As paid sex goes, a trip to the massage parlor sounds classier than hiring a hooker. But that’s like saying coprophagia sounds like a classier bathroom activity than taking a shower — entirely accurate, until you learn what it really means.
Pop culture had convinced us that all masseuses are Jennifer Love Hewitts whose only worry is which male model to jack off before marrying. But then we talked to “Amy,” who worked in a parlor in Montreal, and she told us the sticky truth …

5. Massage Equipment Is Dangerously Unsexy

If you search for a video of a woman giving a man a massage, it’s going to play out the same way 90 percent of the time: She slowly rubs down the client with oil, things steadily getting hotter until the pair are nothing but a tangle of naked, glistening limbs. Well, the prevalence of this genre of porn is setting people up for a huge disappointment if they e

If you have this kind of “massage” parlor in your neighborhood — the kind where they massage the client’s boner — you might see real beds instead of the standard massage tables. But more often than not, they have to keep up the illusion with the regulation equipment. That means staff will be attempting sex acts on a massage table, and that can lead to hilarious disaster and/or bodily injury:

“Tables,” says Amy, “are, let’s say, skinnier than they should be for that sort of thing.” So sex with a massage customer is half Tetris, as the masseuse struggles to twist legs and other appendages into configurations that fit. It’s hard enough with any customer, and it’s extra tricky with the chunky ones. “There’s no nice way of saying, ‘Sir, either sort out your fat positioning, or I’m going to squish your sides with my knees, and you’re going to enjoy it’.”

And that’s if she manages to stay on the table at all. One time, “the client was paying for a BJ but was very insistent on seeing my ass.” This meant squeezing herself onto the foot of the table and hiking her posterior skyward — and then scrambling to avoid toppling off the edge and breaking that ass he so admired. It turns out that blowjobs also tend to give masseuses lockjaw when the table forces them into uncomfortable poses. We tried to read up some more on this topic, but that led us to Cosmo and we had to flee, screaming.

The aforementioned porn videos invariably focus on the sensual application of oil. That’s because oil brings to mind the body’s own fluids, and it shows off the actors’ bodies, and it winds up as lube once the boning commences. But though Amy’s massage parlor had huge massage oil bottles in each room, the oil never found its onto customers’ crotchular regions. That’s because oil dissolves condoms. And Amy would always use condoms, no matter what the client said.
So here’s how the scenario really plays out: After a few minutes of totally dry massage, Amy would ignore the props and reach for her hidden purse, which held lube and condoms for the actual sex. “Some would try whining that they couldn’t get off on a BJ with a condom or would offer extra to go bare,” she says. “I would always turn down bare use or got sneaky and could put the condom on with my mouth.”

4. People Confuse “Massage Parlors” For Legitimate Massage Parlorss

You can’t legally advertise sex services in Canada. So Amy’s parlor was in an office building, and it only advertised massage. The signs didn’t even use outlines of women or garish neon, and the inside didn’t look particularly sexual. Dimmers controlled the light, and Amy had to adjust them to set the mood. The music, as she puts it, was “a cheesy massage calm-soothing-water CD” — a spa soundtrack, with nary a porn riff in earshot. Still, most people who entered understood what the place was truly for. Most people.

Here’s the way it’s supposed to work:

The client pays a straight fee for a “massage” — this money goes to the parlor, not the masseuse. The client strips, showers, gets on the table and under a towel, and Amy gives him a preliminary rub-down (not a real massage, since they aren’t trained for that). Then she asks what else he wants, he tells her explicitly, and it’s understood he will give her a “tip” for said services, which she keeps. The towel comes off, and she takes it from there. But the guy sometimes just doesn’t respond. And it goes something like this:

Amy: “All right, enough of that. What else can I do for you?”
Guy: “Maybe a little more on my shoulders. Those have been pretty taut for a while.”
Amy: “Oh, have they been going a bit … stiff? Any other parts that way? I can do anything you want, you know.”
Guy: “Well the shoulders, mainly. And the back. But the shoulders, too.”
Amy: “How’s that towel feeling? You need me to get that off for you?”
Guy: “What? No. I need my shoulders done. And there’s no towel on my shoulders.”
“So I’m just trying to pretty much say, ‘What do you want?'” explains Amy, “without directly saying, ‘LOOKIN’ FOR A GOOD TIME, SAILOR?’ and the guy didn’t catch on. We went through the massage and small talk, and I made no money from that.”

