Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (17 page)

An insightful study covering a lengthy period of legal prostitution in Argentina (1875–1934) describes a litany of municipal regulations. In Buenos Aires, prostitutes were required to be registered by city authorities, to carry identity cards, to have medical examinations twice a week, and to refrain from appearing at windows and doors. The minimum age for selling sex was 22. Brothels were prohibited from displaying signage and could not be located near churches, schools, and public buildings. Brothel owners had to pay a high license fee, forcing those who could not afford the fee to operate clandestinely in bars, cabarets, casinos, or underground brothels. The number of prostitutes allowed in a brothel changed over time (only two during 1904–1908), and prostitutes working alone from home could not live in a building where anyone else sold sex. A 1908 ordinance mandated incarceration of diseased prostitutes in hospitals until they were cured.
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Some of
these rules, as we shall see, are common in legal prostitution systems today, indicating that the contours of social control have changed little over time.

Legalization of vice can have unintended consequences. During the first third of the 20th century in Argentina, successive municipal ordinances seemed incapable of producing the desired results:

No matter how well intended the ordinance, each new measure was as counterproductive as the one it replaced. … Plans that might have pleased prostitutes offended pimps. When bawdy houses opened in new neighborhoods, residents complained. If the downtown was to be cleared of bordellos, outlying neighborhoods complained. … Yearly changes in license fees or periodic reforms of bordello ordinances created financial and political insecurity for all but the largest and wealthiest brothels. Houses opened and closed, women entered and left with incredible rapidity. … Regardless of what tactics police and municipal authorities used to monitor prostitutes, most failed.
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Such outcomes do not mean that prostitution is inherently policy resistant, but it is clear that legalization of any vice generates a host of new challenges for state officials, whose “solutions” may, as in Argentina, follow a checkered path over time. Spain, for example, shifted from prohibition to decriminalization in 1995, when it began to allow third-party involvement, but a new law in 2003 reversed the situation, recriminalizing third-party involvement. The following year, the Public Prosecutor’s Office issued a circular that interpreted the law as applying only when coercion is involved or when third parties have received direct payment from prostitutes (simply renting a room used for sexual exchanges was permitted).
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The Argentinian and Spanish examples show how a nation can radically alter its policies over a short span of time, a mere decade in the Spanish case.

One American state, Nevada, legalized prostitution in 1971 with a law allowing rural counties to license and regulate brothels; this served to legitimate the existing brothels that were operating illegally prior to the law reform. Street or escort prostitution remains prohibited in these rural areas, and all prostitution is outlawed in the counties in which Las Vegas and Reno are located. The number of legal brothels has remained remarkably stable over time: 33 in 1973, 36 in 1997, and 28 in 2009, scattered across ten counties.
This is because county officials make it difficult to obtain a new license, in order to limit the number of brothels in their jurisdiction. None of the brothels offers male prostitutes, but it is not unusual for female clients to visit as part of a husband-wife couple. Still, the vast majority of the customers are men.

Brothel owners are thoroughly screened by county or town officials; they cannot have a previous felony conviction. Workers must be at least 21 years old. State law makes condom use mandatory and requires workers to undergo weekly testing for STDs and HIV.
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None has tested HIV-positive since testing was mandated in 1985, and unlike some other places where workers have shunned mandatory testing, it is “widely accepted among members of Nevada’s brothel culture.”
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Local governments impose additional regulations.
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These rules govern the location of brothels, licensing procedures, and specific restrictions on workers’ behavior. One universal rule is that workers must live at the brothel for the duration of their contract, which is usually three weeks at a time. If she has a husband or children, they are not allowed to reside in the same town in which she is working. The traditional rule that prevented workers from going into town when not on duty has been relaxed in recent years. Each brothel enforces its own set of rules as well. In most cases, women split half their earnings with the house, are expected to tip staff, and pay for their own health care. Overall, the package of state, county, and brothel regulations make for a tight apparatus of control over the workers. These prostitutes “are restricted in their movement due solely to the nature of their work [and] are clearly being treated differently than other service workers.”
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Nevada’s legal brothels employ a number of safety precautions (alarm buttons, listening devices, management surveillance) designed to preempt or react to an altercation. These safeguards pay off. An in-depth study by sociologists Barbara Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck concluded, “Safety was one of the most important advantages that women stressed in their choice to work in the brothels. They felt, and our research backs this up, that Nevada’s legal brothels offer the safest environment available for women to sell consensual sex.”
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None of the women interviewed had ever felt the need to press an alarm button; and the police are rarely called to deal with problem customers.
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The researchers found that Nevada’s legal brothels clashed with the image presented in the oppression paradigm: these brothels were free of drug use, violence, minors, disease, and trafficking.
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Another analyst points out that the “insulated nature of the brothels offers prostitutes near foolproof protection from theft, fraud, or crime.”
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In addition to this positive assessment
of the safety record, Nevada’s system advances the larger “objectives of health, safety, welfare, and morals.”
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The workers themselves are generally satisfied with the work. Alexa Albert, who conducted observations and interviews in the brothels, describes the workers as “self-aware professionals there of their own free will. … The women had found a genuine sense of purpose and meaning in their work.”
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Similarly, none of the workers interviewed by Brents and Hausbeck had been coerced into brothel work or were there against their will:

