Sex and Stigma

Stories of Everyday Life in Nevada’s Legal Brothels

Sarah Jane Blithe, Anna Wiederhold Wolfe, Breanna Mohr

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781479820702
• eBook ISBN: 9781479847495
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

An intimate and original look at the lives of Nevada's legal sex workers through the voices of current and former employees, brothel owners, madams, and local law enforcement

The state of Nevada is the only jurisdiction in the United States where prostitution is legal. Wrapped in moral judgments about sexual conduct and shrouded in titillating intrigue, stories about Nevada's legal brothels regularly steal headlines. The stigma and secrecy pervading sex work contribute to experiences of oppression and unfair labor practices for many legal prostitutes in Nevada. Sex and Stigma engages with stories of women living and working in these "hidden" organizations to interrogate issues related to labor rights, secrecy, privacy, and discrimination in the current legal brothel system.

Including interviews with current and former legal sex workers, brothel owners, madams, local police, and others, Sex and Stigma examines how widespread beliefs about the immorality of selling sexual services have influenced the history and laws of legal brothel prostitution. With unique access to a difficult-to-reach population, the authors privilege the voices of brothel workers throughout the book as they reflect on their struggles to engage in their communities, conduct business, maintain personal relationships, and transition out of the industry. Further, the authors examine how these brothels operate like other kinds of legal entities, and how individuals contend with balancing work and non-work commitments, navigate work place cultures, and handle managerial relationships. Sex and Stigma serves as a resource on the policies guiding legal prostitution in Nevada and provides an intimate look at the lived experiences of women performing sex work.

Part I

Brothel Prostitution in Theory and Law

Photo by Michelle

I think prostitution should be legalized because it could be regulated that way. . . . I think that with it being legal, you have to follow certain regulations, and I think that is very important. . . . The reason why girls like us come to brothels is because it is safe and legal and we go to the doctor and we don’t have the same things to worry about.

—Jennifer

Photo by Primrose

I am not planning on this to be my career, this is not what I am doing [laughing] forever. I don’t necessarily want people to find out right now just because of the stigma. Does it matter to me? No. Does it matter to everybody else? Yes.

—Primrose

1

Theories of Organizing, Secrecy, and Stigma

We’re supposed to stay under the sagebrush.

There’s a word in Nevada about if you’re a brothel, you better stay below the sagebrush. As long as you stay below those, you’re not gonna stir anybody up that’s gonna get after you.

The mentality was this: lay low in the sagebrush. We’ve got a legal business, just keep it quiet, and just make your money.

Three brothel owners, but one common dictate: stay out of sight and you won’t be bothered. State law and local ordinances push most of Nevada’s brothels into remote regions of the sagebrush-flecked hills, but even without these legal limitations, the stigma associated with sex work and the secrecy that pervades the industry make the idea of operating under the shadows of the sagebrush desirable for many owners, workers, and clients who would rather avoid the critical gaze of outsider scrutiny. However, not everyone finds the ideal of hiding appealing, as indicated by these brothel owners:

I’m not hiding anything. So I open the door to the media and I tell everybody what I’m doing. I’m out there. I’m very boisterous about it and they all said this guy will be the death of the business. The reality is by opening the doors and showing people, being transparent, it brings people like Diane Sawyer and Rita Cosby. Everybody is like, “Wait a minute. This isn’t what I expected.” It’s been a winning formula for me.

I’m a marketing guy. And so, am I gonna sponsor a major event or a baseball team? So, there’s two sides to that coin: one, marketing is great for our business to spread, but it also spreads the wealth and the goodwill and identifies or solidifies the fact that you are giving back to the community that’s giving to you. And so, it’s a double-edged sword.

These tensions between revelation and concealment are discussed at great length later in the book (see chapter 9), but this chapter presents important background information for understanding life in legal brothels by contextualizing this project within existing work on hidden organizations, dirty work, stigma, privacy, and secrecy. This chapter provides insight into the pervasive role of secrecy in shaping organizational practices, as well as how hidden organizations—and their stakeholders—function despite the stigma attached to their work. Finally, we draw out connections between organizational and occupational stigma and the resulting privacy-management practices used by organizational members.