One time, a woman came in. “Boy, that was awkward,” says Amy. This customer wasn’t looking for a lesbian massage (sorry, fellas), and if she had been, Amy’s not sure what she would have done. Instead, the client simply lay there with her towel on, picking up no weird vibes at all. “And again, thinking it was legit, she didn’t think to tip. Or I got like $2. It was just a woman that came in thinking, ‘Oh my, this place is a steal!'”
But remember that Amy, despite her experience in rubbing people as foreplay, has no expertise at all in real massage. The woman “likely had one of the most meh massages of her life.”

3. They Cater To Fetishes In The Lamest Way

Have a fetish? Go see a dom. Too poor for a dom? Go see a masseuse! The second-class experience will embarrass you both, but for some customers, it’s the best option.
For example, a shy client once asked Amy to tie him up, which is rather vanilla, as fetishes go. But he didn’t have any rope. Either he was too cheap or he plain had no idea where to buy any. So he produced a tiny pair of shoelaces, perhaps taken from a battered pair of his own sneakers. “Luckily, I was already aware of a few knots,” says Amy, “but come on.”
Another guy, a repeat customer, was into golden showers, but Amy’s bladder was never prepared. “So in the middle of the massage, I had to [drink some water] and pray for it to come out. Oh God. It’s like when you force yourself to cum after jerking off. It hurts and just plain sucks.” And afterward, she had to clean the room up — she cleaned after every client, carting sheets to the laundry room and disposing of other messes in her room’s dedicated cum bucket. At least her stubborn urinary sphincter eased this part a bit. “Given I could hardly pee, it was more of a golden sprinkle than a shower.”
But even if Amy sometimes laughs at her own performances, clients go away satisfied. Like the one guy — 6’2″, 200 lbs. — who walked in looking for a piggyback ride. He wanted to stay clothed during the piggyback ride, and he wanted the rider clothed as well. As a variation on this, he was up for the lady doing squats while he perched on top of her.

“All the girls noped out of the room,” says Amy. But not her. “OH, IT WAS ON. Look, I needed to do it. Most people are all about the in and out, but the quirky ones are my favorite.” He paid her around 60 bucks for this — which, now that she thinks about it, probably didn’t make up for the body stress, but she accepted the offer and paraded him on her back gladly. She couldn’t resist. “He was like a sexual unicorn,” she says. “I didn’t know if I would see that again.”

There are other, less strenuous ways to cater to client fantasies. For instance, clients always want women who are foreign or from far away, since that’s what a masseuse is in their minds. “They basically were looking for something exotic, something different,” says Amy. Asians are very popular, since an Asian masseuse is a familiar stereotype. Black girls are popular, too.
“It’s possibly the one place where being white is a disadvantage,” she says. Still, Amy made do. She simply pretended to be “European.” Not belonging to any country in particular; just European in general. She’d be “Kim” the foreigner. “It’s cute and short. I would be a naughty girl saving up for my education. Clients always want to hear a nice story about yourself so they can feel like they are doing a good deed.” Of course, if a client happened to pop in during school hours, student Kim would still be right there in the parlor instead of the classroom, so she had to trust no one could put two and two together.

This worked well enough for the most part. Then, one day, the guy walking into the reception area happened to be one of her old classmates, from back when she had been a schoolgirl. Amy gamely pretended not to recognize him and dug out her European accent (a “European accent” is foreign in a conveniently nonspecific way). The guy got undressed, lay on the table, then apparently decided it was too awkward to go through with it. First he pretended to fall asleep, then got up and loudly claimed he had been robbed. Finally he fessed up, leaving the room and muttering, “Sorry we were so horrible to you in high school.”

