Getting Screwed by Alison Bass Read Free Book Online Page A

walking back to their hotel late one evening. Her friend, an African American woman from Washington, D.C., who was attending the same conference (and is not a sex worker), refused to pay for the jaywalking ticket and kept asking why she was being ticketed. So police handcuffed her and took her to the local jail, where she had to spend the night. (She was released the next morning with no charges.) Sardina, who needed to be at the conference the next morning (as one of the co-organizers), decided to pay the fine so she wouldn’t get hauled off to jail too.
    â€œThe Vegas cops knew we were in town and they treated us like dogs,” Sardina said. “The cop practically begged me to come after him so he could use his violence on me, but I couldn’t afford to go to jail.”
    Reed says that what sex workers in Las Vegas complain about most is harassment from police officers demanding sex from them. “They say, ‘If you service me, I won’t bust you,’ ” Reed says. “But then you have to continue servicing that officer to stay out of jail.” The Las Vegas police declined repeated requests for interviews.
    To many researchers and advocates, the bifurcation of Nevada’s prostitution laws is hypocritical and discriminatory. Most of the legal brothels are owned by businessmen with close ties to the state’s political infrastructure, according to Barbara Brents, the sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Chuck Lee, the co-owner of Sheri’s Ranch and a former homicide detective from Chicago, for example, was the chief investigator for the district attorney in Clark County (which envelops Las Vegas and its exurbs). Lee owned several successful car dealerships before he bought into Sheri’s Ranch. The brothels are quite profitable for their owners, most of whom are male. (Of the eighteen brothels currently in operation, only two have female owners, Reed says.) The owners receive 50 percent of the sex workers’ earnings.
    The women who work at the brothels are required to pay room and board and various licensing fees, and at many of the brothels, includingSheri’s Ranch and the Chicken Ranch, they must work shifts that usually run two to three weeks long.
    At Sheri’s Ranch, sex workers can leave the premises for only four hours on one designated day a week to run errands and do their banking in Pahrump. Lee insisted that such restrictions are mandated by Nye County regulations. However, Brents says she has never seen anything in the Nye County code that stipulates that women can leave the brothel only once a week for a few hours. “I think it’s [the owners’] interpretation of what the county says they’ll tolerate,” Brents said in an interview. “I don’t think it’s written in the code.”
    Some of the brothels in northern Nevada, outside Reno, do allow sex workers to leave after their daily shifts. And they do not require the twenty-four-hour on-call shifts that Sheri’s Ranch does, Brents says. But all the sex workers must also sign a contract stipulating that they cannot ply their trade outside the brothel walls. 3
    Anna says she doesn’t mind the restrictions — in fact, she chose to work at Sheri’s Ranch because it was a “lockdown” facility and she felt safer knowing that customers couldn’t get in (without permission) and workers couldn’t slip out. However, she acknowledges, “Sometimes I feel stir-crazy, so [on her designated day out], I put on my jeans and T-shirt and go to Walmart.”
    Many sex workers, however, chafe at the brothels’ restrictions and at having to share so much of their hard-earned wages with management. “You don’t have the ability to be independent and call your own shots,” Reed says.
    She and others note that the women working at Nevada’s brothels have few legal rights. They are hired as contractors, not employees,