Inside A Well-Regulated Brothel

There’s a lengthy and interesting feature in Business Insider about a Nevada brothel called Sheri’s Ranch. It struck me that the reporter approached the story with an open mind, and it’s free of most of the sex-negativity we’ve come to expect from this kind of story:

Sheri’s Ranch is a compelling demonstration that legalized and well-regulated prostitution can be safe, functional, and profitable.

There’s an ineffable welcoming quality to Sheri’s Ranch. There is no shame, no fear, no judgment to be found anywhere near the place. There’s no illusion to maintain – you’ve arrived, hat in hand, to pay for sex. Not only do the ladies know this, but they’re glad you’re here. Where America’s sexual culture seems far more repressed than that of other countries, Sheri’s turns this paradigm on its ear and welcomes you to indulge in (mostly) whatever it is you want. Their business depends on it.

Fair warning: as you may not know unless you are keeping up with current trends in sex-worker activism, there’s a recent push to stigmatize the use of the word “prostitute” and replace it with “sex worker”. Although prostitute was until recently the polite word used in civilized discourse to replace derogatory terms like “whore” and “hooker” and “street walker”, sex worker advocates and activists now consider “prostitute” to be derogatory as well. This nascent development has not yet been fully communicated to the mainstream, and the reporter of this story is someone who clearly has not yet received this particular memo. I think it’s obvious upon reading that the reporter is using “prostitute” in a descriptive manner with no derogation intended, but those of you who find such usage offensive may be offended by this story nonetheless.

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Nothing To Be Ashamed Of

Just one of dozens of interesting passages in an 1858 letter from a prostitute to The Times. This was part of a public discussion — in which Charles Dickens was involved — on prostitution and the “rescue” of “fallen women”:

I speak of others as well as for myself, for the very great majority, nearly all the real undisguised prostitutes in London, spring from my class, and are made by and under pretty much such conditions of life as I have narrated, and particularly by untutored and unrestrained intercourse of the sexes in early life. We come from the dregs of society, as our so-called betters term it. What business has society to have dregs–such dregs as we? You railers of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, you the pious, the moral, the respectable, as you call yourselves, who stand on your smooth and pleasant side of the great gulf you have dug and keep between yourselves and the dregs, why don’t you bridge it over, or fill it up, and by some humane and generous process absorb us into your leavened mass, until we become interpenetrated with goodness like yourselves? What have we to be ashamed of, we who do not know what shame is — the shame you mean?

Found via a Susie Bright tweet — thanks!

Price List

I don’t care how blonde the Russian girl is … looking at this price list, I’m convinced the better deal is two Malay girls and a couple of bottles of good booze:

Found it on a tumblr.

Porn And Not Being Cheery

As blogger and amateur porn creator I’ve found myself indulging in stuff that some people find squicky or at times even horrid. I have any number of reasons for why I feel no need to apologize for my activities. One, easy to articulate, is that it’s just a brute fact that eros is an outlaw. There’s another, though, which has long lingered in the back of my mind which I haven’t made all that explicit up to very recently, when I’ve found someone who did it for me.

Very intense blogger Sister Y, in a post which at the moment is currently my second all-time favorite (after this) rightly calls out people for what she labels “cheery social policy.”

Why are drugs, prostitution, gambling and suicide illegal, when they clearly give so much relief to suffering people? I think it is because, at a societal level, we are deluded into thinking that happiness is possible, maybe even easy or likely, without these things. I have called this cheery social policy.

The fundamental problem with this sort of cheeriness is the assumption that a good life – a pleasant life – is relatively easy to achieve. Cheery people are able to hold such a belief because they are able to ignore – and perhaps can’t even conceive of – the suffering of a significant minority of the population. A good life is not easily achieved for many of us.

There is a majority belief that we need not use extraordinary means to achieve a happy and meaningful life. Behaviors that deviants engage in, perhaps in pursuit of a tolerable life – weird sex with lots of people, say, or using steroids or marijuana or LSD or benzodiazepines – strike cheery people as perplexing and frightening. For a cheery person, these behaviors are wholly unnecessary – life is perfectly tolerable without them. And they increase the risk of harm! Who wants harm?

What the cheery cannot imagine is the importance, the function of these behaviors, and others like them – the pursuit of the interesting, and the temporary suspension of the intolerability of existence, which intolerability (for many) the cheery do not even perceive, and therefore do not properly weight as a problem.

(Read the whole thing, but only if you’re not easily offended by people who aren’t optimists.)

Reading these paragraphs, something clicked for me, because it “squicky porn” could easily fit onto the list with “drugs, prostitution, gambling, and suicide” as stuff that helps un-cheery people keep their heads above water, hedonically speaking. In my own life, during some of the long, dark periods it probably did have that role. Keep this in mind: something you dislike, something you even find revolting, might be to someone else the difference between keeping going and going under.

Half a lifetime of observation confirms to me that we inhabit a society poisoned by optimism. We belittle the problems of people for whom life is suffering by pretending that with a bit of therapy here or a bit of social reform there or turning to Jesus yon that almost everyone can achieve happiness. Wrong. Dead wrong. Many people have very unpleasant lives, and this unpleasantness is pretty much intractable. Ask Sister Y if you don’t believe me.

The mental model of prohibitionists — at least, those who are not just sadists but who have some fragment of compassion in them — appears to be something like this: life is basically good for everyone, and so if we somehow coercively take away what they call “vices,” (drugs and porn and all) then people will be left with good lives, perhaps better lives. Again, wrong. For many people, life is just not good. The very things you call vices might just be what gets them through their days — or nights.

So there’s another reasons, should you need one, to stand up for the stuff you don’t like. It’s not just that if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like then by the time they come for the stuff you do like you will have already lost. (Thought that in itself is an excellent reason.) It’s that if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, you’ll see not just lives blighted, but lives ended.

Dressing Up To Give A Hand Job

These days, images of prostitution seem to be mostly of spandex-clad hookers crouching behind dumpsters in the dark to give furtive street blowjobs. It was not always thus, especially when houses of prostitution still flourished in America:

Of course by the standards then prevailing, her outfit for this posed porn photo is probably the tawdry spandex tube top of its era. But still.

Via Vintage Lust.

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Here Comes Johnny With His Pecker In His Hand

Here’s an old painting of an even older sort of transaction:

The image comes from here, with the breathless caption: “A 19th century painting crudely depicts the power of wealth and dominion.” Me, I see more dominion in that outstretched palm than I do in the guy with his pecker out.

2013 Update: fixed the broken link and upsized the tiny art that was here.

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