Bada Bing!

During the real estate boom of the early 90s, everywhere north of Toronto experienced a massive building expansion. Thousands of new, single detached, two-story homes were built in massive subdivisions along with dozens of industrial parks and strip malls. These houses were mostly filled with Italian families that had moved from various other older neighborhoods near downtown. As soon as they set up shop the requisite Home Depots, giant-screen multiplexes and driving ranges moved in to service all of their needs. BANG! A suburban utopia was created.

Then, in 1999, the bottom fell out of the economy and businesses began drying up. Commercial spaces in the strip malls suddenly became empty shells and industrial parks became ghost towns. The landlords were up against the wall, having to make huge monthly payments to the banks that had lent them the money at high pre-bust interest rates – a “build-and-they-will-come” mentality that always suckers the greedy. Then, like a swarm of majestic locusts, salvation came for the cash-strapped suburban landlords. The sex industry.

By obtaining legal esthetician and massage licenses from the city, which are pretty easy to get, “backrub joints” started renting out huge empty spaces and setting up shop in these commercial zones. These new spaces were cheap because landlords gave up on profits and settled for renting out spaces close to or at cost so they could make those loan payments. They had the amenities and comforts of beautifully constructed, brand-new stores and warehouses. And, most importantly, this area had the most important attraction for any massage parlor industry – the untapped market. Subdivisions upon subdivisions were packed to the gills with overworked, undersexed, married-with-children, frustrated males – Italian males that weren’t too worried about the odd hand job. I say “had” and “was” and “weren’t” but we’ve moved into the present tense now.

North Toronto is teeming with these massage parlors and they’re all doing great business, paying their taxes and their rents on time and becoming good corporate citizens in their neighborhoods. Fondly dubbed “rub‘n’tugs” by their customers, the sex industry has never had such an amicable and palatable façade. And although massage parlor sex is not a new thing, the proportions it has reached in these suburban communities is groundbreaking.

The typical set-up involves blacking out the windows of the former mechanic shop or cellular phone store with glass adhesives; partitioning the space into a bunch of small rooms with massage beds and toilets with showers; setting up a small waiting area in the front, a TV and, of course, a large well-lit sign. Most of the time, you can find the doors propped open, not to let you know it has nothing to hide from the police, but to tell the prospective customer, “Hey, it’s okay in here. We’re not going to get busted.” There is a Clintonesque ethic operating inside the Canadian vice squads and unless penetration is involved, the pigs will let the tugs go.

“The ones where you can get laid are the ones that get busted,” says Frank, an Italian-Canadian customer who’s been going there regularly since his wife moved out. “You’re asking for trouble if you go there.”

Sex is not what the average customer is looking for or getting. Intercourse is not usually an item on the massage menu board, even in the shadier places. Most customers are happy enough to pay 50 dollars for a massage and a gloved hand job. And in most cases the massages (the real back massage, I mean) are actually quite good. As Mike, a contractor and foreman from the area told us, “Bro, you gotta see these places. They’re fuckin’ nice. They take care of you. Nice rub, and at the end to make you really relax they jerk you off. Then you can go home and just chill.” For about 100 dollars the customer can get a condomed blowjob.

Despite being in an Italian neighborhood the races vary. “It’s all Yellow Fever up here. It’s huge,” says Stephen, a computer programmer for IBM. “Very few of the girls are white or even black.” Capitalizing on recent arrivals from mainland China, the Chinese rub shop has become the most popular kind. When the post-British collapse of Hong Kong hit Vancouver, Toronto became the next best spot. The average masseuse is 21, doesn’t speak any English, and, according to most customers, “is totally fuckin’ hat.” After the Chinese rub is the Russian, followed by the Polish. It’s not startling that these three groups also reflect the three largest-growing illegal immigrant communities to move to the Greater Toronto region in the last decade.

The demographic breakdown of the johns is as uniform as the ubiquitous two-story brick houses that they live in. Most of the customers are married, have children, live within 2 miles of the parlors, and are an average age of 36. An engineer named Pasqualino, who doesn’t frequent the rub’n’tugs himself, explained the pervasiveness of the trend: “All my friends go. They do the dash at lunchtime, during their breaks. And even some of the wives know it. They’ll put him in the doghouse, and they won’t say anything, but they know their husband is doing the tug. They drive by these places every day too.”

The proximity of these parlors to residential neighborhoods has even diminished the promiscuity of the whole affair. The men talk about stress relief, relaxation, about the cleanliness and civility of the tug. “The way I see it these men need to release some tension,” says Stephen. “If you go a strip club, you just get more horny and more frustrated. With this the husband goes home all washed up and relaxed and he can sit down and have dinner in peace, even if the kids are screaming and the wife is bitching. These places are better than strip joints because you cut straight to the point, which is getting off. Once that’s done, you can concentrate on your family life.”

The parlors are actually beginning to suffer from their wide acceptance and popularity. Too many operations have opened up, forcing them into competition and sparking the kind of point-of-purchase advertising campaigns that you usually associate with supermarkets and pizzerias. While the traditional sex trade advertises in the downtown weeklies, the suburban style is to go directly to the consumer. The typical strategy is to hit the parking lots of nearby industrial parks and flyer the windshield of the parked cars, but they’ve been known to pamphleteer the lots of major malls and plazas as well. Soon, of course, these women will be as unemployed as their clients and a whole series of “rub and fingers” will open up all over the area. Strapping Mexican teens will rub down a whore’s body and then finger her to climax for total relaxation. Then she can get back to work without being stressed.