Brothel (25 page)

While similar to Wilfong’s FAQ in many ways, Bashful’s “Frequently Asked Questions on Legal Prostitution in Nevada”
differed in others. For one thing, Bashful mentioned some of Nevada’s other brothels, not only Wilfong’s beloved Chicken Ranch. Perhaps the single biggest difference, however, was Bashful’s inclusion of a recommendation of a specific working girl: Baby, from Mustang Ranch. “It just seemed like a naughty and fun thing to do. In all my years visiting brothels, it was very rare that I would see the same girl again because of their high turnover rate. But I had managed to catch Baby at the Mustang Ranch for about three or four in a row. Plus, she was my favorite, and I thought maybe this would impress the girl that I loved.”

Following Bashful’s example, men began e-mailing him their endorsements of other brothel prostitutes. “For the first year, I would only allow messages about Baby. If I didn’t know the girl personally, why would I want to stick my neck out and take the chance that some guy would blame me for not having a good time with her? Why would I stake my professional reputation on it?” Eventually, however, Bashful acceded, inaugurating his first collection of “field reports.” More than 400 field reports on more than 150 prostitutes from twenty-two brothels have been made available, all of them indexed by woman, brothel, date of posting, and author, like the
Zagat Survey
restaurant guide.

While most reports included men’s overall impressions of paid sex with an individual prostitute, they refrained from describing the sex acts graphically or in excruciating detail. Still others read like masturbatory fantasies from the pages of
Penthouse
. “She promptly mounted me, sliding a very TIGHT (and I want to emphasize TIGHT) pussy around my hard-on.…
She used her muscles to extract every last drop of cum from my once hard-on that was growing ever increasingly limp.” Feeling protective of the women I had come to know, I found these types of reviews insulting; the descriptions reduced the women to sex objects stripped of their humanity. Like boastful adolescent boys, they congratulated themselves on their sexual prowess and talent. “She started to move back and forth, letting out little moans of pleasure which I think were actually real.” It was just that—the opportunity to posture and brag—that Web users delighted in most, according to Bashful. “It makes you immortal! My ego is saying, A thousand years from now people will read my field reports. That’s what my ego hopes. But it’s more than just ego gratification. It’s a means of communication and finding out if other guys are seeing this girl. If he reads what I did, then maybe he’ll share something with me.”

The Internet had spawned an unprecedented opportunity for prostitutes’ clients to consort with one another. The pursuit of sex for sale has been, historically, a very private and furtive activity for men, from the lone motorist cruising Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard surveying curbside street prostitutes to the stealthy attorney ducking into an escort agency on his lunch hour. Johns have kept to themselves, in large part because of social stigma. But now, Bashful’s website offered both experienced and new customers a safe, anonymous way to fraternize, to confess their secret liaisons, and to share their reflections and concerns. Electronic communication gave johns an opportunity for camaraderie and peer acceptance, free from shame.

In 1996, a man with the user name “Georgia Powers”
proposed that he and Bashful join forces to create a new web-site, the Georgia Powers Bordello Connection (http://www.gppays.com). In addition to having links to Bashful’s original FAQ, his library of field reports, and regularly updated work schedules for specific brothel prostitutes, their new site hosted an interactive bulletin board, the Georgia Powers Message Board. Initially only a couple of messages were posted per week, but traffic eventually picked up to over two hundred messages posted daily. “Flyfisher,” “Interested Bystander,” “Big Bamboo,” and “Asbestos Moth” were among about seventy-eight active online posters, while the number of lurkers, those who only read the site, is unknown. Until now, access to the candid, unguarded thought processes of johns has been a privilege afforded only to psychotherapists.

I was surprised to learn that a handful of brothel prostitutes had also begun posting regularly on the message board. For women to engage in cyber-chat with customers defied the oldest principle of the profession, maintaining separate professional and personal worlds. Not surprisingly, women initially chose to communicate online with customers as a business tool. Annabella, the first brothel prostitute to join the CyberWhoreMongers online in June 1996, said it had been her initial intention to cultivate business contacts through this new medium and to begin setting up online parties with brothel customers by appointment. In time, Annabella became a deity to the CyberWhoreMongers; she was the brothel prostitute with the most field reports—forty-seven in all. At the start, she had been careful not to engage in extended message board
dialogue with clients, although they were all too eager to interrogate her about both her personal life and her high prices.

