Hate is Hate: The Toxic Brew of Race, Sex Workers, and Hysteria in Atlanta Shootings

Scene of the Atlanta Asian Massage Parlor Shootings. Screen grab from Voice of America

Last week, a gunman walked into three Atlanta-area massage parlors and gunned down eight innocent people. In the immediate aftermath, the conversation descended into a struggle over a narrative. Some insisted it was anti-Asian racism, given that the spas were run by Asians and there has been a recent uptick in anti-Asian violence. Other talked about misogyny, given that most of the victims were women and there was speculation that the shooter was an “incel”. Still others talked about anti-sex work hatred, given the assumed association of massage parlors with sex work and sex workers.

This is not unusual. Whenever a mass shooting happens, there is a scramble to find and hopefully politicize the motive. But this game can be capricious. After the Columbine shooting, for example, we were told that the killers were outsiders who were relentlessly bullied. However, later investigation showed this wasn’t the case and that they were just as likely to be bullies themselves as be bullied. After the Gabby Giffords shooting, attention focused on a political map made by Sarah Palin’s PAC that showed a target on her district. But the shooter turned out to be a deeply disturbed individual and her map had nothing to do with the shooting. After the Pulse shooting, it became dogma that the shooting was motivated by anti-gay hatred. But later investigation and the trial of the shooter’s wife revealed that the location was chosen at random, that the shooter probably didn’t even know it was a gay nightspot and he was on the phone with the authorities during the siege, ranting about US troops overseas.

The latter is, I think, especially important. When the killer tells us his motives, it behooves us to assume that those are his motives. There may be other things at work. But mass murderers are rarely shy about their motives and have no reason to lie. Quite the contrary: they usually want us to know why they did it. That is the entire point of carrying out an act of terrorism.

Generally, when someone’s primary motive is race or gender hatred, we don’t need a dozen NYT articles — and there were close to a dozen of them over the last few days — breaking it down for us in terms of toxic masculinity. We know. The Pittsburgh shooter stated his motives clearly. So did the Christchurch shooter. And the Charleston shooter. And the Ecole Polytechnique shooter.

Thus, when it comes to sussing out what drove the Atlanta shooter to act, I’m inclined to take his actual words at face value, at least as the jumping-off point. And this shooter was quite clear: he killed these women to “remove the temptation” for his alleged sex addiction, a supposed malady he has recently received treatment for. When arrested, he was allegedly on his way to attack a porn shop in furtherance of his crusade.

The revelation of his motives created an odd backlash against the narrative that this was necessarily a racist attack. And I kind of get that. The bodies were not even cold before journalists were penning 2000 word articles on the spike in anti-Asian violence and how this was of a piece with it. And once the killer spoke, they continued to scramble to wedge the anti-sex narrative into a racist hole. But the thing is: this isn’t either-or. Race likely did play a role in what happened, although not quite in the way a lot of people think it did. What happened appears to be the result of a toxic stew of racism, misogyny, religious radicalism, anti-sex work hysteria and the pseudo-scientific discipline of sex addiction, a stew that the eight people murdered — Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Daoyou Feng, Yong Ae Yue, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park and Suncha Kim — may have found themselves at the center of.

The War on Sex & Sex Workers Continues

Robert Aaron Long mugshot released by Cherokee County Sheriffs Office

I should note as we get into this that we have no information that any of the people murdered had anything to do with sex work. There are reports that the spas had previously been busted for prostitution and had reviews on websites that cater to the sex work clientele. And it’s clear that the killer thought they were, regardless of whether they were or not, either because he had used such services or because he had bought into various narratives that there were. But we still don’t know if any of the victims was connected to actual sex work.

The stated motive of the Atlanta shooter was to “remove the temptation” of the women at these spas. He claims that his “sex addiction” was in conflict with his religious beliefs. And that he killed to protect himself and others from the temptresses at these spas.

The problem is that … sex addiction is not really a thing. As David Ley, author of The Myth of Sex Addiction explains:

Last night, I predicted that the alleged Atlanta mass-killer would be found to have a history of what I called "sexual self-hatred," specifically, an association with the sex/porn addiction movement. Turns out, a few hours later, I was right. https://t.co/DaWpQLFdEp

— David J. Ley PhD (@DrDavidLey) March 17, 2021

What is usually called “sex addiction” is simply bad behavior. Harvey Weinstein, for example, claimed that his rape and sexual abuse was a result of “addiction”. Anthony Weiner claimed his behavior was. But the behavior people attribute to sex addiction does not generally meet any definition of addiction, as understood by mental health professionals. And the treatment for it generally does not adhere to how one would treat an addiction. As Ley explains in the above thread, these programs tend to be abusive, teaching people to hate rather than control their sexual desires. And they specifically target the things that supposedly stimulate addiction — pornography and sex work. Cathy Reisenwitz:

By pushing the sex addiction myth, anti-sex worker, Evangelical groups like ExodusCry, NCOSE, and Polaris teach men that they aren’t in control of their sexuality. Rather than trying to understand and manage sexual desires, these groups teach people, especially men, to feel ashamed of and hate both their own sexuality and the people and media they find sexually arousing. They teach men to blame sex workers for their own feelings and behavior.

