A woman selling sex on a street corner is generally understood to be engaged in prostitution. Put her in a luxury hotel or call her an escort, and suddenly the conversation changes. Give her a wealthy “sponsor,” and perhaps she’s simply enjoying a mutually beneficial arrangement. Move the transaction online, and she becomes an entrepreneur. The terminology changes. The presentation improves. The stigma supposedly disappears.
But what happens to the danger? That question has been on my mind as I think back to a recent murder in Smyrna, Georgia, the 2021 Atlanta-area spa murders, and what I witnessed many years earlier as a state regulatory inspector.
There is a difficult balance to strike when discussing prostitution in connection with violence against women. Identifying a murdered woman as a prostitute can invite judgment and the suggestion that she somehow invited her victimization. Avoiding a verified connection altogether, however, risks obscuring patterns of danger associated with the commercial sex industry.
A woman’s involvement in prostitution should never excuse violence against her. Neither should concern for her dignity excuse silence about the industry’s dangers.
The Uncomfortable Context of Atlanta's Spa Murders
In March 2021, a gunman murdered eight people, including six Asian women, at three Atlanta-area massage businesses. The killings prompted national conversations about anti-Asian racism, misogyny, gun violence, and the sexual fetishization of Asian women. Those discussions were warranted, but the establishments' documented connections to commercial sex also deserved sustained attention.
Police never established that the murdered women themselves were selling sex. Nevertheless, the businesses’ connections to commercial sex were documented. The Washington Post reported that Atlanta police had conducted seven prostitution stings at Gold Spa between 2011 and 2013, arresting ten people, all women. Police reports sometimes listed the spa itself as their home address. Complaints about prostitution continued years later, and online customers had described the businesses as places to purchase sexual services. The murderer reportedly frequented two of the establishments and characterized them as sexual temptations he wanted to eliminate.
None of this proves that prostitution caused the murders or that the victims were prostitutes. But why should acknowledging the commercial-sex environment surrounding a murder be mistaken for disparaging the women murdered? The racialized sexualization of Asian women and the commercial sexual exploitation associated with some massage businesses are not mutually exclusive concerns.
There is also a question of who is held accountable. The earlier prostitution investigations at Gold Spa resulted in the arrests of ten women. By contrast, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s March 2026 Operation Rockin’ Robins targeted commercial-sex buyers and suspected traffickers while offering advocacy services to women encountered during the operation. That is a more promising approach, although arrests and referrals alone cannot establish that exploitation has been prevented or that women have been given meaningful ways out.
If prostitution is the problem, why have the women selling sex so often been treated as the problem rather than the men purchasing it?
What I Saw Behind the Storefront
The circumstances surrounding Atlanta’s massage businesses weren’t entirely unfamiliar to me as I’d spent six years as a state regulatory inspector. As one of only three women in my department, I was sometimes asked to accompany male colleagues investigating massage establishments in my region.
Massage parlors weren’t routinely inspected under the system I worked within. Coworkers told me that the industry had wanted it that way. In practice, inspections generally required an official complaint and an opportunity for regulatory intervention, such as a licensing issue.
Of the inspections I participated in during those six years, two stand out. Before the first, I remember preparing myself for what I might find. The complaint included a Craigslist advertisement promising “young,” “fresh off the boat Oriental” girls. I worried that I would encounter frightened young women, possibly trafficking victims, being forced to provide sexual services. That wasn’t what I found.
Instead, there were two older women, both appearing to be at least in their fifties. One was the manager and the other woman was painfully thin, looked a bit dazed, and wore lingerie hanging loosely from her body and makeup that was smeared and appeared to have been worn for days. The business had a room with two showers and a price list offering “body shampoo” services. A washing machine and stove occupied a back hallway, suggesting someone might have been living there. Another room in the front contained a mattress, television/vcr combo on a dresser, and credit-card machine on a table beside the door.
I'd been too nervous to eat lunch beforehand. Afterward, I threw my lunch away. I couldn't get the image of that woman out of my head.
At the second inspection, an older woman stood guard at one of the closed doors of the parlor letting us know a client was inside. She entered and exited the room multiple times as my colleague and I waited for the manager to arrive. This time the she was a woman in her 30’s. As we waited for her to show up and even during the inspection, several men entered the parlor saw two inspectors there, and immediately turned around and left.
Neither inspection established that the women were trafficked. Nor could I determine what choices or circumstances had brought them there. I was there on a licensing fact-finding mission before the investigations began. But I left with a different understanding of what vulnerability might look like.
I had prepared myself to encounter young girls being exploited. I hadn’t prepared myself for the possibility that the women most easily overlooked would be nearly old enough to be their grandmothers. Exploitation does not become less worthy of scrutiny because a woman is older, because nobody is visibly restraining her, or because the transaction happens behind an ordinary storefront.
New Names for an Old Transaction
The women I encountered were far removed from the glamorous image increasingly associated with commercial sex, but the distance between those images is part of what troubles me. When prostitution is discussed as either desperate exploitation or empowered entrepreneurship, what happens to the women whose experiences don't fit either narrative? Perhaps that is part of the problem with how prostitution is discussed.
Today, a young woman might never stand on a street corner, encounter a pimp, or describe herself as a prostitute. She might advertise herself as an escort, negotiate a sugar arrangement, or seek a sponsor willing to finance a particular lifestyle.
These arrangements are not automatically identical. A relationship involving gifts is not necessarily prostitution and producing sexual content online is not the same as meeting a buyer for sex. But when financial compensation or material support is conditional upon sexual access, changing the terminology does not change the commodification of women’s bodies.
