War and Sex Work: The Atlanta Spa Shootings, an Extension of White Sexual Imperialism

Sign at Union Square Vigil naming victims of the Atlanta spa shooting. It reads “Rest in Power Hyun J. Grant, Yong A. Yue, Suncha Kim, Soon C. Park, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina A. Yuan, Paul Andre Michels. #StopAAPIHate.” Photo by Andrew Ratto.

Often used as a euphemism for locations of sex work, massage parlors allude to establishments where clients pay for massages in addition to (or in lieu of) sexual favors. In 2021, Robert Long, a 21-year-old white man, carried his gun into Young Asian Massage Parlor, where he paid for and received a service. Shortly after, he started shooting. He fired again at two other spas. By the third spa, Long had murdered Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong A. Yue, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yuan, and Paul Andre Michels—eight individuals, six of whom were Asian women. When Long killed these eight people, he was not unfamiliar with the meaning of a massage parlor. In fact, he was actively seeking the sexual commodities they offer. At the same time, he wanted to punish them. 

Georgia authorities cite Long’s alleged sex addiction as a pure motive for his crime, claiming that the massage parlors Long visited were merely a “temptation he wanted to eliminate.” These claims of Long’s sex addiction were largely weaponized to eradicate additional anti-Asian hate crime charges brought forth by the prosecution, who sought the death penalty and hate crime enhancements in addition to murder charges against Long. Contrary to Long’s attorneys, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms dismisses notions of prostitution, asserting that the massage parlors were “legally operating businesses that have not been on our radar,” despite two of the them having been historically involved in prostitution investigations. 

Arguments fixating on only either Long’s sexual or racial motivators overlook how both influences work together to make his crime all the more violent. Narratives that scapegoat sex work and paint the shooting as an inexplicable projection of Long’s “sex addiction” grossly undermines the reality of the sexualized racism encompassing Long’s actions while attributing the blame of his choices onto the women he murdered and their occupations. At the same time, failing to acknowledge the reality of sex work and/or sexual motivators in the shooting dismisses the inherent sexualization of massage parlors, which was Long’s very justification for targeting them. Long’s intentional decision to target sexually “tempting” establishments, specifically massage parlors dominated by East Asian women, demonstrates that the violence he committed was simultaneously racially and sexually charged. 

In Long’s eyes, the women he killed were solely sexual commodities—whether or not they were sex workers. As Red Canary Song describes, “the women who were killed faced specific racialized gendered violence for being Asian women and massage workers [...] Whether or not they were actually sex workers or self-identified under that label.” The mere reality that Long reduced these women to objects to be sexually dominated—as “temptations” to be eliminated—before he killed them exhibits a less visible, but equally disturbing violence that occurred: the implicit sexualization of East Asian women. Recognizing this enables us to contextualize the historical role of sexual exploitation at the intersection of race and gender. Without discerning that sexual and racial motivators were collaboratively at play in the Atlanta spa shootings, we fail to connect the violence Long committed to a larger struggle of white supremacy and imperialism enabling white men to sexualize and exploit Asian women. 

Sunny Woan, a lawyer and academic writer of feminist and Asian issues, identifies the historical context of this phenomenon in her paper, “White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence.” Woan asserts that contemporary media depicts Asian women as objects for consumption, a dynamic especially portrayed and created through the “interrelationships between white American GIs who go overseas, the Asian women they meet there, and the white American women back home.” War and western supremacy doesn’t just kill: its violence casts rivaling, “oriental,” countries as weak, docile, and submissive. This is reflected in how the women of these countries are categorized. Where orientalism acts as a western strategy to dominate the “Orient” (in this case, East Asia), the sexuality of local women never exists in a vacuum. The “conquering”—or sexual exploitation—of women overseas reflects a greater conquering of the Orient. It reflects a reality where white American soldiers can dominate the women local to the countries in which they terrorize—emboldening their sexual pride, white supremacy, and patriotism. As Woan asserts, “rape and war created the hyper-sexualized stereotype of the Asian woman,” fostering the oversaturation of Asian women in pornography, the mail-order bride phenomenon (i.e., a service where women list themselves in catalogs to be selected by men for marriage), the Asian fetish syndrome, and worst of all: sexual violence against Asian women. The fetishization and objectification of Asian women—such as in the Atlanta spa shootings—is an issue of gendered and racialized violence that is a continuation of imperialism, colonialism, and war. Through these pillars of hegemonic violence Long, alongside other white men, have been emboldened to reduce East Asian women to submissive commodities. This history catalyzes a culture where white men view the bodies of East Asian women as equivalent to the foreign countries they destroy—as something they are entitled to occupy and violate.

Beneath the guise of a euphemism, the term “massage parlor” unravels realities of sex work, fetishization, sexualized racism, and white sexual imperialism. A massage parlor isn’t purely a massage parlor, it’s a sexualized establishment—a visceral sexualization tied to all East Asian women, molded through histories of American GIs conquering foreign homelands and, in their wake, foreign women. This history made parlors and their workers into something Long deemed deserving of eradication and violence. When Long and other white men hear “massage parlor,” they do not think of isolated massage businesses. Instead, they are reminded of the bodies they are entitled to—exactly like how western imperialism deems the homes, communities, and lands of “oriental” countries. If headlines of the Atlanta spa shootings include “massage parlors,” but leave them merely as a euphemism suspended in a title instead of recognizing the term’s implied sexualization, we omit the crucial fragments of history that enable a reality where East Asian women and their bodies are commodified and assaulted. In doing so, we acquit agitators like Long from one less form of violence to be held accountable for and dishonor the multi-dimensional struggles of those who are concurrently oppressed through white supremacy, war, imperialism, and its persevering ramifications. 

Khanh Doan is a staff writer for CPR and a second-year in Columbia College, prospectively majoring in Ethnicity and Race Studies and Creative Writing. She is especially passionate about disability justice and colonial resistance. You can usually find her in Sephora, perusing for skincare and makeup that she can’t afford.