From our overstocked archives
DC Gazette, 1976 - Mayor Walter Washington has jumped into the massage parlor controversy with a blue stocking bill worthy of an award from the Legion of Decency.
The problem with mixed sex massage parlors is that some people find them morally offensive. Others, and a sizeable number based on economic extrapolations of an apparently booming business, find them quite attractive.
Still others, of uncertain quantity, are publicly appalled but have been privately pawed. As City Council chair Sterling Tucker warned when the bill was .introduced, several parlor operators in Northern Virginia claimed that their customers included those conducting the hearing at which they testified. It is, as William Spaulding says, "a touchy issue."
The zoning commission has already done as much as reasonably can, or should, be done about the parlors: it has issued an order restricting their establishment outside the downtown area to commercial strips. This is in the best tradition of urban heterogenity.
Those who want to limit their children to the more traditional forms of elementary and high school vice, such as drugs, are reasonably well protected; those who want to get a complete rub are given convenient and legal access.
This is important for the health of a city. A city is not a conglomeration of common values and the effort to make it so is doomed both to failure and to aggravate alienation and tensions. The city should provide equal protection to the puritans and the hot to trot if for no other reason than that the two are not always mutually exclusive. When, a few years ago, the mayor of Selma got flim-flammed on 7th Street in the course of a little interracial escapade, a black cop told a reporter: "He's one of those sunrise to sunset segregationists."
The massage parlor is an interesting and important development in American sex economics and, on the whole, a rather salutory one. It has taken sex off the street-corners and out of the tawdry bookstores and given it a certain amount of petit bourgeois class.
After two hundred years of attempting unsuccessfully to supress sex (a failure, incidentally, that has provided a major impetus to the growth of our gross national product), it is perhaps time to accept sex as one of the normal functions of life and seek ways to integrate it into our culture. Although we are surrounded by sex, sex symbols and sex controversy, it is psychiatrists, sexual moralists, ranging from the anti-sexual wing of feminism to Billy Graham, the Mafia, assorted hustlers and fad-skimmers., and advertising agencies providing sublimination in 30-and 60-second doses who have received more than their share of the benefits. Shoddy as the massage parlor scene may be, it at least represents a move towards normalizing sex - one small jerk forward for mankind.
Mayor Washington, who heretofore has not been known to comment on the subject, has made his initial foray into the issue of sex with a sad and funny bill. Sad, because it represents legislative retrograde motion, an attempt to revitalize one of the most hypocritical and obsolete of American traditions: the imposition on others of moral values not markedly adhered to even by those doing the imposing or which - are adhered to only grudgingly and out of fear, in which case the imposition is more directed at spreading one's own misery rather than seeking an improvement in the general wellbeing.
On the other hand, the bill makes quite diverting reading. It says at one point: "The Mayor shall be responsible for...the preparation and administration of oral, written and demonstrative examinations, and for other matters related to the purposes of this act. It shall also be the duty of the Mayor, from time to time, to examine and inspect, or cause to be examined and inspected, all massage establishments and massage schools operated in the District of Columbia, and for this purpose the Mayor may enter and inspect any massage establishment or massage school at any reasonable time. ."
Read literally, and at least some judges believe legislation should be read with a dictionary at hand, one might gather that this is a bill for the relief of Mayor Walter Washington. While it is true that the mayor may delegate his responsibilities to the city's most notorious collection of dirty old men, the vice squad, it is also conceivable that Walter will consider this a matter of such public concern that he will want to become more directly involved,
Who is going to protect Walter Washington's morals while he is protecting ours? (We know now that Lyndon Johnson used to scan salacious FBI files on top officials for bedtime reading.) Isn't it more important that we have a moral mayor than moral conventioneers?
The bill also states that "it shall be unlawful for any person in a massage establishment to place his or her hands upon, to touch with any part of his or her body, to fondle in any manner, or to massage, a sexual or genital part of any other person."
Here we need a definition of "sexual part." There is none in the bill. While our experience may differ from that of His Honor in this regard, we have found, both empirically and pursuing the literature, that various areas of the body function as sexual parts under properly exquisite conditions even though this is not their primary purpose. We are told, although residual prudity prevents us from appreciating it, that for some people the feet perform most amazing functions. We think this is something the council should deal with in its legislative markup sessions. Knowing the police department's tendency to define things in remarkably broad ways, we don't believe the city council should go about outlawing contact with sexual parts without a clear understanding of which they are.
Frankly, this bill arouses prurient interest. Which, of course, is .one of the purposes of such measures: legislative eroticism for those who get their rocks off investigating, suppressing and outlawing sex. A pallid substitute for the real thing -but it seems to satisfy certain types of public- officials. It's just too bad that their thrill is at other's expense.
A couple of months later DC reinstated its law banning massage by the opposite sex in licensed massage establishments. Reported Pacific News Service, “ Washington's sexual entrepreneurs have transformed their operations primarily into outcall and escort services. The activity takes place outside the parlors and so eludes police detection. "
