The State of Sex

Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland

Barbara Brents, Crystal Jackson, Kathryn Hausbeck, Barbara G. Brents, Crystal A. Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415929479
• eBook ISBN: 9781135280222
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The State of Sex is a study of Nevada's brothels that situates the nation's only legal brothel industry in the political economy of contemporary tourism. Nevada is part of the "new American heartland," as its pastimes, people, and politics have become more central to the nation. The rise of a service and leisure economy over the past sixty years has propelled sexuality into the heart of contemporary markets. Yet, neoliberal laws in the United States promote business but limit sexual commerce.

How have Nevada's legal brothels survived, while the rest of the country criminalizes prostitution? How do brothels operate? Who works in them? This book brings social theory on globalizing economies, politics, leisure consumption, and emotional labor in interactive service work together with research on contemporary prostitution and sexual commerce. The authors employ an innovative, multi-method sociological approach, combining historical analysis of how the brothels came to be with over a decade's worth of ethnographic research on the current state of the industry.

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INTRODUCTION

The State of Sex

Let’s talk about gaming, 24-hour availability of liquor, quickie divorces, all the things we do here in Nevada. We have been very successful at this because we recognize one overriding issue, and that is that one man’s morality is another man’s pleasure … Now because of my background in tourism, I’ve been asked many times over the years, by hotel owners, business people, even elected officials, “What can we do here in Ely to bring more tourism in?” And that question has only really one answer. It doesn’t matter who’s asking it, or where they’re from. And that is you have to offer people something that they can’t get at home.

Phil, Ely citizen, at a public hearing on their legal brothels

For years, brothel prostitution has been Nevada’s dirty little not-so-secret secret. Nevada is the only place in the United States with legal prostitution.¹ Nevada is also one of the top tourist destinations in the world, with an economy dependent on the millions of tourists who come into the state to indulge in legalized gambling.² In a country where prostitution is criminal everywhere else, Nevada officials cringe every time the press mentions the state’s legal brothels. Legal brothels operate in only ten rural counties, not in the large resort cities of Reno and Las Vegas. Nevada’s brothels look nothing like the ultra-modern, upscale strip clubs, adult nightclubs, or ultra lounges in the big city, chic, mega casinos. At most, around 500 women work in 25 to 30 legal brothels scattered throughout the state in small towns and along remote highways.³ The locals staunchly defend the existence of their brothels, so much so that despite state level animosity, in the past ten years no state legislator has dared try to shut down the industry.

Why are these brothels still there? On the face of it, the answer is clear. Nevada built a tourist industry on turning deviance into leisure. Nevada had legal gambling before any other state in the United States. From that they built some of the largest resorts in the world, exploiting the seemingly ever-growing appetite for fantasy, indulgence, sun, and sin. Amid the slot-machines and roulette tables, scantily clad cocktail waitresses and topless showgirls tantalize tourists. Outside, pictures of strippers are splayed across billboards, and hawkers hand out free fliers filled with color photos of mostly nude women. Called a “triumph of globalized postindustrial capitalism,” Nevada’s resort cities, Reno and Las Vegas, excel in packaging glamor, spectacle, fantasy, adventure, and sexuality.⁴ Las Vegas is particularly successful, luring 37 million visitors a year, with the promise that you can “be anyone you want to be” and “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”⁵ The state’s tourism thrives on selling an image of boundless sexual possibilities. Legal prostitution seems to be an added bonus.

Despite this, the casino industry prefers to market just the allure of sex and has always opposed the state’s legal brothels. State and tourist industry leaders feel they walk a fine line between constantly shifting consumer tastes for and against sin and deviance. Sex as a commodity exposes people’s worry that private intimacies in a public market can harm human relationships.⁶ We associate a host of images with prostitution—crime, women’s exploitation, immorality, and disease. In the face of this, it is not that obvious why these brothels persist.

Yet the symbolic importance of Nevada’s legal brothels keeps growing, underscored by the popularity of an ongoing series of documentaries by HBO TV, Cathouse, about one legal brothel, the Moonlite Bunny Ranch outside of Reno. The mayor of Las Vegas, the largest city in Nevada, keeps trying to stay ahead of the changing market for sin and discusses legalizing a red light district downtown. An executive from the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino came out publicly in favor of some form of legal prostitution in Las Vegas. As criminalizing prostitution does not seem to slow the trade in the urban areas, both politicians and resort leaders privately wonder if some form of legal prostitution might not be a good thing.

The rising importance of tourism and sexual commerce is all part of broader social changes happening in a post-industrial consumer economy. Across the globe the sex industry comprises an ever-larger portion of a rapidly expanding tourist industry. In an economy with widening income disparities, the wealthy and the not so wealthy seek escape and adventure in their leisure time, and the poor find jobs providing it. This has meant more sexual consumption, from strip clubs to sex toys to digital porn beamed to a cell phone. Men remain the major consumers, but women are the fastest-growing consumer segment of the adult industry.⁷ Newspapers and magazines report on the numerous ways the sex industry is going from seedy to stylish—Hustler magazine has a storefront on Sunset Drive in Hollywood, and porn stars like Jenna Jameson are reaching superstardom. The right to choose one’s pleasure competes with fundamentalist religion to dominate the morality of the age. Concerns about an increase in trafficking, political sex scandals, debates about the freedom of women working in the sex industry, and the ever-constant debates about morality continue to fuel battles over the place of the sale of intimacy and sexuality in consumer culture.

