Title: Confessions of a Massage Parlour Princess Author: Bailey Summers Publisher: Burman Books Publish Date: 2006 Pages: 134 Genres:: Non-Fiction,Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

“On really good days, the job doesn’t bother me at all. I fool myself because of the comfort of the income it provides, and I almost forget about the days I don’t want my husband touching me.”

Massage parlor work has a lot of perks. It offers good money, and you can set your own hours. Except, along with regular massages, happy endings, a.k.a. hand jobs, are part of the deal. And there’s the rub.

Bailey Summers (known as Dr. Bailey by her customers) offers a weary but caring sexual service provider’s-eye view into the day-to-day life of a massage parlor worker and how it affects her marriage and relationship with her parents. A suburban wife who took up massage parlor work to pay off debt she accumulated as a happily married working woman, she takes you inside her world where massages that finish off with sexual gratification encompass, as all interactions between humans do, infinitely more than what appears to be taking place on the surface. She says “I know I help lost souls all the time, and I actually mean all the time. I talk to and help the girls I work with, as well as the broken men who come to see me.” Her clientele is rich in psychosis and loneliness, sometimes poor on payment. Summers speaks of the injustice and indignity of being forced to provide certain services, a “basic,” for $10.

The lives of massage parlor workers and the circumstances/dreams that lead them to this line of work are as varied as the types of foliage populating the Amazon. One woman rubs to pay off her house, another worker yanks because she (like Summers) can’t give up the quick money, especially when clients are generous and the requested services extensive. As for the clientele, Confessions of a Massage Parlour Princess packs a crowded airport terminal’s worth of human stories into a small bookumentary.

The prospect of giving up the lifestyle you’re accustomed to can make a woman go far beyond what she thought were impermeable boundaries, as Summers grimly acknowledges. “Nobody wants to admit that they put money before their own self-respect.”

The girls who seem to be most affected by the job are the “broken girls,” ones who were sexually abused and are too shattered inside to assertively handle the invasive groping of drunk or troubled clients. Summers believes sexual service workers provide through touch and human presence a release of tension that may stop would-be criminals in their tracks, ironically helping to uphold the law even as they break it. She writes with both horror and empathy about a morbidly obese client whose fat literally dropped to the floor in drapes of flesh when he took off his boots, and of a colleague she witnessed passing out on the job from advanced cancer while trying to earn enough money to afford treatment.

Confessions of a Massage Parlour Princess is a compelling, raw book by a talented author that gives the reader some insight into a little known aspect of the sex industry, as well as the psyches who perform the services.