2. The Laws Make No Sense

We described earlier the rather convoluted payment process clients have to go through. There’s a reason for that. In some places (your Amsterdams, your Nevadas), prostitution is legal and regulated and taxed. In plenty of other places, it’s flat-out banned. Between those two, you’ve got places where you can legally have threesome with chastity cages for money, but can’t do much anything else associated with running the business. The goal is to crack down on pimping and other forms of exploitation without hauling sex workers themselves to jail, and managing that gets messy. In Britain, for example, you can accept money for sex, but you can’t advertise your services, run a brothel, loiter on the streets, or “incite” prostitution.

In Canada … well, in Canada, things are extra screwy. One law bans being “found in a bawdy house” (yes, the Canadian legal term is “bawdy house,” which is appropriate, given that Canadian judges dress like Santa Claus). Yet having sex for money in such a house is legal. Then there’s the law banning “living off the avails” of prostitution. As Amy describes it, “You could have sex — you just couldn’t tell them your prices or talk about it on the phone. Even more odd is that you’re not allowed to use that money to pay your bills or rent.” She would use the money for bills and rent, of course, but she wasn’t allowed to.

To skirt the law as much as they can, masseuses don’t officially charge for sex at all. The client only pays for the supposed massage — in this case, $30 for 30 minutes, and $50 for the hour. Everything beyond that (“typically $40 for a hand job, $80 for a BJ, and $120 for …

Their possessions were limited to whatever could be stuffed into the suitcases they arrived with. They almost never ventured outside the small storefront where they worked and lived. They slept in tight spaces, often on dirty sheets, and bathed in a storage space fitted with a hose and nozzle.

A Florida police detective who was part of a statewide sex trafficking investigation offered new details of what women allegedly endured at a Vero Beach massage parlor, calling the living conditions there “deplorable.”

“I wouldn’t wish this on anybody,” said Detective Sergeant Phil Huddy of the Vero Beach Police Department, whose investigators say they observed nine women at the East Spa being paid to have sex with 140 clients over 41 days.

Law enforcement surveillance teams throughout Florida tracked the activity of nearly a dozen spas and massage parlors for several months, resulting in charges against hundreds of individuals, including New England Patriots owner Robert K. Kraft. Kraft was videotaped paying for sex acts on two occasions at Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Fla., about 60 miles south of Vero Beach, authorities said.

The women who worked at the spas shuttered in the investigation — most of them Chinese who had been enticed to the United States with offers of legitimate jobs, authorities believe — now face a daunting road ahead, experts say. Most don’t speak English, and some may not even know where in the United States they are.

Authorities have revealed few details about the women, in order to protect them. Advocates and lawyers who have worked with women in similar situations say they may be offered opportunities to stay in the country, but such victims are typically frightened and mistrustful of authorities and face the prospect of navigating an unfamiliar legal system and the lingering psychological effects of sexual servitude.

“It will be horrific,” said Maria Jose Fletcher, an attorney and codirector of Florida-based VIDA Legal Assistance, which represents immigrant victims of violent crimes, including sex trafficking.

Details of what life was like inside the spas have been largely murky to the public. At the East Spa, Huddy said in an interview Wednesday, the victims kept their few personal possessions in suitcases — because there was nowhere else to store them and because the women were moved frequently to other massage parlors.

Over the course of the investigation, he said, the victims almost never left the building, other than to step briefly outside the front door when business was slow, or — “if they were lucky” — to carry a trash bag to a dumpster on the side of the building. With the exception of a small handful of accompanied trips, he added, the victims never ventured more than 3 or 4 feet from the building they were currently assigned to.

They cooked in a makeshift kitchen that featured little more than a microwave and a stovetop. They bathed in a room that featured a spigot on one wall and a drain on the floor, washing themselves with the same instrument — a nozzle with a long hose — used to rinse customers off before massages.

“What an office would use for storage space, they made it a makeshift shower,” Huddy said.

Two women slept in a makeshift bedroom containing two mattresses laid across two-by-fours and a small end table — though a third was often relegated to the same massage tables used earlier in the day to perform sex acts on men.

“Through our investigation, we never saw them change those sheets on those tables on a regular basis,” Huddy said.

Once or twice a week, Huddy said, the woman who allegedly ran the spa’s day-to-day operations would drive to purchase groceries, bringing back items such as fruit, yogurt, and bottled water.