No state in the United States has been as successful at capitalizing on these social changes as the state of Nevada. Between 1997 and 2007, Nevada has grown faster than any other state in the U.S., drawing rural Midwesterners, urban Californians, and immigrants from Asia and Latin America to cheap housing, plentiful jobs, and business opportunities that spin off its success as a global tourist destination.⁸ This state of sex, Nevada, is thus an ideal place to start looking at the conditions of commercial sex today. Although sex has been bought and sold for centuries, something potentially different is happening in today’s consumer society. What can Nevada, one of the fastest-growing states in the country, the epitome of a tourist leisure economy, and the only experiment in legalized prostitution in arguably the most advanced industrialized nation in the world, reveal about sexual commerce? What does prostitution look like when it is legal? How do broader social inequalities of gender, class, and race affect brothel prostitution? Do the particular political, historical, and social circumstances in which prostitution occurs influence what prostitution ultimately is? What can we learn from Nevada about how private intimacy in a public marketplace affects human relationships? To answer these questions, we examine the basic social relations and social institutions that characterize sexual commerce in Nevada’s legal brothels—the political and economic settings, its business organization and labor strategies, and the people who work in it.

MAPPING THE TERRAIN OF NEVADA’S BROTHELS

While we like to think of Nevada’s rural brothels as remnants of the Old West, the reality is much more complex. Nevada’s small desert towns appear as American as apple pie—homes with picket fences, small businesses, churches, schools, and gas stations clustered along a main street. For those people who know just where to go, brothels are found in nondescript buildings, houses, or trailers, identified by the smallest of signs naming the Stardust, Mona’s, or the Shady Lady Ranch. The idea of sex for hire seems out of place on streets that feel more like a set from the 1960s Andy Griffith Show than postmodern twenty-first-century communities.

Yet Nevada’s brothels exist in what some argue is currently one of the most dynamic and dramatically changing regions of the country. Nevada is a part of what a Brookings Institution study calls the “New American Heartland” as its economy, people, and politics are becoming more central to the nation.⁹ In contrast to its history in Old West industries like resource extraction, the entire Intermountain West has seen surprising population and employment growth in the past 20 years, spearheaded by a global economy no longer based on natural resources, but on “traded” industries—businesses that sell products or services to other regions and countries.¹⁰ These include hospitality and tourism, as well as information technology, and knowledge creation. Nevada’s transformation to a mature service economy has been nothing short of phenomenal. The availability of jobs in the tourism industry has spurred the fastest-growing population growth in the country.¹¹ People have poured into the West from the original Sunbelt states of California, Texas, and Florida. And these populations have also become much more diverse: the foreign-born population in the region has quadrupled since the 1970s, mostly with immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries, but also from Asia and Europe. The Brookings Institution called Las Vegas the most important face-to-face business-networking venue in the country thanks to its convention business. The Brookings Institution study concludes: “Contrary to its current marketing slogan, what happens in Las Vegas often does not stay there, but instead influences global commerce.”¹² These dynamics have also impacted the rural regions of the state.

This dynamism extends to the state’s politics. The politics behind this growth is also representative of trends in the rest of the United States. The West has been known for its libertarian political culture since the turn of the century, an opposition to central government, and a belief in the rights of individuals to make their own personal and economic decisions. Nevada politicians have always generally encouraged private enterprise over social support, imposing few restrictions on businesses. Indeed the politics that allowed brothels to exist well into the twentieth century and beyond World War II were quintessentially libertarian. However, since the 1970s, political institutions across the globe, not just the American West, have embraced neoliberal economic policies supporting free markets, decentralized and small government institutions, low public spending, and low taxes. This kind of political economy has encouraged a proliferation of a wide range of businesses to meet market demands, including sex-related businesses.

While neoliberal economics is akin to libertarianism, Western libertarianism has an awkward relationship with socially conservative “values” politics. Where economic neoliberalism sets the sex industry free, social conservatism seeks to shut it down. Nevada has a history of fighting attempts by the rest of the nation to regulate its morals, be it gambling or sex. Today’s culture wars fuel a resurgence of anti-prostitution, anti-sex industry politics in many places in the world. This resurgence is often led by the same conservative groups who espouse free market business policies. However, in Nevada, the new middle America, neoliberal opposition to central government and a belief in individual free choice extends to morals regulations. Western libertarianism is inflamed by the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of government attempts to “shove their values down other people’s throats.”¹³ Some analysts argue that this reflects a “market morality,” a value system emphasizing the freedom to choose one’s lifestyle via consumption patterns inherent to consumer culture. Seen in this light, Nevada’s social libertarianism portended current trends.

