The rules of the brothels change with the culture

This is the second part of an interview with former brothel worker Nevada Rose. She got her first job at a Nevada brothel when she was in her early twenties and worked for about ten years, from the 1970s into the 1980s. Among the brothels she worked in was Bobbie Duncan’s Buckeye Bar in Tonopah. I interviewed her in the summer of 2014.

Nevada Rose described the difference between an escort service and brothel prostitution.

Sometimes an escort service involves nonsexual activities such as going to dinner or a show, but 99 percent of the time, sex is involved with an escort. Typically a client pays a set amount of money for an agreed-upon amount of time, during which he does, within agreed limits, pretty much whatever he desires. If the client finishes early, the party can continue because he has paid for a set period of time.

A brothel is different.

“In a brothel,” she said, “you take a customer to your room and settle on a party. You collect the price for that service in advance. If during the session the customer decides he would like to do something more than that, then that costs more money. A new price for another type of service must first be negotiated.”

In a brothel, once a man finishes, the party’s over. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a few minutes into an agreed-upon hour session or not; it’s over. In a brothel, a customer gets only what he has negotiated for for a set price.

Nevada Rose emphasized, “The negotiation is very, very important because you have to nail down exactly what the man wants to do.” The object for the woman is to get a longer party for more money.

Brothel Rules—Dirty Hustling

Life in a brothel involves many rules. Nevada Rose said, “You can imagine, when you have a houseful of women that you have to keep control of. They’re women in competition so you don’t want to have fights break out and other such unpleasantries, so rules are made.”

One rule involves dirty hustling.

Women are in competition for customers in a brothel. Typically when a customer enters a brothel he selects the girl he wants from what is called a lineup, where the women on duty line up, state their names, and wait while he makes up his mind. In most brothels, the women were not allowed to converse with the customers during a lineup except to smile and state their name, then let the customer make his choice.

Dirty hustling involves a woman surreptitiously doing little things to catch the customer’s eye. It can be done very subtly by smiling or making a suggestive movement or offering an uncalled-for comment. She might dress in an eye-catching manner a little differently from the other girls. Or she may have a big flower in her hair or make sure that the colors of her clothes are different from what the other girls are wearing. A woman may even show a little pubic hair, trying to catch the customer’s eye.

Each girl learns her own style of presenting herself in the lineup while staying within the rules.

Contracts

When a girl goes to work at a brothel, she signs a contract. While the contracts vary from brothel to brothel, they basically say she can’t work at another house within so many miles of that particular establishment. The contract may be for six months. It states that she can’t have customers outside the brothel and will not try to elicit money from a customer that is not shared with the house. And girls who don’t fulfill their contract can and will be sued in court.

What’s different now, Nevada Rose said, is that in the old days a girl who didn’t live up to her contract might end up with a broken leg or acid in her face.

“Now what happens is you end up getting your funds in your bank account confiscated,” she said.

The Internet

The Internet has become a dominant force in the prostitution business, including the legal brothels in Nevada. Some of the brothels are, as Nevada Rose said, “Really, really, really intensely involved in the Internet.”

Brothels have their own websites. When multiple brothels are owned by a single corporation, their websites are branches of a main website. All the women are expected to participate in that through a chat room and a message board. If a girl doesn’t have her own laptop, then every house has three or four computer stations she can use to connect to the Internet. Most big-dollar brothel operations, she says, are working off appointments made on the Internet.

The Changing Scene

When asked what she thought the future of legal brothels in Nevada would be, Nevada Rose replied, “I don’t know what they’re going to turn into now. It’s very, very hard now because the sexual ideals of people are different.”

For example, she said, “When I was working (in a brothel) you’d get a lot of people for oral sex because usually women—wives and girlfriends—didn’t do that. So there was a lot of demand for oral sex in the brothel.”

That was 30 to 40 years ago. Today, it’s anal sex.

“Now you can go into a dance club or nightclub and buy a girl a couple of drinks and get whatever you want in the bathroom,” she said.

When it comes to sex in a brothel, Nevada Rose said, “Anything you can’t get in your normal every day is going to be more desirable. And with many men, just the fact that they’re seeing a prostitute is a turn-on. We do a lot of virgins, believe it or not, still. Some virgins are bringing themselves to the party; others are brought by a parent.”

Whereas formerly a legal brothel had kind of a Disneyland-type attraction to it, that’s not the case now. She thinks it makes it more difficult for the legal brothels.

Nevada Rose thinks that society does not make it as difficult on prostitutes as it once did.

“You see it on TV, it’s in the news, it’s just everywhere,” she said. “You’ve got a culture that says they just have to save them,” or, “They’ll straighten out. They’re just acting out because they’re young.”

In years past, she said, “You did not want anybody to know you were a prostitute because you’d be totally ostracized. You couldn’t work.”

She believes the laws protect prostitutes more than in days past.

“If you walked out of a brothel just to go to the grocery store, they’d arrest you for soliciting,” Nevada Rose said. This was in the 1970s and ‘80s.

One of the changes in the last 30 years is girls kissing customers. This was never done in previous years. Now, one of the things that some men are looking for is what’s called a “girlfriend experience.”

They want the girl to party with them for several hours, go out and hold hands, have drinks, and sometimes go on a date. There could be a lot of kissing. She said, however, there are some girls around who still won’t kiss. Most do, however. You might find them making out right in the parlor.

Nevada Rose said one of the biggest changes in the brothels in Nevada in recent years is a more corporate atmosphere.

“You have shareholders, you have CEOs. Before, it was the madam and she had the final word. She might have partners that were men, but they usually weren’t around. Now men own the places straight out and run them and it’s a more corporate atmosphere.”

She believes it is more necessary today because as a society we’ve become more legalistic.

“You have to have lawyers, you have to have contracts. I mean, it’s more of a big business-type atmosphere.”

Bob McCracken has a doctorate in cultural anthropology and is the author of numerous books in the Nye County Town History Project.