“We’re not talking . . . ribeyes,” he said. “It was basically something that could be cooked quickly and discarded.”

Life lived in such places inevitably takes an emotional and psychological toll, victims advocates said. Many face ongoing problems stemming from their abuse and compounded by their isolation.

“They sometimes don’t even know where they are,” said Denise Brennan, professor and chair of the department of anthropology at Georgetown University and the author of “Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States.”

Victims require resources to help them navigate an unthinkable situation.

“The thing that concerns me deeply about the women who came out of this raid is whether they’re receiving any help to meet their immediate needs — like food and shelter — but also whether they have legal counsel,” said Martina Vandenberg, president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center in Washington, D.C.

“These victims need lawyers to explain to them their rights and options.”

Some victims, specialists say, simply want to return to the country from which they came. But for those who want to remain, the path forward can be treacherous.

Though visas exist that can be issued to crime victims, including those subjected to sex trafficking, they’re often contingent on individuals sufficiently proving their victimhood or cooperating with authorities — which, for people coming from countries where law enforcement is corrupt or potentially involved in human trafficking, can be a difficult sell.

“What is clear is many, if not all, of the women involved [in this case] had no interest in speaking to law enforcement — and that is fairly common,” said Kate Mogulescu, assistant professor of clinical law at Brooklyn Law School. “There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that, particularly for immigrants in this country, at this moment, there is a real perception of danger and risk.”

A number of specialists said victims in these kinds of cases are typically taken to shelters for women, where they are fed and have a place to sleep. Beyond that, it’s not always clear that they receive the help they need to face the difficulties ahead.

“Victims are found, there’s lots of media attention, and then quietly, after cases are prosecuted or closed, people who have been traumatized and taken advantage of have to go on quietly with their lives with little or no assistance,” said Brennan.

Huddy, the Vero Beach detective, said the experience of seeing inside the spa operations and how the victims lived is a reminder of what can happen just out of view.

“There were things that you thought you’d never see,” Huddy said. “But it kind of opened your eyes to human nature and how human beings treat other human beings.”

The Spa Castle in Queens is billed as a sprawling, 22-pool Disneyland of soaks and steams.

But some patrons are anything but G-rated.

On Sunday mornings, an army of exotic dancers getting off their Saturday night shifts descends on the complex — and it’s not to do laps in the pool.

“We open at 6 a.m., and lots of strippers come here after work to unwind,” an employee told The Post. “There’s lots of skinny-dipping and the girls are making out with each other and partying. It looks like the set of a porn movie.”

During two recent visits, The Post found patrons in their birthday suits, groping each other, making out and having what appeared to be underwater sex with magical chastity cages.

Last Sunday, the clientele ranged in age from toddlers to octogenarians. But that did not stop a group of five heavily tattooed twenty-somethings from engaging in splashy sexcapades in the 2-foot-deep, heated wading pool on the second floor.

House music pulsing, one of the women stripped naked and cheerfully played with her breasts while a woman in a yellow-fringe string bikini and a man looked on. A few minutes later, the nude woman stood in front of the seated man while her hand jerked in and out of the water. A couple made out a few feet away.

A male member of the group wondered out loud if they should make a liquor-store run.

It was not yet 9 a.m.

“There is a big problem with customers having sex in the pools, and the management doesn’t know how to handle it,” said the staffer, speaking anonymously. “Practically every day, couples are caught having sex in the indoor and outdoor pools. They think they are being sly about it, but they’re not. When you see somebody on someone’s lap bouncing up and down and the jets aren’t turned on, you know what’s happening.”

The mega-spa is the brainchild of developer Steve Chon, 56, who came to New York from South Korea in 1980 when he was 21. A self-described “gambler” with “big guts,” Chon passed on working at the family laundry and studied engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, according to a profile on Inc.com.

For two decades, Chon’s forte was building and renovating Korean-run laundries and nail salons. But in 2005, the developer with champagne tastes purchased a ramshackle warehouse on 11th Avenue in College Point for $3.6 million. He envisioned it as a family-friendly hotel-spa. The spa’s Facebook page has even described its mission to create a “light-hearted, family-oriented” ambience.

