Brothel backfire

People keep asking me why Harry Reid wants to ban prostitution in the rural counties. I'm confused by the question. They seem to be looking for me to explain some sort of sinister agenda on the part of Nevada's senior senator. But I think Reid's motives are pretty easy to figure out.

In his recent speech to the Nevada Legislature, Reid said he decided to speak out after a businessman told him he wouldn't locate his company in Storey County because of its houses of prostitution. Reid surely was alarmed that this businessman was not alone in avoiding rural Nevada because of the brothels.

Considering our gambling-dependent and recession-ravaged economy, is this not something Nevada should be thinking about? Forty-nine states do not have legal brothels, leaving image-conscious businessmen with lots of alternatives.

Also, people too often forget that Reid is a Mormon, a conservative faith by any measure. Knowing this, why is it surprising that he has little affection for legal prostitution? Did I miss the memo announcing that Mormons and other devout Christians support the selling of sex?

Now, while there's nothing odd or surprising about Reid's anti-prostitution stance, I don't happen to agree with it. If you've been a columnist in Nevada for any length of time, you can't avoid giving this issue some serious thought. I've considered compelling arguments on both sides, but ultimately settled on the view that legal brothels are more beneficial for everyone involved than the inevitable alternative.

I recommend three books that provide reams of insights into the realities of Nevada's most peculiar institution. Each provides a warts-and-all picture of this stigmatized industry.

First, an academic offering from UNLV sociology professors Barbara Brents, Crystal Jackson and Kate Hausbeck: "The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland" (Routledge). The in-depth research by this trio shoots huge holes in common stereotypes and cliches. Brents and her colleagues interviewed numerous working girls, and found that many of them are not the tortured souls the popular culture makes them out to be. In fact, they're serious about their work and earn good money that is used to pay mortgages, raise children and go to college.

Lora Shaner's "Madam: Inside a Nevada Brothel" (Huntington Press) is a memoir of running a Pahrump brothel. Shaner minimizes the polemics in favor of painting three-dimensional portraits of the people who work in brothels and their customers. "At the beginning, I believed that women who worked as prostitutes were different from the rest of us, that they had some incomprehensible belief system that permitted them to cross a line into a nether world the rest of society could never understand," Shaner writes. "I was wrong. They are exactly like the rest of us -- human. These women are not understood because they remain cloaked in mystery, subject to prejudice born of ignorance."

A valuable complement to Shaner's book is "Legal Tender: True Tales of a Brothel Madam" (Stephens Press) by Laraine Russo Harper. While "Legal Tender" covers some of the same ground as "Madam," Harper adds important dimensions to the industry. For example, she points out that brothels are valuable to mentally and physically disabled customers who might otherwise go through life without experiencing intimate relations. Harper also notes that some customers pay good money just to have someone to talk to. "Brothels are not always about sex," she writes. "They are about companionship, about sharing, about easing someone's loneliness."

Perhaps the most resonant argument for legal brothels is they provide a secure and regulated environment for women who otherwise are forced to ply their trade under more dangerous circumstances. All three books tell excruciating stories of women escaping nightmarish situations and finding safe haven in brothels.

The point, I think, is if you develop a deeper understanding of what really goes on within Nevada's brothels, it becomes more difficult to give a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down verdict on the industry. Sen. Reid gives a valid reason to shut them down, but doing so would have troubling effects on the fragile economies of rural counties, on the hundreds of people employed by the industry, and on the customers, some of whom rely on the brothels in ways that go beyond popular stereotypes.

The most persuasive critique I've heard about Reid's brothel stance is that it's such a trifle of an issue compared with the gargantuan crises we face at the state, national and global levels. Compare, for example, the senator's attack on legal prostitution with the galling report by Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi that none of the Wall Street wizards who ruined the economy is looking at the world from behind bars.

"Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom -- an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities -- has ever been convicted," Taibbi writes.

That, to me, constitutes a moral corruption dwarfing the regulated activities of a handful of women in the hinterlands of Nevada.

Geoff Schumacher (gschumacher@reviewjournal.com) is the Review-Journal's director of community publications. He edited the book "Legal Tender." His column appears Thursday.