with oils and other products on it. I noticed there was none of that sonorous droning soundtrack you so often hear in spas, and that in fact there was no music at all. It was strangely silent.
When I got to the desk, I noticed three bored-looking women lined up on a sofa, which hadn’t been visible as I was coming down the hall. They were clearly employees rather than punters, and they looked up from their phones with an air of slight surprise. They weren’t wearing any sort of uniform, and I noticed that one of them had the kind of long, manicured nails that you’d think would get in your way as a massage therapist. Feeling rattled, I stalled by asking the proprietress various questions about the massages on the printed list and the differences between them. The price was indeed appealing - unheard of for London, really, £40 for an hour. Still, I felt desperately uncomfortable and wished to leave.
I didn’t, of course, and why? Embarrassment. I’d come all the way in and had a conversation and now I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, felt like I had to go ahead with it. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: maybe I’ve lived in England too long.
Rather than being taken behind the desk to any of the rows of doors in the back, I was ushered quite quickly into the room that I’d passed on my way in. When I shut the door behind me, I noticed two things I hadn’t seen before: a toilet plonked incongruously in the middle of the room, and a large framed sign on the wall reading, Professional Massage Only, Strictly No Sexual Services.
I felt more unsettled by the presence and placement of the loo, but I don’t know why; the sizes of the sign and the font strayed into the ‘thou dost protest too much’ category.
The masseuse who entered wasn’t one of the women I’d seen before. She wore a patterned, Mandarin-collar tunic and bare feet, and spoke in a lilting, burbling voice I couldn’t understand well, except for when she clicked her tongue in a worried, sympathetic way and said ‘tension here, tension here’, and when her stomach would growl, which it did repeatedly, and she would say, ‘no food today,’ which made me concerned for her, as it was 5 pm. Initially there was nothing startling about the treatment, until she crawled up onto the table and perched on my back on her elbows and knees, grinding these four pressure points into areas of muscular tension. She weighed almost nothing; she was as easy to bear as if she were a parrot on my shoulder.
I found it hard to relax, despite the excellence of her technique. Every time I heard the front door I tensed, my ears straining to detect whether it were a man or woman, trying to pick up the conversations at the front desk. Then it was over, and forty pounds seemed such a paltry sum for a London hour of robust massage. I thought about her rumbling stomach and her saying ‘no food today’ and wondered what percentage of this the proprietress might take. As she had already left me alone, I put a £10 note on the side table, hoping she would be the one to get it, and left quickly.
Over the coming hours I actively tried to work out whether the place were indeed a ‘legitimate business,’ not necessarily in terms of whether the sign were telling the truth, but whether it was possible the employees were being exploited. Private prostitution is not illegal in the UK, but running a brothel is, and many brothels in London operate under the moniker of ‘massage parlour’.
I scoured Google, where I spotted glowing reviews like the one my friend had given me, including ones written by local women I knew. One male reviewer warned (or informed) that the European women who worked there offered ‘happy endings.’ Other men left brief reviews that somehow seemed suspect. So and so was excellent. She met all of my expectations.
Researching more widely, I encountered a thread on Mumsnet where someone asked how one could tell that such a business was legitimate. Some respondents accused her of casual racism, as the business was Thai owned. Someone else told a disturbing and yet hilarious story about the wonderful spa-quality treatment in a lovely room that she’d received at a local establishment, so life-changing that she’d raved about it to everyone, including her husband, who duly went in for an appointment of his own. Instead of being shown to the room where his wife had received her massage, he was taken instead to a different room with a bare mattress on the floor and a scantily clad woman present.
I wondered about all the rooms behind the Plexiglass-protected front desk in the place I’d visited and tried to convince my husband to do a reccy - not to actually go through with a massage, I hastened to add, but at least to see if he got a vibe when he made inquiries. But I don’t even KNOW anything about massage, he said. I wouldn’t know what questions to ask. My pleas fell on deaf ears. I made the mistake of asking male friends locally and even my builder if they knew the score. I think some of them took it the wrong way. Why are you asking ME? they said.
Just before I ceased my investigations, I found another discussion forum, catering to quite a different demographic than the Mumsnet site. The men on it named no names, possibly not wanting their favourite massage parlours to be raided. What they did do was swap tips on how one could tell that a place or a particular masseuse would be open to what they were seeking. Late opening hours - which this business had featured - was a good sign, as far as they were concerned. Worried, I scoured the other hints, trying to remember. Did she let her breasts brush my back when she was crawling on me? Did I feel her breath on my neck?
Feeling both rather sick and rather silly, I shut the computer.
I rang my friend to ask why she’d never returned after her great massage, other than the pandemic, of course.
I guess I wasn’t sure about it, she said. I wasn’t sure whether it was a brothel or not.
Oh, I said, I didn’t remember your mentioning that.
Well, she said, MY massage was fine.
So was mine, I said.
I suddenly remember something else about the Roman baths: enslaved people were all over the shop in there, an integral part of the Roman spa economy, as with nearly all other business sectors at that place and time. You could hire a special enslaved person attached to the baths, a capsarius, to watch over your street clothes and other belongings. If you were a wealthy freeman or freewoman, enslaved persons carried your bathing kit, your sandals, your towels, your toiletries. Enslaved persons rubbed you with the olive oil after your exercise and scraped it off with that strigil. If you couldn’t be bothered to wash yourself, the enslaved would do it for you. The enslaved scurried after you, toting your bathing paraphernalia. The enslaved massaged you, anointed you with the heavy perfumes the Romans preferred to a natural new-washed smell, and, now and again, performed sexual favours.
I saw my parents and my sister at the weekend for our regular New York Times Sunday crossword over Zoom, and I told them the tale. In some ways I want to go back, but I’m not sure if I should go back, I said. But maybe it’s a legitimate business.
My sister looked at me steadily. ‘Elaine,’ she said, ‘you have one-hundred-percent visited a brothel.’
When I’ve lain in a spa at Center Parcs, pretending for moments here and there that I am a resident of the ancient world, my well-paid masseuses have chatted with me about how lovely it is to work there, about their benefits packages and their high job satisfaction. On this latter occasion, no one sexually molested me and no one held onto my feet and sang you love you and you love your life, which are both big pluses. Forty quid is a damn good deal. But being probably-but-not-definitively-but-I’m-not-sure massaged by an enslaved person just up the road from me at bargain basement prices? Well, that really doesn’t sound like the kind of doing-as-the-Romans-did I want to do.