by Alexa Albert
The professional tricks were smug because they knew that if a party was unsatisfactory, the client could complain to management and receive restitution, despite the woman’s independent-contractor status. When professional tricks complained that a woman had charged too much, stiffed them on time, or even been bitchy, Mustang management’s response was that the customer was always right. “I know what the prices run,” Stewart said. “If a girl gets out of line, I just tell the floor maid. She’ll inform the girl, ‘Stewart’s a very good customer and he better come out smiling or you can just pack your bags right now.’ If the girl doesn’t treat me right during a party, the floor maid may ask if I want to pick another girl, or she may refund half the money I spent, docking it from the girl’s books. Management doesn’t want to lose a regular like me.”
He was right about that. Stewart spent $30,000 to $40,000 a year on parties at Mustang. That sum gave me new appreciation for what his regularity as a customer meant to the women and the industry. In recognition of his loyal patronage, Mustang management agreed to sell Stewart $3,000 worth of passes for $2,000, which he split up among his friends.
Stewart, Roger, and Tom were a constant presence at the brothel. I imagined I would be hard-pressed to find any other outsiders more obsessed with this subculture than they were. Needless to say, I was wrong. I found just such a group on that great and universal haven for obsessed loners, the Internet.
9 .. BROTHEL.COM
With the elegance of a soap opera starlet at the Emmy Awards, Annabella rose as her name was announced. Forty-six pairs of eyes in a banquet room, mine among them, followed the tall, statuesque beauty as she strode to the front of the room to collect her prize: a five-inch-by-four-inch object made of clear glass cut in the shape of a diamond with a plaque fixed to its base that bore her name and the words COURTESAN OF THE YEAR.
Described by her admirers as a cross between Christie Brinkley and Lisa Kudrow, Annabella had worked as a model, posing for porn magazines, before becoming a brothel prostitute. Of half–American Indian and half-Irish descent, she had large gray eyes, a sparkling smile, and thick blond hair that cascaded down her back. She wore a shimmery gold lame gown that would have made the late Sally Conforte green with envy, especially because Annabella worked at one of Mustang Ranch’s biggest competitors, the Sagebrush, located in Carson City.
I had never met Annabella before that night, but I had heard about her. Customers and former Sagebrush prostitutes who had moved over to Mustang Ranch spoke in awed tones not only of her beauty but of her lengthy and extraordinary parties. Men routinely compared her talents to those of a gifted psychic or therapist, describing her as intuitively alert to the sort of woman each man wanted her to be and then somehow capable of becoming that woman. “She is totally service-oriented,” one client told me. “She gets completely into your mind, body, and soul. You are her world for the duration of the party.” Annabella was also known to be pricey. Rumor had it that a “straight lay” with her typically cost $1,100.
Annabella seemed genuinely appreciative of the award. “Thank you all so very much,” she said demurely. During the standing ovation that followed, she discreetly tried to dab away the tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.
It was late July 1998, and I had found myself a guest at the second annual CyberWhoreMonger Convention, a gathering of forty-some men and a handful of prostitutes who communicated by way of a customer-designed website—the Georgia Powers Bordello Connection—devoted to their shared obsession, Nevada’s licensed brothels. The men were a motley crew straight out of the ballroom scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show—an assortment of dementedly exuberant men of all shapes and ages, most with glasses and giddy smiles on their faces. Until tonight, most of the guests had never laid eyes on one another and only knew each other by their computer pseudonyms.
As guests first entered the private room at the restaurant, Reno’s Famous Murphy’s, event organizers handed them a laminated card that read: “The bearer of this card is a member of that group known as the CyberWhoreMongers. Membership in this group signifies that this person is of low moral character, is known to consort with disreputable companions and spend his money foolishly.” The card certifying membership had been issued by the Chief CyberWhoreMonger, who went by the handle Bashful and who happened to be my date for the evening.
I had had only brief contact with Bashful before the convention. Several years earlier, he had contacted me by e-mail to ask if he could post my condom breakage study on his website, to inform men of the results. Through the grapevine, he learned that I was back at Mustang and once again e-mailed me to invite me to be his date for the convention. Curious, I accepted.
Bashful picked me up at Mustang before the convention in a caramel-colored GMC truck with out-of-state plates. I was to discover that he was deeply proud of knowing all there was to know about Nevada’s brothels, and he pumped me about my experiences at Mustang. I, in turn, learned that Bashful was thirty-nine, that he worked as a computer programmer for the U.S. military, and that he was eager to share his version of the tale of the origins of the Internet’s first website dedicated to legalized prostitution.
Bashful first learned of Nevada’s brothels in 1985, when, as an undergraduate physics major, he overheard one of the graduate students bragging about his summer sexual escapades there. Bashful sought out a book devoted to the subject, Gerald Paine’s A Bachelor’s Guide to the Brothels of Nevada, the forerunner of J. R. Schwartz’s Official Guide to the Best Cat Houses in Nevada. (Written by enthusiastic customers, both are quippy, subjective guidebooks for other men.) At the time, Bashful was still a virgin. “I never had any girlfriends, no women at all. I always put it off. I always thought that when I went to college I was going to win the Nobel Prize in physics and marry a movie star. Then I realized that I wasn’t a very good physicist and got into computers. I figured that someday I would worry about getting a girlfriend. The fact is I just put everything off.”
Including losing weight. Bashful had always been overweight, and now he weighed over three hundred pounds. An immense man with a full beard, he resembled a lumbering bear. But beneath his thick, functional wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes betrayed a vulnerability and shy charm. Bashful’s procrastination in pursuing intimate sexual relationships was intricately linked with his procrastination in losing weight. “It’s like the Groucho Marx line: I would never join a club that would have me. I wouldn’t want a woman who would want a large mammal such as myself.”
Bashful did lose some weight—one of two times in his life that he got down to 190 pounds—before he first ventured out to the brothels, intent on losing his virginity. It was May 1986, a month shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. “When I got to Mustang, there was a huge lineup of girls, and the bar area was jam-packed with guys. The hostess asked if I would like to pick a lady. The place was silent, everyone was looking at me. I picked a girl on the far left who seemed to be a little biggerbusted than normal, and had a fairly nice figure. Then—and nothing like this has ever happened since—all the guys in the bar started cheering. In my mind, I could see hats flying up in the air as they cheered, but I doubt that happened. She was a real nice girl, and I had a real nice evening. I still remember driving back to Reno afterwards, it was such a sense of elation. It was just wonderful. It was truly more than I had expected.”
But the loss of his virginity didn’t encourage Bashful to try his luck with dating or to slim down. Instead, he became preoccupied with the brothels, making trips out to Nevada twice a year. “I became addicted, obsessed, maybe more than I should have. It was just too easy.” Bashful kept his semiannual brothel migrations secret until 1994; he was then a graduate student in electrical engineering, enrolled in digital processing and filtering classes. He had begun surfing the Internet and stumbled across the alt.sex.services Usenet newsgroup, a bulletin board devoted to sex-related material. Here, much to his surprise, he found two items pertaining to Nevada’s legal brothels: Blake Wilfong’
s “Unofficial Chicken Ranch FAQ” and a message posted by a man about a girl named Jennifer at the Cherry Patch II brothel.
First posted in October 1994 by a computer scientist who had worked as a consultant to NASA, the “Unofficial Chicken Ranch FAQ” was meant to “make information about the Chicken Ranch more widely available to men who might wish to go there.” Wilfong claimed he had no affiliation with the brothel, apart from being a customer for over eight years. The website detailed the legality, regulation, and safety of the Chicken Ranch and offered Wilfong’s testimonial that “after approximately one hundred parties with thirty-three ladies at the Chicken Ranch over a period of eight years, I have never contracted an STD.”
Wilfong gave readers a slew of suggestions, ranging from advice on transportation to and from the brothel, to the best hours to visit. He even offered a tip on how to handle the tricky task of remembering women’s names during lineup: “Don’t feel bad; most customers can’t remember all the ladies’ names. It’s fine to say ‘the second from the right’ or ‘the lady in the blue dress.’ But here is a way you can easily name the lady you want: As the first lady comes out and introduces herself, memorize her name. Now, as the second lady introduces herself, decide whether you’d rather party with her or the first lady. If you want to party with the second lady, forget about the first lady and memorize the second lady’s name. Continue this process as the lineup forms. This way, you only have to remember one name, the name of the most attractive lady you have seen so far.”
Wilfong’s candid and public admission to being a trick surprised Bashful. But he was even more astonished by the second item posted, the message about Jennifer at the Cherry Patch II. “Frankly, it was far more explicit than anything I was interested in. He talked about fisting her and all. I was thinking, God I can’t believe that this is on the Internet. But he claimed that she wanted it out there, on the Internet, and that she was getting customers from it. He was apparently getting a lot of e-mail from guys who wanted to know more about the brothels and prostitution in general. Finding these two documents had a big effect on me. For the very first time, I realized just how powerful a medium the Internet could be.”
Inspired by both men’s outspokenness as well as by Gerald Paine and J. R. Schwartz’s guidebooks, Bashful set out to engineer a cyberspace guide for consumers to Nevada’s legal brothels. In November 1994, Bashful first posted to alt.sex.services a text file with questions he thought people might have about the brothels and his best answers. “I was nervous. I thought the FBI was going to bust down my front door and arrest me that next morning on pandering charges or some such nonsense. I thought maybe people were tracing me somehow. But it’s never been a problem.” Within hours, Bashful had received a response from a man who said he had visited a number of the brothels and preferred the smaller houses. This man also informed Bashful of the double-buzz trick—ringing the doorbell twice, the signal created by the brothels for nonclients to use upon arrival at the outside gate—to avoid getting a lineup, which Bashful ended up including in his FAQ. “That’s one thing that guys really dig. They love the double-buzz trick, because they don’t want to see a lineup. They just want to go in, settle down, look around, and take their time.”
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 extende
d 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.
