Ho Man! I Love Holistic!

The City of Toronto licenses more than 200 brothels under the banner of holistic health centres, a Toronto Star investigation has found.

Licensed to offer alternative health treatments such as shiatsu, reflexology and aromatherapy, about three-quarters of the city's holistic centres operate as sex dens.

Link.

We suspect there's a fascinating analysis in this story, one dealing with the Cartesian mind-body split. The balance between material and spiritual is difficult to achieve, but it's best achieved with a sacramental view of creation. When the sacramental view is lost, mental distortions creep in, like the New Age therapies that lace the holistic practices. The result is some form of physical perversion. Here, prostitution.

Why else do sex workers gravitate toward holistic businesses? It's not just Toronto, by the way. Cities throughout the U.S. have experienced a similar thing with massage parlors. All that rubbing and groping, often in the name of some sort of higher spiritual and physical purpose? It seems inevitable that some sort of problem will "pop up."