All the women we interviewed stressed that they made their own choices to enter brothel work. … In all brothels we found that the women were strong, open, and often had close bonds with others in the house. They are in the business to make money, and some do quite well. … But many workers say they do it not just for the money but also because they like the work and the people they work with.
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These highly regulated brothels are not for everyone; many sex workers would find them too confining, and some quit after just a few days in a house. In the abstract, the restrictions may appear onerous, but the studies just cited indicate that they are not experienced negatively by those workers who are willing to abide by the norms.
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Counties hosting legal brothels have virtually no illegal prostitution.
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At the same time, county officials purposely limit the number of brothels in order to restrict the size of the sex sector, with the tacit consent of existing brothel owners, who wish to limit competition.
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This may not be wise, as one analyst argues: “A state statute should be instituted which bases the number of brothel licenses available on something less nepotistic and more objective, such as county population.”
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Nevada’s decentralized approach has the advantage of giving local officials tremendous regulatory flexibility, but it also “allows unstructured and unspoken rules and even discriminatory screening of owners whose rights may be violated.”
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Has stigma declined during the state’s four decades of legal prostitution? Brothel owners aspire to being seen as respectable members of the community—in some towns sponsoring scholarships for high school students, donating to the local Rotary Club, and participating in parades and holiday festivities.
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Polls show that a majority of Nevadans support the status quo, but it is a thin majority of 52 percent (support is higher in the counties where legal brothels exist), and only about a third favor introducing brothels to Las Vegas itself (
table 3.1
). Some rural counties have tried to recriminalize prostitution.
In Lincoln County, prostitution was outlawed in 1978 as a result of a referendum passed by two-thirds of the county’s voters. In 1999, Ely’s city council voted to revoke the licenses of its three brothels and ban prostitution, but the decision was vetoed by the mayor.
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Most other efforts to rescind legal prostitution have been unsuccessful, further demonstrating tolerance for the status quo.
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One reason for this tacit support is the economic benefit to local governments, in the form of revenue from fees and taxes.
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At the same time, tolerance for the brothels does not necessarily mean that the providers have been destigmatized: “The small towns tend to support the brothels, but still sometimes stigmatize the women.”
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As a rule, local women do not work in their hometown’s brothels.

Is Nevada’s legal prostitution a model that could be replicated elsewhere? It certainly has longevity on its side, existing for four decades now, and it demonstrates that legal prostitution
can
exist in modern America and is not a wholly foreign concept. At least some of the regulations would be endorsed by many people, though other rules would be deemed excessive. The tremendous decentralization of authority over the brothels—largely the province of counties and towns—creates a checkered arrangement that some other nations would find problematic. At the same time, we must remember that these brothels are isolated and remote from major population centers; this explains why they have remained fairly uncontroversial but also makes the Nevada model unsuited to nations that wish to legalize prostitution in urban areas.

Readers may not be aware that prostitution is legal and regulated in 13 of Mexico’s 31 states. A study by anthropologist Patty Kelly sheds light on one such system: the Galactic Zone outside Tuxtla in the state of Chiapas.
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Given the small scale of the Zone and Tuxtla’s population of half a million, there remains plenty of illegal prostitution in the area. Moreover, some of the Galactic Zone’s regulations are obtrusive, such as the mandatory health card that includes the worker’s name, photo, and health status and must be renewed every three months (workers are routinely tested for syphilis and HIV).

Yet the Zone’s form of legal prostitution also has some benefits. First, the Zone appears to have broad popular support. In Tuxtla, “prostitution is generally accepted (and sometimes valued) as long as it is confined and invisible,” which is precisely what the Galactic Zone accomplishes.
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Second, Zone
workers have a “great deal of freedom and exercise control over their work.”
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They alone decide when to work and for how long, who they will serve, and their rates; they come and go as they please; and many take extended leaves to visit family in other parts of Mexico. Almost all of the 140 women working in the Zone are independent, free of pimps. Third, while prostitution is hardly lucrative for Zone workers, on a good day the women can earn as much as ten times the daily minimum wage in Chiapas. It is not survival sex: the workers are able to buy consumer goods that they otherwise could not afford, such as nice clothing, cell phones, jewelry, and items for their children. Fourth, working in this arena helps to bolster the women’s sense of control over their lives and their self-esteem. Many began working in the Zone to support their children after escaping an unhappy, abusive, or violent relationship with a husband. The Zone allowed them to break free of dependency on their husbands and, more generally, to “find in prostitution a life better than the one they might have had.”
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There are unpleasant aspects of this highly controlled type of prostitution, but the net effect of working in the Galactic Zone is positive for the women: control over working conditions, lack of coercion, economic advancement, and enhanced self-esteem.

One of the few comparative analyses of legal and illegal prostitution is anthropologist Yasmina Katsulis’s study of Tijuana, Mexico. Katsulis interviewed and observed workers in both spheres: those registered with the authorities, subjected to compulsory health exams, and holding a work card and those who had not registered. (Bars employing sex workers must be licensed and are subject to fines if their workers are not registered, but this does not apply to massage parlors, private brothels, dance halls, or escort services.) Individuals and sexually oriented establishments in Tijuana are visited periodically by government inspectors. About a thousand prostitutes are working legally at any given time, along with a larger number of illegals.

Although the registration and mandatory health checks may seem burdensome, Katsulis documents positive outcomes for those who work legally, and these benefits are quite significant. A major finding is that legal status, in itself, has diffuse effects on the workers: providing social capital, empowerment, and a sense of professionalism. The legal workers have