The imagery suggests luxury, independence, discretion, and control. A woman isn’t selling sex; she’s securing her bag. She isn’t prostituting herself; she’s dating strategically. Some women may experience these arrangements as empowering, but a woman’s sense of empowerment does not settle whether the institution itself is exploitative. Nor does moving prostitution indoors eliminate its risks.
Research has documented substantial violence against women in prostitution, although the risks differ across settings. A 2001 study published in the BMJ, for example, found that 81% of women surveyed in street-based prostitution reported having experienced violence from clients, compared with 48% of women working indoors. Different forms of prostitution are not equally dangerous…but lower risk is not the absence of risk, and expensive surroundings cannot guarantee that a buyer will respect a woman’s boundaries.
The radical-feminist concern is not that every man who purchases sex is violent. It is that the transaction itself makes sexual access something a man can purchase, turning economic inequality into sexual entitlement. No amount of luxurious branding resolves that tension.
When the Circumstances Aren't Clear
Last month, a 26-year-old woman was brutally murdered at an apartment complex in Smyrna, Georgia. Her family initially believed she had been making DoorDash deliveries, but investigators subsequently reported that she hadn’t been working that day. What brought her to the apartment remains unclear. Questions about her whereabouts gave way to speculation about whether she had been escorting, although no publicly established evidence supports that conclusion.
In her Substack article There Is No Rubric That Will Make Them Care, Dominique Morgan criticized the impulse to scrutinize a murdered woman’s choices before deciding whether she deserves sympathy…a concern I share. Whatever brought the woman to that apartment, responsibility for her murder belongs to the person who killed her.
However, I don’t believe the answer is to treat a woman’s circumstances as irrelevant to understanding the violence she experienced. There is a difference between asking what happened and suggesting that what happened was deserved. If a connection to commercial sex is established, it should be possible to acknowledge it without diminishing the victim’s humanity.
A woman’s circumstances may help us understand the danger she faced, but they should never determine how much we care that she faced it.
Opposing Prostitution Is Not Opposing Prostituted Women
The distinction between changing an industry's image and changing its underlying conditions isn't merely rhetorical. It's a question I've spent considerable time examining through my work with Women's Declaration International USA.
In January of 2025, I moderated a Women’s Declaration International USA webinar on combating the exploitation of women and girls, featuring Erin Brewer, Melissa Farley, and Elly Arrow. One recurring concern was how pornography, prostitution, and trafficking can overlap while being marketed as entirely different experiences. Farley, for example, discussed research involving women in pornography production and challenged the idea that putting a camera between a buyer and a woman fundamentally changes the transaction.
I also helped write WDI USA’s anti-pornography statement, which identifies these industries as interconnected forms of commercial sexual exploitation. That remains my radical-feminist position. These industries are not legally identical, and not every person selling sex is trafficked. But their differences should not obscure the underlying commodification of sexual access, overwhelmingly purchased by men.
Contemporary discourse often treats criticism of these industries as though it necessarily constitutes criticism of the women involved. It doesn’t. A feminist can oppose prostitution entirely without despising the women involved. Recognizing that women possess agency does not require accepting the purchase of sexual access as a legitimate expression of equality.
Sasha S. Graham has argued that prostitution and pornography are profoundly exploitative institutions whose inherent violence cannot be legislated away. In her view, the only legitimate solutions are prevention and exit. I agree. Prevention means addressing the circumstances that draw women into prostitution, challenging male sexual entitlement, and refusing to market commercial sexual exploitation as glamorous entrepreneurship. Exit means providing realistic economic alternatives for women who want to leave.
If prostitution is paying a woman’s rent and an exit program cannot help her keep a roof over her head, government has not created an exit program. Telling women they have a way out means little when the only thing waiting outside is eviction.
The goal is not a safer, more respectable prostitution industry. It is a society in which prostitution no longer exists.
The Warning Should Survive the Rebrand
The Atlanta spa murders illustrate why the commercial-sex context surrounding violence deserves examination, even when the individual victims’ involvement is unknown. The recent murder in Smyrna raises a different question: why is examining the circumstances surrounding violence against women so often confused with passing judgment on the women themselves? And my experiences as an inspector showed me how easily women can be overlooked behind the storefronts, euphemisms, and regulatory blind spots surrounding the industry.
Feminism should be capable of recognizing the humanity of women in prostitution while rejecting the institution itself. Discussing violence associated with commercial sex does not mean women deserve it and questioning the glamorous presentation of escorting and sugar arrangements does not require pretending every participant has the same experience. And telling young women that prostitution carries serious risks should not make women already involved feel disposable.
Society has become increasingly comfortable changing the language surrounding prostitution and other uncomfortable concepts, but the question is not whether prostitution can be made respectable enough to escape criticism. It is whether an institution built around purchasing sexual access to human beings should exist at all.
A woman’s dignity does not depend on defending prostitution. And opposition to prostitution does not diminish her right to safety, compassion, or justice. An escort is not necessarily safer because she isn’t called a prostitute. A sugar arrangement is not necessarily empowering because it resembles dating. A woman murdered in connection with commercial sex is no less deserving of sympathy because the circumstances of her death are uncomfortable to discuss.
The danger should not disappear from the story simply because prostitution has found a prettier name.
Excellent essay, Kristin.
This is also why I hated the movie “Anora” and was disgusted that it won so many awards.