Stigmas on race, gender and sex overlap
Seven of the eight people killed were women; six were of Asian descent. The suspect, according to police, appeared to blame his actions on a “sex addiction.”
While the U.S. has seen mass killings in recent years where police said gunmen had racist or misogynist motivations, advocates and scholars say the shootings this week at three Atlanta-area massage parlors targeted a group of people marginalized in more ways than one, in a crime that stitches together stigmas about race, gender, migrant work and sex work.
“In some ways this is another manifestation of the targeting of marginalized people in the U.S.,” said Angela Jones, an associate professor of sociology at Farmingdale State College, State University of New York, whose research has focused on race, gender, sexuality and sex work.
The killings in Atlanta follow a wave of recent attacks against Asian-Americans since the coronavirus entered the United States, with the majority of reports coming from women.
Investigators believe the gunman previously visited two of the massage parlors, but it’s not clear if any the businesses offered sexual services. The Atlanta mayor said police hadn’t been there previously beyond a minor potential theft. Still, the suspect equated the parlors to sex, and that drove him to kill, police said.
“There’s this assumption that all these massage parlor workers are sex workers. That may or may not be the case,” said Esther Kao, an organizer with New York-based Red Canary Song, a group of Asian and Asian-American sex workers and allies that does outreach to massage parlors. “The majority of massage parlors are licensed businesses that also provide professional, non-sexual massages.”
“There’s this assumption of sexuality and fetishization of Asian women’s bodies that is unique to this kind of crime,” she said.
At least one of the victims was a patron, not an employee. Thirty-three-yearold Delaina Ashley Yaun and her husband had gone to the spa on a date, her mother, Margaret Rushing, told WAGA-TV. Yaun leaves behind a 13-year-old son and 8month-old daughter.
The shootings follow high-profile instances of race and gender-based killings in recent years by white men.
“This is a thread that is woven through the histories of these gunmen. Toxic masculinity is truly a problem in this country,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action.
The Georgia gunman’s targeting of the businesses because he linked them to commercial sex is a nightmare scenario for those who work in erotic industries and are increasingly subjected to online harassment and attempts to report massage parlors to the IRS, said Kate D’Adamo, an organizer and advocate for sex worker rights. “At its core it’s about going out and targeting sex workers as fallen women, blaming them for social ills,” she said.
Prostitution laws mean women also fear reporting harassment or violence to police, afraid of being arrested themselves or their pleas ignored, she said. Those fears are even more pronounced for women of color, those who are immigrants or those with few language skills.
Researchers who spoke to more than 100 Chinese and Korean workers at illicit massage parlors for a 2019 study found that although some women said they felt deceived or coerced into jobs that involved sex work, many more chose the profession after having bad experiences in the few other types of low-paying jobs available to them, like restaurants and nail salons.