I met one of Raine’s masseurs, Simon, at a coffee shop. A former breakdancer with an engineering degree, Simon made his way into massage after getting laid off in 2008. “I’d tried massage parlors before, and I thought, ‘Why can’t women do what men do and take ownership?’” he tells me. “The next thing I did was print up business cards.” This may not have been what massage school had taught him, but it was a lot more fun than kneading a lower hamstring. So, he put an ad on Craigslist offering massage with a picture of himself: buff and beautiful. Tanya walked to her car. She was the last client of the day. As she was sitting in her car, her masseur came out of the parlor. He looked at her for “half a second,” then “darted his eyes downward,” and continued walking to his car. She went into the massage room, took off her clothes, and tried to relax. The masseur put on the same CD as before: a muzak version of Radiohead’s greatest hits, played on xylophone. As the instrumental version of “Creep” played, the massage began like the other one had before. But this time, when he got to her butt and inner thighs, she didn’t clench. He started rubbing her butt vigorously with his thumbs. “And then he just started rubbing closer and closer [to my vagina],” Tanya recalls. “I was like, ‘I wonder if he’s gonna do it?’” Like, on my genitals for an hour? I don’t know how that’s gonna go,” Cookie responded incredulously, glancing at the Hitachi Magic Wand. But her goal that day was to have an orgasm, so she was game.

I had not been able to actually come to orgasm from that type of fingering [since the assault] happened. And now, I feel like I regained that ability to come from fingering,” says Tanya. “I felt really relieved and fulfilled.” What made it so erotic for her, she says, is that “it was somebody just making sure I got off. And that was all they wanted. They didn’t have any other expectations. And then I didn’t have to talk to them after.” Whereas, when she hooks up with her boyfriend she has to worry about his feelings, and the experience always ends in full penetration. In the massage parlor, “there was no penis causing any discomfort, and I didn’t have to deal with condoms or birth control.” After having a free, 30-minute Zoom call in which Stewart led her in breathwork and explained that his bodywork “can bring up a lot of hormonal responses that can confuse us into feelings,” but that there would be no romance, Cookie booked a three-day retreat. A month later, she was on a two-hour ferry ride to Victoria to meet Stewart. Stewart is married to a man, something that his client Cookie tells me is appealing to her. “It just makes it feel so much safer for me,” she says. So why would a woman pay for sex? Despite the stereotype that ladies can get laid whenever they want, the truth is more complicated. “Women buy sex because they want sex that they can control,” explains Caldwell. “Some women want casual sex and feel safer with a negotiated service. Others want a sexpert who might better understand their needs. Sex workers are unlikely to reject, belittle, or harass their clients, and many women who previously tried online dating prefer the convenience and consistency that commercial sex offers.”Some women want casual sex and feel safer with a negotiated service. Others want a sexpert who might better understand their needs. I just bawled my eyes out, like I had never cried before,” she says, recalling that he held her as she cried for 10 minutes. “I realized that the work that we were doing was actually much, much deeper [than sex]. This was attachment work, like having-an-emotionally-neglectful-father stuff.”

Stewart is one of 116 licensed sexological bodyworkers worldwide. Their work straddles the lines between sex work, therapy, and massage. Dr. Caldwell says the sex-as-therapy trope helps “reduce stigma” for women because women are less likely to openly state they want sex. “A woman who told me she bought sex for therapy might tell her best friend that she bought sex because she was curious or horny,” says Caldwell, “and both of these motivations might be true.” Once she arrived, Cookie became a bit nervous, but Stewart brewed her a cup of tea, they chatted, and she began to relax. Then they moved to the floor, and Stewart began stretching and rolling like a cat and instructed Cookie to do the same. “Even that was hard, honestly,” she says, “just wiggling around on the floor with a stranger I had just met.” She’d learned from Reddit that when men are at a parlor, they don’t really have to ask for a happy ending. The masseuse would ask them, make a gesture toward their penis, or sometimes, “the men would have an erection and that was the indicator for the masseuse to offer it,” says Tanya. “It seemed so simple. But as a female, I was like, ‘How do I indicate? And do I even want that?’ And then part of me worried, ‘What if I get one and then I get arrested?’” Yet, Tanya isn’t completely sanguine about the experience. She says she “kind of feels dirty about it…because, as a woman, I’m not supposed to pay for sex. As a mother, I shouldn’t be wanting this. I wish I didn’t feel that way.” In December of last year, Tanya entered a strip-mall massage parlor in a ritzy Houston suburb—the same parlor she’d been going to for 11 years for traditional massage services, sometimes with her ex-husband. As she stood at the counter, the receptionist assigned her a male massage therapist. A 30-something woman waiting behind her piped up and said, “Oh, you’re getting him! He’s wonderful!” Tanya didn’t think much of it.T hough our patriarchal culture likes to pretend that women don’t buy sex and men don’t sell it to them, it wasn’t difficult to find sources for this story once I figured out where to look. Stewart told her that he was going to take her close to peak arousal, then bring her down, and bring her up again, until she finally climaxed (a technique also referred to as “edging”). Cookie laid on the table as he worked the Hitachi all over her body. After about 45 minutes, with his gloved fingers inside of her, she came.