I would add, and I flatter myself to think that Cathy would agree, that are plenty of non-religious groups pushing this sex addiction narrative as well as the antipathy for sex workers. And many of those fly under a feminist flag.

That’s because the sex addiction narrative is a shadowy reflection of a different narrative — the sex-trafficking narrative. In fact, some of the organizations associated with sex addiction are also associated with anti-trafficking initiatives. I have written before about the myth that his country is filled with hundreds of thousands of sex slaves and that millions of predatory men are out there just waiting to assault a helpless defenseless child:

We are constantly being told — by politicians, by the media and by the entertainment industry — that there is a national crisis of sex trafficking and specifically a crisis of child sex trafficking. But the evidence to support this claim, when you dig into it even a little bit, turns out to be a ziggurat of garbled statistics, junk social science and outright lies. My friend Maggie McNeill has devoted an entire page to debunking claims that are so common and oft-repeated, they are taken as gospel: that the average age at which a woman enters sex work is 13 (it’s mid-20’s); that there are 300,000 child sex slaves in the US (there are at most a few hundred), that sex trafficking and consensual sex work are inextricably linked (they aren’t); that the Super Bowl or other big events are magnets for sex traffickers (not at all).

These two things — sex addiction therapy and the sex-trafficking moral panic — flow from the same source, overlap in narrative, share organizations and converge on the same point: the ostracization and endangerment of sex workers or those who are perceived to be.

Consider the method used to advance both causes. Sex addiction therapy shames men for their sexual desires. But one of the favored methods used by the anti-trafficking organizations is … shaming men for their sexual desires. “Real men don’t buy sex” we are told. Clients are either evil men taking advantage of victims or pathetic “incels” who can’t get sex elsewhere. Both identify pornography and massage parlors as specific loci of evil; they just differ in the kind of evil they attribute to them.

These are two sides of the same coin — a coin often wielded by the same organizations. One side of the coin tells “sex addicts” that their desires are bad and that the sex workers who provoke it are evil. The other sides tells clients that their desires are bad and that the sex workers who provoke it are helpless victims. And we have indications that the shooter was both a client and a “sex addict”, exposed to the toxic myths from angles. In the end, both dehumanize sex workers, both demonize desire, and both seek to deprive sex workers of their livelihood. And both focus specifically on massage parlors. Whether casting sex workers as temptresses or helpless victims, the result is the same.

An important thing to remember, however, is that this dehumanization of sex workers is not confined to “evangelicals”. Not even close. Let’s look at the Newspaper of Record, which ran a long piece looking at sex addiction and evangelical Christians. It makes some important points that are touched on by Ley and Reisenwitz, particularly on how the intersection of religious faith and sex addiction ideology can produce a toxic brew.

Here’s the thing though. You can point the finger at Evangelical groups in this particular case. But the NYT might want to look up some things about beams and eyes. Because I’m sure the NYT does not think of themselves as a bunch of religious nuts. I’m sure they regard themselves as progressive and feminists. And yet, they have pushed the misogyny and hatred that fed this attack just as much as the religious right. They’ve just pushed it from the other side of the poisonous coin.

Here is an article in NYT wrote in the wake of the Robert Kraft bust in Florida, alleging that most of the 9000 Asian spas in the country are brothels filled with enslaved women. Their source? Mostly cops and activists and a few anonymous victims, some of whom make the usual tired and debunked claims (“They’re seeing 8-12 men a day!”). The NYT had wall-to-wall coverage of the initial claims of the Kraft bust, mindlessly parroting the claims of police and activists that the women involved were coerced, enslaved and seeing ten men a day. When the reality came out — that these were mostly middle-aged women, some of whom were doing the occasional happy ending without coercion — the NYT was oddly quiet.

And porn? One of their principal writers recently wrote a huge feature alleging that sites like Pornhub were engaged in trafficking. His partner in this? Exodus Cry, a religious organization that has made the eradication of all sex work one of their goals. They have also engaged in shaming campaigns over hook-up culture and casual sex. The NYT crowed with triumph when Pornhub tightened its procedures for verifying content while casually ignoring that most of the work on that had been done by sex workers themselves over many years.

This anti-trafficking narrative, and the specific focus on Asian massage parlors has had consequences. A year ago, Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote about the moral panic over massage parlors, which mainly give massages but occasionally dabble in sex work.

“Suspicious behavior,” according to police, may include having more male than female customers, being open during nonstandard business hours, employing masseuses who wear high heels, having an entrance in the back of the building, requiring customers to buzz in for entry, keeping window blinds closed, having employees that don’t leave the building for lunch breaks, and of course being listed on Rubmaps. In Texas, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office works with a group called Project AWESOME that checks licensing department records against businesses on Rubmaps and reports suspected licensing or zoning law violators to the cops.