But to chat freely was exactly what the next two prostitutes who came online had in mind. Almost a year after Annabella first logged on, Daisy and Fernanda posted to the message board, an event that ultimately changed both the volume and the tone of the message board communications. According to Bashful, “That’s when the message board exploded from twenty messages a day to two hundred. Suddenly, men’s interest skyrocketed. The ‘Girls Aren’t Allowed’ sign had come down! Because neither one was still working in the brothels, they were completely free to say whatever they wanted. Daisy blasted the Mustang Ranch every which way but loose. Fernanda did to varying degrees as well. And we simply loved it. Where else in cyberspace or anywhere else in the world, can people, even ordinary squares, come along and actually talk to real live prostitutes? And without having to pay them? So people were really excited about it.”

I remembered Daisy. She had been one of Baby’s night-shift colleagues, the one who’d handed out tongue-in-cheek “whore” awards. We’d met on my first trip. A petite, energetic brunette with cropped, boyish hair, she had challenged me to defend the rationale of my condom research. We were alone together in the parlor, where I was describing the study in an attempt to convince her to participate. In the middle of my pitch, she interrupted. “Who cares about condoms? I don’t know why you’re doing this study. You should be doing a psychological study about why we got into prostitution in the first
place.” I hadn’t known what to say. Daisy volunteered her own analysis: most of her peers were either adopted or military brats. She then offered the oft-asserted correlation between prostitution and a history of sexual abuse in childhood; she professed that it applied to brothel workers as well. She finished with a fierce diatribe against the brothels for their role in perpetuating the business of prostitution and in pimping women. Not surprisingly, Daisy refused to participate in my condom study, and I never saw her again at Mustang after that trip.

Now, Daisy and Fernanda were using the message board to stir things up. The two women said they were out to set the record straight, to correct the CyberWhoreMongers’ misconceptions about prostitution, sex, men, and women. According to Fernanda, “Coincidentally, Daisy and I ended up online at the same time. We were the first women who really spent any amount of time there. All these old-fogy fuckers sitting around bullshitting about LPIN [licensed prostitution in Nevada] had no idea what was really going on. They were just reiterating all these stereotypes and bullshit.”

A twenty-seven-year-old tomboy with short, wildly curly, honey-blond hair, Fernanda had a mischievous grin that only hinted at her chutzpah. After being kicked out of her adoptive parents’ home at fourteen, she had hitchhiked from New England to Florida, and ultimately found herself smuggling alcohol and tobacco out of the United States with her boyfriend, who later became her husband. He was caught; Fernanda fled to Nevada to escape prosecution and became a prostitute at Mustang Ranch to cover her husband’s mounting legal expenses.
One of the most outspoken women at Mustang, Fernanda regularly challenged brothel management’s authority. During her first two weeks of work, she broke a customer’s nose when he bit her nipple. After she had earned enough money to cover her husband’s bills, Fernanda formally left him, prompted by his fury that she had resorted to prostitution. In the meantime, she had found a new family in her Mustang colleagues.

Of the online postings, Fernanda said: “[Daisy and I] came in and were like, ‘Oh no, fuck that. You guys have got it all wrong. The houses don’t give a shit about us, are you kidding? You’ve got your blinders on.’ So, we started telling them what was really going down.”

The Internet offered brothel prostitutes like Fernanda long-awaited autonomy to promote and broker their business. And, shielded from retaliation by management, Fernanda and Daisy and later others could express their opinions freely and air their grievances about self-serving brothel owners and poor work conditions. The women sought to squelch unfair and dangerous misinformation, such as claims of rampant, concealed sexually transmitted diseases among brothel prostitutes.

