Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women

by Alexa Albert
New York: Random House, 2001. ISBN 0-375-50331-5

Nevada is the only state in the Union where prostitution is legal, and as Alexa Albert makes clear in her book Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women, it's just as complicated as any other enterprise. It's a business with a large number of rules: state law permitting local regulation, county laws putting restrictions on it, individual brothel rules, and personal rules that each prostitute sets for herself. Prostitutes pay their taxes (one of them hired an accountant who mulled the proper response for "Occupation" on her tax return), licensing is done at the local police station, and the brothel industry association spokesman is George Flint, a retired minister who also owns a wedding chapel business.

Albert began her involvement with the Nevada brothel industry in college for a public health research paper on condom usage, and this book is the result of many years of off-and-on observation, mostly in residence at the famous Mustang Ranch brothel. Apparently she's the first outsider who'd been allowed inside as someone other than a customer, and it results in a wealth of detail in the book. Albert describes day-to-day operations, interrelationships between the prostitutes, the role of the support personnel, the business dealings of the brothel owners, the history of legalized prostitution in Nevada. She interviews the opposition, describes the political and economic dynamics, and tracks trends like the shy and socially dysfunctional customers who find solace in the purchased caring available at the brothel. (It reads almost like the closest some of these people will get to love, but then the money gets involved and it all comes crashing down. There's an extremely awkward scene where one shy customer tries to tip Albert for observing him with his favorite prostitute at the latter's "suggestion.")

The material is given matter-of-factly but with a personal viewpoint. The author became very close to some of the prostitutes, still corresponds with some of them, and describes them with compassion. So of course, this is not a book to titillate; indeed, it describes the anger that Albert felt when she read some crude descriptions of experiences with some of the women on web site guides to Nevada's brothels. As related in the book, many of her friends would condemn the industry in conversation, then press her for juicy details. It's all a part of the same cultural hypocrisy about sex that would rather see unwanted teen pregnancies rise than discuss contraception in public schools, that cannot erase the prurient interest present to some degree in all people, yet denies the tools to promote public health.

After Albert has spent weeks living in the brothel as an observer, she is surprised and dismayed at the rush to judgment and quick condemnation that is found in the outside world. George Flint's own stepdaughter shrieks about the threatened corruption of her teenaged daughter as Albert mentions that the project began with a study of (gasp) condom use. And there are many areas where she clearly felt uncomfortable, as when the prostitutes asked her if she could turn a trick, making the assumption that her interest signaled a buried desire to become one of them. The whole idea of the girl-next-door is that of buried naughtiness, and hailing from the white middle-class as she does, it's clear that it took quite a bit of courage for Albert to dive into the industry with all the attendant social awkwardness (including that of leaving her fiancé's parents with awkward explanations about what their daughter-in-law was up to).

Indeed, Albert herself faces her fairly reserved ideas amidst a highly oversexed environment. She writes that her "drawers are full of cotton briefs and sports bras," (p. 212) but is tempted to try on lingerie from a traveling salesman then discovers, embarassed, that it features a G-string. She takes the plunge from hearing stories from the prostitutes to observing a sadism session on a paying customer, all the while wondering how far this broke the mental boundaries of fidelity to her fiancé. There's a link to the working women of Mustang Ranch, who have boyfriends, husbands, children — how to reconcile the opprobium of society with the need to make a living? Some of the men don't mind, but some actively encourage it, and there's an intriguing though unresolved discussion of the line between understanding and pimping. And, of course, it's all a business, so Albert also digs into the finances. The summary: the house gets a lot, support personnel get tips (fees or bribes, in a way) from the prostitute's share, and the rest after taxes comes to quite a bit less than half of the money taken in.

The book provides a good background to the industry, along with a vivid first-hand look at operations at the Mustang Ranch brothel. But it does feel like it's trying to avoid taking that last step into advocacy. Yet at the same time, it's clear what side she's on from the personal comments in the narrative. After the unflattering descriptions of brothel opponents, the carefully worded statements supporting the women of Mustang Ranch, one expects her to argue for something, but this she doesn't quite do.

Perhaps that's part of her reserved nature, and it may well be a line that she simply can't cross if the book is to be kept solidly in the informational category. It does seem this is deliberate; the descriptions are all carefully-chosen, the admiration shows through, but Albert can't drop the "but" in "Yes, but ..." I had a similar problem writing this review; how do I avoid moving to the wrong side of a search filter, avoid any words which could remotely be a double-entendre? I think it made my review rather lifeless.

Buried in the acknowledgements (this seems actually appropriate in a far more prominent place, like the introduction), her thanks to:

Judy Albert, my mother, who obliged my requests as a child to drive past the streetwalkers who lined the doorways of Seattle's First Avenue peepshows and porn theaters. Her openness, curiosity, and compassion for others are three of the most important gifts she has given me."

do link to an implied theme of the book: that ought of sight, out of mind, is what allows crises to grow. Stepping back a bit, perhaps the book is acceptable enough not to shock some oversensitive ears, to promote reasoned and pragmatic debate. I think it's already so far along the road to advocacy that the people whose minds need to be changed will already find it near-intolerable (George Flint's daughter, for one), and that it might as well argue for a position, if only in two pages in an afterword. But perhaps I read too much advocacy out of Albert's words and that line of restraint is actually not as far as I thought it was. In that case, and hopefully so, then as Dr. Jocelyn Elders is quoted on the back dust jacket:

This well-written, nonjudgmental, informative book ... could serve as a light at the end of a very long tunnel, and form the basis of both moral and legal discussions about prostitution in the future.