Organizational Secrecy

Despite differences in applications, common among scholarly definitions of secrecy is a description of information being purposefully, willfully, and/or consciously concealed.1 Importantly, secrecy is conceptually distinct from deception, privacy, and anonymity—though overlaps certainly exist with all of these terms. Later in this chapter, we will describe in greater detail the role of each of these concepts in relation to legal brothel prostitution, but for now, some orienting distinctions may be helpful. Sociologist David Gibson explains that deception is a particular subtype of secrets because the information being concealed “is that one is misrepresenting the facts.”2 Similarly, privacy, which refers to desires to control access to things considered to belong in a personal domain, overlaps with secrecy any time that “the efforts at such control rely on hiding. But privacy need not hide; and secrecy hides far more than what is private.”3 Anonymity, likewise, can be considered a subcategory of secrecy, in which the specific information being concealed is identity knowledge such as legal name, location, distinctive appearance and behavior patterns, and social categorization.4 The legal brothel system in Nevada largely operates under the shroud of secrecy (in all of its forms); therefore, we extend our examination into contexts where anonymity, privacy, and deception each may characterize some interaction, but where concealment practices more generally are prevalent. For that reason, the broader concept of secrecy deserves some theoretical attention before we delve more deeply into applications to the brothel context.

Often, discussions of secrecy assume that these processes of concealment are inherently evil or ethically problematic. Certainly, secret information is hidden from the pressures of questioning, criticism, or comment; therefore, it could be argued that “no matter how benign the motives of insiders are, the lack of public scrutiny increases the likelihood that the secret action may have unintended undesirable and possibly unethical consequences.”5 However, tendencies to celebrate transparency risk oversimplifying communication into an outdated, linear model in which “senders are compliant information providers, messages are clear and self-evident, and receivers are consistently interested and involved.”6 Transparency is itself a highly ambiguous term, and moving away from moralizing discourse that simplistically asserts that transparency is “good” and secrecy is “bad” allows us to consider instead how each enables and constrains social interaction and organizational life.

Far from demonizing secrecy, sociologist Georg Simmel claimed that it is “one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. . . . Secrecy secures, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious world, and the latter is most strenuously affected by the former.”7 Indeed, the act of concealing information from another creates “a differential stock of knowledge between different actors,” which makes possible different constructions and enactments of reality.8

Take, for example, the February 2017 resignation of Michael Flynn, national security advisor to president Donald Trump, following allegations of illegal correspondence with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. According to the Logan Act, private citizens cannot conduct foreign policy; therefore, any interaction between Flynn and Kislyak before inauguration day in January would be in violation of this law. Initially, Flynn denied that he had discussed anything of substance with the Russian ambassador prior to officially taking office. Based on this understanding of events, vice president Mike Pence publicly defended Flynn in a televised interview with John Dickerson on Face the Nation.9 Later reports indicated that Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak in December 2016.10 White House representatives cited “trust issues” due to the provision of incomplete and/or misleading information as the reason for Flynn’s removal from office.11

The concealment of information, therefore, both influences our ability to shape a particular construction of reality and elevates the secret holder to a position of power over anyone without that knowledge: “When we are not privy to the existence and essence of a secret, whether important or trivial, we are forced to accept a reality different from the reality of the secret holder(s).”12 Without access to that hidden stock of knowledge, people simply tend to accept the reality portrayed by the secret holders(s). Had Pence had access to a more detailed account of Flynn’s interactions with Kislyak, it is conceivable that he would have conducted himself differently on Face the Nation; however, acting on the information available to him, Pence occupied a different social reality, constituted by different stocks of knowledge, than he would two weeks later.