As Brown noted on Twitter, the kind of security one might want in an establishment that has a mainly female staff and a mainly male clientele — locking doors, buzzing people in, etc. — are seen as suspicious by police. And thus discouraged.

Let’s also remember that official investigations into massage parlors — investigations the NYT and other news orgs lionize, cheer and mindlessly parrot the rhetoric of — can sometimes involve brutalizing women, threatening them, robbing them and even raping them in the form of vice cops getting services from women they subsequently arrest. Let’s remember that the criminalization of sex work can result in women being coerced into sex and even murdered by police officers. Just because it’s state-sanctioned violence does not mean it’s not violence. Is violence committed in the name of “rescue” morally better than violence committed to “remove the temptation”? Especially given that “removing the temptation” was the justification for legal crackdowns on prostitution until the public grew tired of it and the trafficking narrative was created to justify continued legal violence against sex workers?

Let’s also not forget that many of these voices supported the FOSTA law, which has put sex workers in great danger. And many of them are currently supporting the SAFE TECH Act which will place sex workers in greater danger. And many of them support the EARN IT Act, which will place sex workers in greater danger.

You simply cannot divorce what happened here from the general hysteria — fueled heavily by the government and the media — surrounding sex and sex work. You can not separate it from an agenda that claims that dehumanizing, robbing, endangering and visiting violence upon sex workers is OK so long as it is done in the right cause. We have a media culture and government that has told us that all massages parlors — especially Asian massage parlors — are merely brothels with a paint job. We have a media culture and a government that has told us that that these places are hotbeds of illegal immoral sex at best and forced sex and trafficking at worst. We have a media culture and a government that has cast any attempt to make these places safe in terms of abuse and trafficking and applauds men going into these places with guns, so long as they also have badges. And we have a media culture and a government that has shamed men who use these services (or use porn, which was the next establishment this man was going to target).

Photo by DOCLVHUGO, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

It is not just sex addiction ideology that fed this. It is our society’s general hysteria around sex and sex work, of which sex addiction ideology is merely a part. Today it was a man killing people to “remove the temptation”. Tomorrow, it will be a man killing people to rescue helpless victims, like the man who went into Comet Ping Pong with a rifle. And the hysteria that informs this (as well as QAnon) has been fed by many of the same people scrambling around for a narrative, trying to find someone like Evangelicals to blame this on.

The Toxic Brew

Now does this mean racism played no role in these killings? Of course not. There has been a long cultural fetishization of Asian women, specifically in the context of sex work. Even if you remove the misogyny and sex worker hatred, there’s still plenty of evil left over to attribute to racism. This man didn’t just kill people he thought were sex workers (whether they were or not). He focused particularly on Asian ones. And this is not entirely unexpected. If you can stomach the misogyny of incels and pick-up artists and their ilk, you will quickly find racism lurking just below the sexism. These are often part of the same vile mentality; one that sees women as objects and non-white women almost as animals. I cannot bring myself to link or quote some of the awfulness that lurks in these circles. I wanted to pour Clorox on my computer after reading it.

But again … this not something created by Donald Trump or Evangelicals or whoever the villain of the moment is. It is something that has long simmered in this country across people of all political persuasions. And it is something that has been fed, in the case of Asian women, by increasingly hysterical claims that all Asian massage parlors in the US are hotbeds for illicit sex work. You can’t build up massage parlors as a great moral threat and then act all surprised when someone reacts violently.

In The End

In the end, we may never really know what motivated this stunted creature to go out and do what he did. We have his words, we have his actions, we have the circumstances he grew up in. But the person most responsible for what happened was … him. As destructive as sex-addiction therapy is, most of those who go through don’t run out and murder a bunch of people. As vile as anti-sex work rhetoric has gotten, most people don’t start shooting up massage parlors. As insidious as racism is, the recent spike in anti-Asian hate crimes has the numbers still in low triple digits. The simple fact is that an evil man did an evil thing. The path he found to that evil thing is important because others may follow it. We should absolute have these conversations. But the path did not create him. It did not pre-destine him. We must never lost sight of that. He chose this.

As we look at the wider issues surrounding this horror, I am fine with having discussions of anti-Asian hate. I am fine with discussions of how that intersects with misogyny. But I also want to highlight our national hysteria over sex work, the way that hysteria is fed by many of the same people wringing their hands over this tragedy and the way anti-sex work violence is accepted, even cheered, when it happens at the hands of law enforcement.

We have long and awful history of regarding sex workers as disposable people. It is one of the reasons that sex work remains illegal — because if a sex worker is beaten, coerced into sex or murdered … hey, it’s just a sex worker. It’s one of the reasons serial killers have often focused on sex workers. Because … hey, it’s just a sex worker. And that particularly applies to sex workers of color, who are more likely to be targeted for violence by those who prey on them.

But let’s not let these people be disposable, whether they were sex workers or not. These were real people with families and dreams and communities they were part of. Read their names. Know their stories. Eight lives were tragically cut short; eight good lives. As we talk about the killer and his motives, let’s not let him eclipse the good people he killed.