by Alexa Albert
Although she was always cordial, Dinah kept mainly to herself at Mustang. Typically, she sat alone at one end of the bar throughout most of her shift. In spite of her aloofness, Dinah kept an eye on the Mustang scene and always had gossip to dish, of which I often became the recipient. For Dinah, the trip to the sheriff’s substation to get licensed had been more terrifying than turning her first trick. Already apprehensive about her new venture, Dinah said that although the sheriff was perfectly professional, facing him was terrible. “I turned out at the Sagebrush Ranch in Lyon County. I’ll never forget my first visit to the sheriff’s office to register. The application asked which position I was applying for. I stared at the two boxes—one that said ‘Maid’ and the other ‘Prostitute’—for the longest time. It was like I couldn’t bring myself to check off ‘Prostitute.’ I nearly died before I managed to mark off the right box.” Unlike Lyon County, Storey County used a euphemism to lessen women’s embarrassment: Petty told Eva to write “Entertainer” as her professional title.
Once Petty was satisfied with Eva’s application, he photocopied her two pieces of identification and accepted her $50 cash to cover the licensing fee, which would be submitted with her application to Storey County officials in Virginia City. The final steps of the licensing process involved taking two Polaroid photographs—one for her file and another for her work card—and then fingerprinting her. The print, of her right index finger, would be used in Virginia City to confirm her identification and search for outstanding warrants. Petty said that few applicants actually had any history of previous altercations with the law, save for occasional speeding tickets, but a few days later, he was to handcuff a new blond turn-out and escort her dramatically out of Mustang. She had four warrants for her arrest.
After county officials processed Eva’s application, Petty would deliver to Mustang Ranch her laminated lime-green work card, her official documentation authorizing her to prostitute in the named brothel. Prostitutes could only be approved to work at one licensed operation at a time; if Eva chose to change brothels, she would need to reapply and pay another $50 licensing fee. (Not infrequently, women moved from brothel to brothel as the seasons changed and business fluctuated.) Brothel management retained each woman’s work card, in preparation for the next impromptu inspection by the sheriff. Meanwhile, back at the Ranch, Eva would need to wait a minimum of twenty-four hours to “clear,” or receive the results of her STD tests. Once the tests came back negative, she would be a licensed prostitute.
I was surprised that licensing was such a rigorous process, but that was precisely the idea behind legalization: to impose a number of conditions upon an otherwise unruly enterprise as a means of control. “Within our society, we have no choice as to whether or not we want this fact of life called prostitution,” Joe Conforte was fond of telling his critics. “You are not going to eliminate prostitution. Our only real choice in the matter is how we choose to deal with it: control or uncontrol. As long as the business is here, as long as we can’t eliminate it, why not organize it?”
Advocates of legalized prostitution, like Conforte and George, were quick to point out that criminalization of prostitution, the policy implemented elsewhere in America, had utterly failed to eradicate the sale of sex. It had succeeded, however, in driving the industry underground, forcing prostitutes to operate on the sly with little recourse against abuse or injury. Criminalization also unjustly targeted prostitutes. Almost always it was prostitutes who were arrested and jailed, not the men who exploited or abused them. (For example, in New York State in 1993, 83 percent of prostitution-related arrests were for soliciting, 11 percent for patronizing a prostitute, and 6 percent for pimping or promoting prostitution.)
But critics argued that regulated, controlled prostitution was merely a wolf in sheep’s clothing, that it sanctioned pimping by brothel owners and governments. I had to wonder if there wasn’t some truth to that. I had already heard about a few brothel owners who were notorious for exploiting their licensed prostitutes. For example, the owner of a brothel in southern Nevada allegedly confiscated women’s personal supplies (condoms, lubricants, nylons) and required them to repurchase everything directly from the brothel at inflated prices, like sharecroppers or miners buying from the company store. And “his” working girls had to buy their meals à la carte from the brothel kitchen, where slabs of tomato cost $2, a box of frozen vegetables $5, and a hamburger $7 (in contrast to Mustang Ranch’s flat $10 a day for all you could eat). “The owner took advantage of us, took advantage of the fact we were confined to his brothel,” one prostitute divulged to me. “Nothing was free. Everything was overpriced. You couldn’t split anything with anybody.”
Opponents of the brothels often preferred the abolition of all criminal laws regarding prostitution between consenting adults, including voluntary contractual relationships between prostitutes and their “managers” or pimps. (The mainstream feminist view of prostitution has evolved over time; once most feminists maintained that prostitution was exploitative of women, period, but now a movement has emerged that holds that it’s all right for women to do what they want to do.) Decriminalization would also mean the abolition of any statutory regulation of prostitutes, including the requirement of medical examinations and STD workups.
While decriminalization appealed more and more to me as I heard stories about exploitative brothel owners, I was troubled by the idea of eliminating all testing. Mandatory testing violated my sense of a patient’s right to privacy, but didn’t the public have a right to be protected from potentially transmissible diseases if prostitution was to be legalized? And yet why should a prostitute be singled out among all the other service professionals in contact with the public? Surgeons and dentists, for example, weren’t routinely screened for HIV and hepatitis.
For some time, I debated inwardly the question of which model of prostitution seemed most palatable. I still had a lot to learn, especially about what drove women into this profession in the first place.
*Cited in The Mythical West: An Encyclopedia of Legend, Lore, and Popular Culture, edited by Richard W. Slatta, ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2001.
3 .. BREADWINNERS
Most of the women seemed reluctant to discuss how they got into the business, so I was caught off guard when Donna opened up to me one night at Mustang #1. Donna was a young redhead with a shy smile and thick bangs cut blunt across her forehead, like a toddler’s first haircut; I had first noticed her showing her colleagues a book of sexual cartoons. She had put the book together herself, clipping cartoons from magazines like Playboy, to entertain her clients while they waited for her to return from booking money with the cashier. It cut down on the number of customers who snooped through her room and stole mementos like underwear and bras, she said.
Donna saw me watching her and invited me over to look at her book. Her customers’ favorite, she said, was a cartoon that showed a prostitute being called to the rescue of a man found unconscious on a beach with an erect penis. She watched my face for a reaction. I smiled cautiously, unable to read her own attitude toward the cartoon and not wanting to offend. I must not have, because from that moment on, she and I exchanged pleasantries whenever I visited Mustang #1.
Donna and I frequently ate dinner at the same time, and the night she confided in me, she and I were sitting alone in Mustang’s kitchen. Over lasagna and garlic bread, we bantered about the weather, nearby Reno, the casinos. Then, apropos of nothing, she mentioned that her husband couldn’t get a job, “because it’s hard for someone his age.” He was forty-two years old, she said, playing nervously with her wedding band. I wondered where the conversation was headed.
Donna went on to confess, almost apologetically, that she’d never planned to become a prostitute. “One day he came into the kitchen where I was preparing dinner,” she said softly. “He said he thought I should start working to support our family. We had all this debt, plus house payments.”
At twenty-three, Donna had a five-year-old boy and a three-yea
r-old girl. Aside from baby-sitting as a teenager, the only job she had ever held was as a receptionist in a Reno insurance agency.
“But then he told me he wanted me to work at Mustang Ranch,” she said. “He knew several guys whose girlfriends worked there from time to time and earned good money. Of course, I knew what Mustang Ranch was—I’ve lived in this area my whole life.” She couldn’t conceal a fleeting grimace.
She said she cried for a week and asked her husband over and over whether he really wanted her to become a prostitute. He explained the moral and ethical issues as he saw them: he knew she loved him, and he believed that she wouldn’t be attracted to the clientele, so it was fine with him. Tearfully, she said she would do whatever he wanted. “Deep down, I didn’t think he’d really make me go through with it.” She let out a disheartened sigh before recovering her shy smile.
When I met her, Donna had been working at Mustang for one and a half years. She lived at the brothel for a couple of weeks at a time, always returning home with a good deal of money in her purse. Cash was no longer a problem for her family. To go home to her kids and husband, she needed to earn at least $4,000, to cover the monthly bills. Her husband had been incrementally increasing her quota by a couple of hundred dollars over the past several months. I would come to see this vicious cycle frequently, of prostitutes increasing their cost of living with every dollar earned. Consequently, women who had planned to prostitute only briefly found themselves trapped in the business even though they had surpassed their original financial goals.
Until then, out of deference to the women, I had been careful not to pry or try to get too personal. So I was surprised when of her own volition Donna felt compelled to answer the question that was most on my mind: How did you get here? Judging from the questions asked prostitute guests on talk show programs and of me by family members, it was also the question that most preoccupied mainstream America. It was a variant of the “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” cliché, asked of any woman who resists the social restrictions that govern most of us and who is involved in types of behavior we normally classify as “taboo.” It’s as if knowing the answer, we can reassure ourselves that we’ll never walk in their shoes.
Prostitutes have been cast as victimizers and victims, as dead to the pleasure of sex and as too alive to it. Whatever else, they have always been Other, sufficiently unlike the rest of us as to evoke sympathy, not empathy. Usually with the best of intentions, psychologists pathologize prostitutes by suggesting sweeping causative associations between prostitution and disadvantaged situations, physical limitations (e.g., substance abuse), and previous traumatic experiences, especially sexual abuse. And knee-jerk moralists speak of prostitutes as flawed characters lacking in values.
But no easy formula fit the women I met in Nevada’s brothels. Several were black and Latino; a few were Asian and Native American; fully two-thirds of Mustang’s prostitutes were white. Almost nine out of ten had either graduated from high school or earned their general equivalency diplomas. While some of the prostitutes I met came from lower-income families, many grew up well-to-do. Some of the women came from broken homes with absent fathers, and some had mothers who had prostituted themselves, but many grew up in intact, functional two-parent households. Although some women admitted to drug and alcohol misuse, the brothel seemed to weed out women with profound addictions. Fewer than half of the women spoke to me of childhood sexual abuse, a prevalence not all that much higher than national estimates that at least 20 percent of American women have experienced some form of sexual abuse as children.* And two-thirds of Mustang’s prostitutes considered themselves religiously observant and professed membership in traditional organized faith communities, almost exclusively Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish.
It was clear that the women working in Nevada’s brothels represented a distinct group. Fewer than half of Mustang’s prostitutes had sold sex outside the brothels, whether “on the track” (the street) or through escort or outcall services. Although it wasn’t unusual for streetwalkers to give Nevada brothels a try as a respite from the streets, George Flint figured that under 10 percent of the brothels’ regular prostitutes were former streetwalkers. He speculated that the reason was the brothels’ extensive rules and obligatory confinement: “True street girls can’t make the adjustment. Every one of them fails. Maybe they’re too accustomed to their independence. Or the fact that they choose their customers, their customers don’t choose them.”
One trait common to most of Mustang’s women was financial hardship. Since Donna’s husband was unemployable, or claimed to be, someone needed to earn a living for the family; she had only a high school education and meager work experience, and he convinced her she had few options. This was a pattern I saw frequently—women who had ended up at Mustang Ranch to provide for loved ones. Instead of lacking family values, as moralists contended, most of the women I came to know there possessed a profound sense of personal responsibility and an unwavering commitment to their families that ultimately drove them to do this “immoral” work.
Almost every woman was financially supporting someone else—often her husband, sometimes other family members. Carrie, a prostitute in her early thirties, was taking care of her mother, who had turned her out more than a decade ago. With raven-black hair down to her buttocks, Carrie bore an uncanny resemblance to Morticia Addams, a likeness enhanced by the black dress she always wore: tight-fitting, low-cut, long, and sheer. Forbidden to return home until she earned the quota her mother set, Carrie was frequently forced to remain at Mustang for weeks on end.
Then there was Ivy, whose mother-in-law had packed up her bags and loaded them in the car before announcing that she had freeloaded off her husband’s family long enough—her mother-in-law was taking her to Mustang Ranch to get a job.
It wasn’t always families that the women subsidized; all too frequently, pimp boyfriends had manipulated them. The women didn’t admit this to me readily, however. In fact, the subject of pimps didn’t come up until I met Brittany, a thirty-one-year-old with a sweet, wholesome face devoid of any makeup, and a pageboy haircut. Instead of the standard brothel “eye patch” bikini top, which barely covered the nipples, and matching “tulip” shorts, cut to expose both buttocks cheeks, Brittany stuck with knee-length cocktail dresses. I couldn’t get over how much she resembled an old high school friend of mine. Brittany kept her distance from me for a couple of days, then approached me one afternoon in the Mustang bar. To break the ice, I asked her how the brothels had changed over the eleven years she had worked in them. She mentioned how the previously obligatory three weeks on/one week off work schedule had been relaxed, and how the house minimums had gone up from $30 when she started to $100. And of course, she said, the brothels used to require women to have pimps. Startled, I asked her to repeat herself. I had assumed one of the benefits of legalized prostitution was the elimination of pimps.
Realizing that no one had yet let me in on this well-kept dirty secret, Brittany reiterated that the brothels used to require women to have pimps before they were hired. The rationale was simple. The involvement of pimps enabled brothel owners to leave discipline to men who wouldn’t hesitate to keep their women in line. Brittany said it wasn’t unusual for an owner like Joe Conforte to collect all the pimps’ phone numbers, and call them whenever a girl misbehaved to come “straighten her out real quick.” All too frequently, Brittany said, “straightening out” involved brute force. Owners also benefited from the pimps’ relentless demands that the women earn more and more money.
Meanwhile, pimps found much appeal in placing their prostitutes in Nevada’s brothels, despite having to relinquish half of the women’s earnings to owners. For one, the pimps could be assured their prostitutes would be supervised and attended to. Once extricated from the burdens inherent to managing working girls illegally, these men were free to seduce other women into the trade. A pimp could keep track of his prostitute’s business simply by calling the brothel
and speaking with the cashier or a manager, who freely disclosed the women’s earnings. He frequently kept abreast of his prostitutes’ daily conduct by putting all his working girls together in the same brothel and encouraging them to snitch on one another.
Even though the brothels no longer required women to have pimps, many of Mustang’s working girls still did, confided Brittany in a hushed tone. How many women? I asked, incredulous. Brittany glanced quickly around the room and let out a sigh before replying that almost all the girls did, in her opinion. Those without pimps, she said, included herself, Baby, Dinah, and a few others. With disbelief, I briefly surveyed the room. Why on earth would these legal prostitutes need pimps? Off the unsafe streets, they surely didn’t need a pimp’s protection. Weren’t the women already giving up a significant portion of their money to the house? The brothels functioned as stand-in pimps. Most of the women had portrayed themselves as tough and independent-minded women who viewed prostitution simply as a job, a way to earn a living. I hadn’t detected any signs of coercion. And I had never heard any of the other women talking about pimps.
Brittany wasn’t surprised to learn this. None of the women would’ve wanted to admit aloud to being exploited, to giving up their hard-earned money to a man when the brothel already extracted half their earnings. Moreover, Brittany said, most of these women denied that their pimps were pimps, considering them “boyfriends” and “friends.” She had reason to know, she said; she’d once had a pimp herself. “God forbid if you ever called him a pimp. It wasn’t even in your vocabulary. It was like a bad word,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, if you’re sending your money to a man who wouldn’t be with you if you weren’t sending him money, then he’s not your boyfriend, he’s your pimp. Still, it took me a year after I left Bobby to be able to call him my pimp.”