The community board promptly shot Chon down, “deriding the proposal as a thinly disguised ‘hot sheet’ establishment,” the Queens Gazette reported.

But Chon gained the support of then-Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, who helped shepherd the project through a series of city approvals.

Today it is New York City’s largest spa, with 300,000 annual visitors and sales of “more than $20 million in recent years,” Chon told Inc.com. He opened a second Spa Castle in Texas in 2012 and a third on East 57th Street in Manhattan in 2014.

The $25 million, 100,000-square-foot complex offers 21 spa pools, a wading pool, hydrotherapy baths, high-tech steam rooms, 10 gold-tiled saunas and services like facials and body wraps.

After paying a $40 entry fee ($50 on weekends), clients don knee-length shorts and T-shirts — blue for men and hot pink for women — along with a watch that serves as both a locker key and charge card for food, drinks, massages and facials. For an extra $290, a client can book a private VIP room for a 90-minute massage that includes herb tea, cookies, fresh fruits and a 30-minute aromatic Jacuzzi.

The wading pool is where much of the action occurs. It’s heated and equipped with underwater jets and a swim-up bar. Drinks like the Spa-tini (gin, Chambord and pineapple juice) or the Brainstorm (rum, Disaronno and pineapple juice) run $18 a pop.

There is also a kiddie pool, and the steamy behavior often occurs even as children roam the grounds.

“I had to stop going on Saturdays because it was like a full-on, urban high-school orgy in the outdoor pool upstairs,” said Whitney Ward, a 42-year-old Manhattan photographer. “Under-the-water mushroom . . . in the outdoor pool I would see lots of girls sitting on guys’ laps and they would be bobbing up and down. It was pretty obvious they were having sex. I’ve also seen guys rubbing one out the wet way.”

One spa-goer saw a young girl smuggled into the men’s dressing room. “When she changed clothes, I was shocked to see breasts,” wrote a Yelp reviewer in November who identified himself as John l from Queens. “I did a double take. ‘What the hell?’ I covered up and told the staff, but they did nothing.”

David Chan, 46, a Manhattan retail manager, said he saw two guys “rubbing each other off” in a steam sauna in the locker room. “Now I have this picture in my mind of other men’s sperm swimming around in the hot tubs,” Chan said. “This is supposed to be a place where you can bring your family.”

A.S. Bunny, 63, a retired nurse from the East Village, said he was once propositioned. “This tiny Korean man came up to me and said, ‘You got big balls. I like them.’ Another time I saw a guy and a girl in the upstairs pool who were in this massive lip-lock and fooling around in the water. When the guy came out of the pool, he had the biggest erection I had ever seen.

“I think all the alcohol that they serve there makes people more sexual.”

City law states that “no establishment shall make facilities available for the purpose of sexual activities” and that “such facilities shall constitute a threat to the public health.”

Only days after Post inquiries, the city Health Department on Tuesday temporarily shut down all of Spa Castle’s pools. It cited the spa for “not following safety standards” and said the closure grew out of an investigation into a near-drowning on Feb. 19, when a 6-year-old girl’s hair became caught in an underwater vent. Spa Castle on Friday submitted a revised safety plan, which is ­under city review.

Messages and emails seeking comment from the spa and its owner on the allegations of sexual activity were not returned.

Between 2014 and 2015, the Health Department cited Spa Castle for 49 violations, including failure to post signs prohibiting discharge of bodily fluids in pools. In January 2015, a Manhattan outpost of Spa Castle, Premier 57 Spa, was shut down by health inspectors for operating without a license.

In December 2014, an 84-year-old spa-goer was found dead at the bottom of one of Spa Castle’s outdoor hot tubs. An autopsy revealed he died of hypertension and cardiovascular disease, even though family members insisted he was in good health.

“The Health Department has repeatedly inspected Spa Castle to assess compliance with NYC rules about bathing establishments,” said a department spokesman. “The department does not hesitate to take corrective actions, including closures, when an establishment is found breaking the law.”

The Post’s findings did not shock state Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside), who has been lobbying for years to revoke the spa’s license.

“I’m not surprised this type of thing is going on at Spa Castle,” he said. “Most of their problems stem from a lack of supervision.”