"Masseuse" replacing "masseur"?

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:11 AM -0400 10/4/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
>I keep hearing an annoying TV commercial aimed at women in which
>something is described as being "Dating-a-masseuse good!" Why would a
>supposedly-straight woman describe something as being as good as
>dating another woman? Has "masseur" fallen out of use? For me, it's
>ironic, because I'm old enough to remember when "masseur" was used for
>both men and women.

Me too.  But check out "male masseuse" on google:  537 hits.  Pales
in comparison to the 2,130,000 hits for "masseur" (including of
course both male-specific and underspecified/sex-unmarked
applications), not to mention the 1,740,000 hits for "masseuse" tout
court, but still not negligible, and I'm pretty sure "male masseuse"
will (as it were) come up not infrequently in the domain of
umliterature.

Larry

>  My WAG is that "masseuse" became popular as the
>so-called "massage with a happy ending," i.e. orgasm, became popular
>
>-Wilson Gray