Nevada’s geography has played a major role in the politics, culture, and economy of the state and is important to understanding the brothel industry. Nevada has among the most densely populated cities as well as the most sparsely populated rural areas. Two cities anchor opposite ends of the state: the Las Vegas metropolitan area with more than two million people in the south, and the Reno area with just under 400,000 in the north as of 2008. Las Vegas and its surrounding area constitutes one of five Western “megapolitan” corridors, dense urban regions where a relatively large territory is linked by overlapping commuting and employment exchanges. The remainder of the state’s population is spread out across more than 100,000 square miles. Most of the rural counties have fewer than six persons per square mile on average, compared to the national average of 79.6 persons per square mile. In fact, seven counties average approximately one person per square mile.¹⁴

Nevada’s geography is fairly typical of the dry mountainous western United States. The eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range cradle the Reno/Carson City metropolitan area in the north. Las Vegas and southern Nevada are part of the Mojave Desert and receive less than five inches of rainfall a year on average. Much of Nevada is literally the dry, cracked remains of a giant mud puddle. Low desert basins are broken by fault lines along the edges where the bedrock is pushed up into mountain ranges. Northern Nevada is higher and cooler than southern Nevada; it gets more rain, and sustains some livestock grazing, irrigated pastures, and agriculture. While resource extraction is no longer Nevada’s main industry, mining is still important for many rural towns. One of the world’s most productive gold mines is in northern Nevada, near Elko and Carlin. A chunk of land the size of Rhode Island in the south-central part of the state houses the nation’s nuclear testing range. Indeed, more than 85 percent of Nevada’s land is federally owned, either by the Bureau of Land Management, which leases the land to ranchers, farmers, and mining interests, or by defense and military installations.¹⁵ Also, the intermittent mountain ranges sustain outdoor recreation.

Brothels emerged in the mining towns of the mid- to late 1800s, but their persistence into the twenty-first century is directly related to the growth of tourism. The dramatic population growth in the past 30 years has had a profound effect on the industry. Not surprisingly, the largest brothels are clustered as close as they can get to the boundaries of the counties containing the biggest resort cities. In the past 20 years these brothels have become more suburban than rural. Suburban brothels are the biggest houses, with up to 80 women contracted at any given time, and are often the most profitable. About an hour’s drive from Las Vegas, the Chicken Ranch and The Resort and Spa at Sheri’s Ranch skirt the township of Pahrump in Nye County, a rural community that has seen its population grow 321 percent between 1990 and 2006.¹⁶ The two brothels are out on Homestead Road, once a dirt road that at one point was miles outside of town; now several housing developments creep closer. On the other side of Pahrump, nearer Amargosa Valley, is Mabel’s Whorehouse and Cherry Patch II. About 20 minutes’ drive east of Reno along Interstate 80 there has been the Mustang Ranch (now the World Famous Mustang Ranch), the Old Bridge Ranch (closed in 2008) and the newer Wild Horse Ranch. An hour’s drive from Reno, just east of Carson City, are the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Miss Kitty’s (now the Love Ranch), the Kit Kat Ranch, and the Sagebrush. (See Appendix A map.)

The smaller rural brothels are located progressively further from the two main population centers. In the past 20 years, six rural brothels have operated beyond an hour’s drive up Highway 95, a mostly two-lane highway that links Las Vegas in the south to Reno in the north-west.¹⁷ The tiny southern Nevadan towns along this corridor survive from sporadic mining and some agriculture, but mainly from federal and military projects, and the tourism that the highways bring. Brothels in the southern part of the state are mostly in trailers located outside city limits. Located along the highway, Angel’s Ladies, which closed in 2007, sits three miles outside of Beatty (two hours from Las Vegas); the Shady Lady Ranch is a half hour north of Beatty. Just under a four-hour drive from Las Vegas, and five hours from Reno, are the Cottontail Ranch at Lida Junction and Billie’s Day and Night and Bobbie’s Buckeye Bar in Tonopah, though these are now closed.

In the northwest part of the state, still along Highway 95 but closer to Reno, a number of brothels have existed, though all but one are now closed. About three hours south of Reno, the Wild Kat Ranch remains open in Mina but the Playmate Ranch in Hawthorne is currently closed. The Lazy B Ranch and Salt Well’s Villa near Fallon and under two hours from Reno are also closed. These brothels are often nondescript, with little more than a sign and a few cars in a gravel parking lot (large enough for semi-trucks to pull in). These brothels, for ...

Table of contents

• CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES SERIES
• CONTENTS
• SERIES FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 CONTEXTS OF SEXUAL COMMERCE
• 3 THE MAKING OF NEVADA PROSTITUTION
• 4 THE BUSINESS OF SELLING SEX
• 5 PATHS TO BROTHEL WORK
• 6 BROTHEL LABOR: MAKING FANTASIES AT WORK
• 7 CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A Nevada Brothel Guide
• APPENDIX B
• APPENDIX C Sex Workers Interviewed
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX