Images are the brood of desire. – George Eliot
What seems like a straightforward news article can often reveal hidden depths when examined critically by an informed mind; the biases, knowledge gaps and outright lies of both the author and the interviewees then stand out in sharp relief, like a computer-enhanced photo of the Earth taken from a satellite. Many of you probably saw this item about the decline of Nevada brothels, but let’s apply some image enhancement to the picture:
…As state legislators ponder levying an 8% sales tax on brothels and other live entertainment, the director of the Nevada Brothel Association says that a bad economy and an abundance of illegal prostitutes is already killing off the business. “When I started as the lobbyist for the industry in 1985, we had 37 brothels in the state,” [said] George Flint…“Now we have just 18, and 12 to 14 of them are not doing very well”…Since the recession…many women [have gone] into business for themselves so as to avoid handing over 50 percent of their fee to brothel owners.
There’s so much more to see in this short paragraph than meets the uninformed and uncritical eye; let’s take it in order of appearance. First, it’s interesting that brothel owners are complaining about plans to tax them when they themselves agitated in favor of it for years, because they recognize that once a government becomes used to income from an industry it will generally work to build up that industry in order to increase revenues. So I suspect Flint’s complaint is just poor-mouthing intended to set up some request for concessions to the brothel industry or a crackdown on independent operators; despite his claim that it’s the economy which has hurt the brothels, the fact of the matter is that it’s a combination of the internet and women’s social progress. Since 1985, the average American woman’s opportunity cost has risen due to increased education and removal of impediments to employment, and it has been demonstrated that women of higher opportunity cost prefer to work illegally rather than submitting to the relatively exploitative conditions in Nevada brothels. The internet then made it much easier for women to make that choice, and so they have; only a hopeless lawhead could fail to understand that arbitrary “legality” is very far down the list of factors used by the typical woman when considering her means of survival.
As a result…prices for sex have fallen. “Instead of paying $400…these guys can now go out and get the same service for a third of the money,” Flint said.
This is an outright lie, as any man who has ever hired an escort in Vegas will tell you. I don’t know if even the streetwalkers there can be hired for $130, much less an escort, and to pretend that’s the “same service” one receives from a brothel is more like something one might expect to hear from a prohibitionist (in close proximity to phrases like “selling her body” and “prostituted woman”).
State officials estimate that there are some 30,000 sex workers just in Las Vegas…“Look in the phone book, there are what, 100 pages for nude dancers who’ll come to your hotel room?” Flint said. “The big hotels have their own girls. The strip clubs have upstairs rooms. You have a variety of different levels of prostitution in Vegas.” With those many layers, the city has no shortage of problems, from violent pimps to the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV. “Since 1987, we’ve never had a single woman test positive for HIV who worked in a brothel,” Flint said.
I probably don’t need to remind you that whores are not a significant vector for any STI anywhere in the developed world, but you may not realize that the invasive, degrading weekly disease checks required by Nevada law are one of the reasons so many women prefer to work independently or for escort service owners who treat them like adults capable of taking care of their own health. I’ve also previously addressed the “violent pimp” propaganda and explained how politicians and brothel owners spread it in order to maintain public support for the status quo, but of course that’s not how they spin it:
A PPP poll conducted in 2012 found that 66% of Nevada residents believed that brothels should be legal across the state. Few politicians, however, have shown the political will to take on the issue. “My constituents are not ready for it,” former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman…[said] in 2011. “They are always ready to have a good discussion because they are smart people, but they are not ready to legalize prostitution because they have moral objections.”
We’ll pause for a few moments here so everyone can finish laughing at the idea that the majority of Las Vegas residents have “moral objections” to vice businesses, and to give y’all time to clean the coffee off of your monitor screens.
Barring a sudden economic turnaround or what he sees as an unlikely political awakening, Flint sees continued trouble for the brothel industry. “I’m an optimistic guy, but I’m not optimistic that this business will bounce back very quickly,” Flint said.
This is the only wholly truthful statement Flint made in the whole article. As an officially-sanctioned but ersatz replacement for escorts, the brothel industry is doomed; its only hope is gentrification, the transformation of brothels into attractive resorts to which men can take their friends, clients or open-minded wives, places which can offer an experience not available in a hotel room or even a typical incall. When in the 1970s and ‘80s strip clubs went from being seedy dives to upscale gentlemen’s clubs, everyone benefitted except the prohibitionists (who had to invent the myth of “negative secondary effects” to shore up their “sin and degradation” catechism); the same thing will happen as Americans lose their ignorance-spawned fear of bordellos. Here’s some free advice, Nevada brothel owners: stop getting in bed with the prohibitionists and instead work toward decriminalization and eradicating stigma. Then you can invest in turning your businesses into showplaces and possibly even franchise operations, and you’ll make more money than you ever did catering to guys who were just too scared to call “illegal” hookers to come to them.
I would not assume that George Flint speaks for the brothel owners. I seem to recall the title of “director of the Nevada Brothel Association” is self proclaimed.
People are already encouraged to take their friends and spouses to the Bunny Ranch. Yes, women do go there, sometimes with their partners, sometimes with other women friends, and sometimes alone.
I think brothels and, to a lesser extent, massage parlors will always be the first (only?) sex work venues to get in bed with government in this way; their high upfront capital costs would make them bad investment in a world where the government can quickly turn prohibitionist. Other modalities have lower upfront costs, and can simply skirt the law more easily in any case.
Message seems pretty clear:
Hey, government guys. We are paying good money for a monopoly. But you aren’t holding up your end of the deal by shutting down our competition. And now you want to raise the price for this supposed monopoly?
Well – in a world where prostitution has been decriminalized across the board – would brothels really survive in that universe?
I don’t think so. The business model for brothels is terrible – and the only way it works is in a prohibitionist regime.
Do the girls really give up 50% of their “take”? That’s kinda bullshit. I would never see an escort that’s being exploited like that.
Not in their current form.
But much like upscale salons with booth rental, they could exist in a different way.
Restaurants exist despite all the delivery services, TV dinners, home-cooked meals, and vending machines. Movie theaters are still around, Netflix and all. People still go out to sporting events in person, even with TV and all-sports networks. Sometimes, you want to go out for an evening.
I do believe that brothels can survive, no matter how many legal escorts there are out there. But they will have to be something more than “at least it’s legal.” They will have to provide the experience of “going out.”
Hmm, for $130, I expect her to be behind a thick piece of glass and me with some Vaseline and a box of tissues. Oh, and I expect I’ll be paying it out 1 quarter at a time.
My impression of brothels in Florida is that the girls who work there who are any good also have their own Websites and use the incall location… as an incall location. Also, a lot of them stop working in those places if they find they can get a clientèle purely through other means that will support them. I suspect the main advantage of the illegal brothels in Florida is that’s they are up to date in their payments to various police benevolent funds, whereas women working on their own are more likely to be considered “Fair Game” (callback!).
I don’t have any inside knowledge that will tell me so. I did know one girl who told me she was fired from one because they accused her of taking customers back without writing it down, and she felt it necessary to explain to me that there was no way she would do that because “there’s a video camera right at the door.”
However, these places operate pretty openly, and ever so often we get a story about how a cop or his wife was arrested for pandering: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2013-01-23/news/fl-boca-prostitutes-20130123_1_local-prostitution-boca-raton-police-brazilian-woman
So paid off police is my working theory until I hear a better one. (Hopefully involving Alien Mind Control Rays, ala Men In Black.)
I’m confused. Early in your post, you decry brothel owners as trying to drive independent prostitutes out of business. At the end of your article you give brothel owners some pretty good advice: “stop getting in bed with the prohibitionists and instead work toward decriminalization and eradicating stigma. Then you can invest in turning your businesses into showplaces and possibly even franchise operations.” Well suppose brothel owners took your advice and succeeded. What’s to keep them from continuing trying to drive independent operators out of business?
Nothing at all, unless the whole crony system is abolished (which won’t happen under the current form of government). What I am hoping for is that a majority of brothel owners will eventually recognize that it’s better to compete fairly by providing features independent operators can’t, than to get in bed with a government that could turn against them at any time.
I agree that concentrating on providing features independent operators can’t (suites with themed playrooms catering to various tastes, etc., I guess, maybe some sort of corporate gloss making the prostitution seem more “wholesome”) is the right way for brothel owners to go. In the Old West days every town had a brothel and those that didn’t had independent operators making money from all those lonely farmers and cowhands. I can see the US returning to those days with a more slick, polished approach. But I am not sanguine about brothel owners being all that smart.
Okay I can see it here now – when you said “theme rooms”. I’ll never hire an independent when I’m Germany – I’ll always go to one of the FKK’s – which are nothing more than brothels.
The advantage of the FKK’s is that they’ll have, usually at least 30 completely naked women walking around the place. Everything is themed – all the rooms and they’re magnificent. Roman theme predominates most FKK’s (and I love that whole motif!). A man is a KING in an FKK – and gets treated as such. It’s a whole experience … a male Disneyland and there is no way for indies to compete with that .
Soooo … it could be done because it has been done. However, the Nevada Brothels are a far, sad cry from German FKK’s atm.
Some of the Florida ones actually do have theme rooms, believe it or not. (Or did, it’s been ages since I’ve been and that area, Drew Park, was targeted for gentrification.) Some others were just relatively clean rooms with sofas (never, ever beds… I guess that would be too obvious). Some were the crummiest dives you’ve ever been in and you feel like you need two showers when you leave.
Oh, and these are all lingerie modeling shops officially or executive body rub places (not massage, you need a license for that). (For some reason, the ones that advertised as private lingerie modeling always seemed to be nicer to me, but that may just have been my luck).
After a while though I just had girls back to my place, and then when I got roommates I got a frequent stay card at one of the local hotels.
kind of ironic how in most parts of the economy it is the Walmart’s running out the small time operators but here it is the opposite effect…
I ve just learned this morning that my part of an overall 8 minute length time-slot in a interview series broadcasted tonight about the impact of the German Prostitution law was cut off by the editor. Following reasons: my demand for decriminalisation is “too complicated” and they need nice images. We had the film shoot in the make-up room of the TV station because “I” cant offer a hotel room to visualise my place of work. This report has been postponed twice, prostitution not newsworthy and always a topic, the reporter told me. I answered yes, but with the difference that sex workers face a law reform and usually the media coverage in Germany is not about sex workers rights and demands, but mostly dedicated to scandalise, dehumanise, victimise sex workers or to provide image enhancement for managers. Not to forget to strenghten the conflation of sex work and trafficking. Legal frameworks were never discussed since ages but demands to prohibit prostitution and to introduce the so called Swedish model usally staged by celeb extremist feminists and some social workers, mostly employees of catholic organisations.
I hope the brothels survive. My attempts to find an independent have utterly failed. At the Bunny Ranch, I can spend time with intelligent, beautiful, fun, generous women. I don’t need references and nobody cares what I do for a living. Apparently, the independents have all the business they need with current clients. There is a need for providers for the rest of us.
It seems I’m not good enough for escorts, even if I somehow could afford them. Rather than argue the point, I’ll just accept this and, if I ever come into money, win a contest, sex stamps become a reality (yeah right), I’ll be looking for a brothel.