Importantly, then, secrecy is not only a matter of concealing information but also of selective sharing. It has been well documented how the very processes of concealment that define secrecy generate the possession of differential information, which in turn creates group boundaries between insiders and outsiders:

Concealed information separates one group from another and one person from the rest. What I know and you do not demonstrates that we are not identical, that we are separate people. The difference can create a hierarchy, wherein secrecy cedes social power to those who control the flow of treasured information.13

This hierarchy, however, also creates a barrier to intimacy and interpersonal connection. As a result, secret holders often report feelings of alienation,14 as well as mental fatigue, intrusive thoughts, and negative physiological symptoms.15 Among other possibilities, revealing secrets can alleviate stress, build social closeness, or educate others and change social conditions.16 Yet fears about possible relational damage and judgment lead to selective disclosure of secrets: “People tend to hear those secrets about which they already approve and are less likely to hear secrets about which they disapprove.”17 The burden of secrecy, therefore, is characterized by both a fear of disclosure and a temptation to disclose.

For all of these reasons, in-group/out-group boundaries based on the containment of secrets are temporally bound and vulnerable because “secrecy always creates the possibility of accidental or deliberate disclosures or revelations.”18 Because of this risk, organizations employ various protective mechanisms—such as restrictive rules and sanctions, incentivizing compensation schemes, and isolating measures of geographical separation and secured perimeters19—as well as knowledge barriers20 to deter secret-transmission that could pose a threat to firm goals and practices. Although all organizations and social groups engage in some forms of secrecy to create social order, establish boundaries, and protect valuable assets,21 these concerns about secrets’ vulnerability are especially palpable in the context of hidden organizations. According to communication scholar Craig Scott, these organizations do not “want or need their identity to be recognized and not all organizational members want to have their membership or affiliation known by at least certain others.”22 It is to these shadowy organizations that we turn our attention in this book.

Hidden Organizations and Dirty Work Occupations

Most organizational research has ignored the wide range of organizations that desire or are forced to operate in the shadows. Very little scholarship focuses on organizations that keep secret identities, memberships, goals, and locations.23 Yet such organizations populate strip malls, downtown buildings, and street corners in likely every community. Organizations may be hidden because they are engaged in illegal activities and wish to avoid prosecution (such as gangs, terrorist organizations, illegal markets, or drug cartels), but motivations for avoiding heightened visibility extend far beyond the impropriety of lawlessness. For example, federal governments host a myriad of covert operations and organizations (such as U.S. intelligence organizations like the CIA or covert military operations like SEAL Team Six). Still other organizations desire privacy for exclusivity (secret societies), stigma (gun ranges), or political ideologies (cults, anti-government groups).

Secrecy, for some hidden groups and organizations, is rooted in stigmas: discrediting differences that lead others to categorize an entity as undesirable, bad, dangerous, or weak.24 Organizations are often accountable to multiple social audiences with disparate values, conflicting ideologies, and irreconcilable belief systems. As such, it is likely that “perhaps all organizations are stigmatized by some social audiences at one time or another.”25 These stigmas may characterize group members’ unifying identities26 or an organization’s core practices.27

Organizational stigma refers to the “perception that an organization possesses a fundamental, deep-seated flaw that de-individuates and discredits the organization.”28 Taken from Erving Goffman’s work on individual stigma, organizational stigma describes conditions that cause images to ruin, spoil, or become tainted. Goffman identified physical abominations, character blemishes, and tribal identities as aspects of an individual that could bring negative attachments and outside judgment.29 Management scholar Bryant Ashley Hudson uses the term core stigma to describe the unshakable stigma some organizations experience by their very existence.30 For core-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Story of Our Collaboration
• Introduction: Exploring Inequalities and Moral Judgments in Legal Prostitution
• Part I. Brothel Prostitution in Theory and Law
• Part II. Living and Working as Legal Brothel Prostitutes
• Part III. Managing Legal, Occupational, and Community Constraints
• Appendix A. Photographing Legal Prostitution: The Art and Work of Priscilla Varner
• Appendix B. New Directions for Ethnographic Methods: Creative Data Collection, Analysis, and Presentation
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors