Take Nevada Brothels... Please

Amanda Brooks of After Hours and some of her fellow prostitutes and activists from Nevada have been experimenting with local brothels where their work is nominally legal. Brooks, who merely didn't enjoy her first stint, passes along a link to a colleague, Mariko Passion of Educated Whore, Urban Geisha, that's outright hellish.

New rules and regulations and a house meeting which lasted almost 2 hours. S was chastising the captive audience of 10 working girls and 2 staff like we were in 8th grade detention. It went on for almost 2 hours without any dialogue or debate. On and on she went about how ungrateful some girls were for complaining about the food, or the lack of customers or the lack of money that we made. On and on she went about how some of our rooms smelled like trucker asshole and how we never took out our garbages. She made comments about how if we were on the streets we would probably get arrested 7 or 8 times and we would probably get HIV. The fear factor was definitely a huge part of this lecture. Instilling the fear that there was no way that we could ever find any better working conditions than where we were right now, and if we dared to complain about it, we could pack our bags and try to find better. On and on she went about how drinking and smoking pot made us fat and lazy. On and on she went about how people need to keep their mouths shut about other people in the house. On and on and on… How we wanted to be in our rooms all the time and use this like a hotel. She had said that only one other house had more customers than this one, that was the Asian brothel, and all the girls there were from overseas and had to pay huge debt bonds. It was the most blatant example of how pimps and madams become trapped in that power position where they feel that talking down to, criticizing or literally beating up their workers is the only way that they are capable of listening.

She said it here.

It's a lovely example of why you can't just staple the word "legalize" next to the word "prostitution" and call it a day. Although technically I have to say in Nevada *prostitutes* aren't so much legal as *brothels* are. The laws governing the system a) totally benefit brothel owners, b) utterly assume the actual sex workers are common criminals, and therefore c) trickles very little of the proceeds to the actual workers and d) requires that they actually *remain locked in the brothels* for up to 10 days at a time! On the clock the whole time and expected to get up for "line-ups" at any hour of the day or night to the tune of a very loud buzzer or bell. And (sez Mariko at her main blog, Bound, Not Gagged) it's no better in Australia.

According to conversations I’ve had with Rachel Whotton from Scarlet Alliance, the same is true for brothel owners in Australia. In Oz, they have become a political lobby and are speaking out against any non brothel sex worker, trying to convince parliament that if a girl were to not work in a brothel there would be no way that she could keep herself safe or clean. This is the overall belief from many people in the general public, and it is the legacy of male priviledge in all its ugliness.

She said *that* here.

The good news is that Mariko successfully bailed out of her experiment and has headed back to her home town and her former non-legal job. Pretty bleak, by the way, when sex workers feel safer, healthier, and more respected working as illegal out-call escorts than legal brothel prostitutes!

The point being, though, that systems like Nevada's or Australia's or countless others that merely institutionalize existing proprietary, punitive assumptions about sex workers will always be part of the problem. Yes, earlier this week in comments I mocked the idea of sex-work as empowering (any more than any other trade such as plumber, surgeon, or actuary can be.) But that's because I think the real problem isn't that sex-work makes anyone *more* powerful, it's that the status quo is so flipping *disempowering* that almost any improvement looks like up.

And all I'm saying is that *if* legalization policy was merely going to institutionalize the status quo then anti-prostitution activists *aren't crazy* for opposing legalization. Heck, *if* the only alternative to Nevada-style "legalization" was the Swedish model that decriminalizes sex-work but criminalizes customers then I'd probably support that model instead (even though it evidently only drive sex-workers back underground where their customers are forced to operate.) Instead *if* one was going to make prostitution legal at all then all the power, the benefits, the money, and the freedom to form associations needs to fall to the sex workers themselves rather than pimps, quasi-legal escort-service managers, illegal brothel owners, and customers (the status quo most places in America) or the legal brothel owner (the Nevada and Australia model) or the government.

(And since it's a month with a vowel in it it's time for me to repeat my caveat that while I feel pretty strongly that independent prostitutes should be able to work legally I'm not actually all that crazy about prostitution itself because of the way it institutionalizes the dynamics of constructed gender and a patriarchal ideology of heterosexual sexual scarcity. Barring the setbacks of a Nevada/Austrilia-style takeover, though, prostitution could be transformed just as easily if it's legal as if it's illegal. And if it happened to be legal then workers would have *way* more safe, legal access to law enforcement, legislative policy-makers, and the courts.)

Update: Afterthought: reading through both Brooks and Mariko's posts I was struck by how much more humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing the working *conditions* are compared to the actual work itself. This is *not* an assertion that sex work is cush, just that *when* one commits the evident heresy of looking at it as a form of *labor* instead of, say, evasion of the wages of sin where hanging's too good for them adulteratin' hoors, one almost immediately notices just how much it doesn't have to be that way, and just how much our own complicities support keeping it that way.