Getting Screwed by Alison Bass Read Free Book Online

month; they can’t get a license to work without clean test results. Since that law went into effect during the AIDS scare in the 1980s, no brothel worker has tested positive for HIV . 1 (Nevada state law has required condoms in the brothels since 1988. 2 )
    â€œWhat draws customers here is that they know they’re not going to bring something home with them,” says Chuck Lee, a Las Vegas businessman who has co-owned Sheri’s Ranch since 2001. In fact, the major drawing card for Nevada’s brothels is the safe environment they offer — for both clients and sex workers. While Sheri’s Ranch is more opulent than the Chicken Ranch (the brothel next door whose name was made famous by the movie, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas ), its focus on safety is shared by the state’s other brothels. Nevada is the one state in the United States that has officially legalized prostitution, but only within the confines of heavily regulated brothels restricted to sparsely populated counties well outside resort areas such as Las Vegas and Reno.
    Contrary to what many visitors believe, all other forms of prostitution remain illegal in Nevada, even on Las Vegas’s gaudy Strip, where scantilyclad women pose for pictures with tourists and Mexican immigrants hand out cards advertising “hotassescorts” and free admission to the city’s many strip clubs. Sex is everywhere in Sin City, and it is a big part of the resort’s draw for traveling businessmen and tourists. According to the sex workers I interviewed, the casinos usually look the other way when elegantly dressed escorts pick up men at the casino bars and nightclubs. The yellow pages in every hotel room contain pages and pages of escort service ads for “Barely legal flawless thin and busty blonde” or “Beautiful soccer mom to your room, busty, slim, discreet.”
    Despite the carefully cultivated atmosphere that anything goes in Las Vegas, the city spends a lot of money enforcing its laws against prostitution. Like other local police departments, the Las Vegas Police Department receives funding from the U.S. government’s antitrafficking task force. In 2012 and 2013, for instance, the department was awarded a million dollars from the Department of Justice for “antitrafficking,” according to a University of Nevada researcher. But police use the yellow pages and online ads not to go after traffickers but to entrap the many sex workers who are working in Las Vegas by choice, sex workers and researchers say. The vast majority of sex workers arrested in Sin City are not trafficking victims, although once in custody, some claim they are victims to avoid prosecution.
    Under the new antitrafficking laws, “police have to ask [the sex workers they arrest], ‘Are you a trafficking victim?’ ” says Jennifer Reed, who is involved in a multisite study of Las Vegas sex workers as part of her Ph.D. dissertation in psychology for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “And so some say they’re trafficked so they won’t get put in jail. And, of course, that inflates the [trafficking] statistics.” Las Vegas police are so vigilant about prostitution that they recently stopped two young African American sisters (who were in Sin City on vacation) when the women tried to hail a cab to take them home from a nightclub one night. “They thought we were prostitutes,” said one of the sisters, both professionals, who were eating at the same Bavarian restaurant as I was that evening. Such harassment is hardly an isolated incident in Las Vegas, many say. “The police target minorities,” Reed says.
    They also target anyone who is out late at night wearing provocative clothing. Cris Sardina, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother and former sex worker from Arizona who was in Las Vegas in July 2013 for the fifth annual Desiree Alliance conference, was arrested with a friend for jaywalking while