More interestingly to me, they let loose their feelings about the profession, and their clients—feelings I had heard few other brothel prostitutes express, especially
to
their customers. When a man posted a message asking how she really felt about being a prostitute, Daisy replied: “The first words that come to mind are: degraded, dehumanized, used, victim, ashamed, humiliated, embarrassed, insulted, slave, rape, violated. I know these words are hard to you … but I just closed my eyes and
typed the words that come into my mind.” She went on to describe her true thoughts about brothel customers: “99% of them fit these words: pig, dog, animal, uncaring, user, slave owner, asshole, mean, thoughtless, rude, crude, blind.”

Stunned by Daisy’s frank communication, CyberWhoreMongers flooded the message board with humble, apologetic replies. Typical was that of a man with the user name GS: “It makes me take a good hard look at myself, and I don’t like what I see. It is posts like this one, and your previous posts about your feelings that open our eyes. I hate that I have contributed to making a woman feel this way.”

As more prostitutes posted to the board, they united in teaching the men brothel customer etiquette and admonished any man who used the message board to exhibit disrespect for prostitutes. One man with the handle XL wrote: “I was shocked and offended when Fernanda and Daisy first came on the board. They were hitting us over the head with some of the behind-the-scenes reality of licensed prostitution in Nevada (LPIN), which some of us preferred to ignore and others never knew existed. It needed to be offensive to get the point across—the medium of crudeness and anger was as much the message as the facts were. Eventually I got it. They completely changed the tenor and personality of the board and have influenced our view and knowledge of LPIN as much as anyone.”

Where once the all-male cyber-community was almost unconditionally accepting of one another, now the men began turning on one another in shows of gallantry. The message board grew cluttered with posts from men blasting each other’s
ideas and reprimanding one another for being insensitive. Bashful even submitted to the prostitutes’ requests and removed all mention of prices from the field reports. By publicly disclosing prices on the Internet, Bashful had intended to expose the brothels’ pricing system as a shell game that kept consumers guessing as to real prices, and to enable novice brothel visitors to make more informed choices. Now, his critics contended, he had forsaken his original mission in order to “kiss the girls’ asses” so as not to have “a bunch of girls mad at him.” Much antagonistic discussion on the message board followed before Bashful decided to try to strike a balance between the interests of the clients and those of brothel workers. He posted the general results of a pricing survey he had conducted among the CyberWhoreMongers, which revealed that men’s parties cost an average of $335 an hour and 90 percent of them ranged between $150 and $500 an hour.

Despite all their bickering, the CyberWhoreMongers and a handful of prostitutes had become a tight-knit virtual community. “In the long haul,” Bashful posted on the message board, “we seem to have become a family that fights a lot but still has a remarkably warm and cohesive quality to it. My best friends are members of our community.” Because of the illicit and confessional nature of their conversations, the CyberWhoreMongers found themselves bound by a sense of intimacy and vulnerability. In addition to their usual titillating discussions and playful banter, individuals began to use the message board to ask for support during serious life crises, ranging from romantic breakups to health problems. One man who went by
the handle Clatch claimed his cyber friends offered more moral support after his heart attack than did people in his everyday life. “After I got home from the hospital, I checked the message board and I was astounded to see so much concern about me. People asking each other where I was, saying things like ‘This isn’t like him to go this long without posting.’ In some senses, I have gotten to know these people better than people in my real life.”

But in spite of their burgeoning sense of kinship, the community was still only a virtual one, until one day in 1997 when Bashful proposed a real-life meeting, a rendezvous in Nevada to go brothel-hopping together. Only twelve men showed up that first year; many others were too apprehensive about both losing their anonymity and doing the unimaginable—going to a brothel to consort with other men. But the twelve who took the dare found immense satisfaction in chatting about computers and swapping stories about their favorite brothel prostitutes before heading out together en masse to the Ranches and partying with each other’s recommendations, including Annabella and Fernanda. “My days of solitary brothel cruising came to an end,” one man posted afterward, “and I learned the joy of hanging out in whorehouses with the guys.” Thus was born the annual CyberWhoreMongers Convention.