Laraine Russo Harper. Legal Tender: True Tales of a Brothel Madam. Las Vegas: Stephens Press, 2008.250 pages.
Legal brothel prostitution is a small, enigmatic part of the Nevada experience. “Direct to your room” escorts get all the advertising and notoriety, but prostitution remains illegal in Clark County and therefore Las Vegas. But the legal brothels, the closest of which to Vegas are in tiny Pahrump, tend to fly under the radar.
In Legal Tender, former madam Laraine Russo Harper recounts the six years she spent running an unnamed Pahrump brothel. It’s an often-amusing collection of anecdotes about her time in the sex business.
Harper was recruited to run the brothel by a friend who had been impressed by her tact and commitment as a casino host. After visiting the dingy trailers that comprised the sex palace, Harper accepted and began a thorough renovation, transforming the brothel into a full-service resort.
Most of Legal Tender revolves around Harper’s struggle to bring class to the tacky brothel scene. One chapter recounts the eccentricities of various “ladies” employed in the brothel, while another discusses the foibles of the customers. It’s told in a humorous vein that tends toward the sophomoric side. Take, for example, this extract:
I laughed as I compared my new endeavor with the gaming business. I remembered in the casino industry that “BJ” stood for “blackjack.” Not anymore! It had a whole new meaning now. Many things would take on new meanings from that point forward. (p. 24)
There’s a great deal of that in the pages to follow. Also, much of the humor is at the expense of the customers, or at least their personal hygiene and fashion sense–not exactly a selling point to the potential patron.
The details of how the brothel works are interesting from many perspectives, but Harper isn’t content to just tell us about life as a madam. Instead, she wants us to believe that brothels are beautiful, egalitarian oases of fulfillment: “The ladies,” she writes, ” did not judge a person based on their looks as we, as a society, tend to do. It was a business and everyone was a potential customer.” Harper goes on about how it doesn’t matter what kind of car you drive or what you do for a living: the brothel ladies are there to make you happy. Couldn’t you say that about any business? I’m sure the folks at Trader Joe’s don’t ring up my order because they like the cut of my jib. They’ve got stuff to sell, and I’ve got money. If I didn’t give them money, they wouldn’t let me walk out of the store with my groceries. There’s nothing noble about it, unless you want to wrap it into the bigger story of capitalism liberating Europe from its feudal slumber. But that happened several hundred years ago, and I don’t think that a Pahrump brothel can take credit for it.
The book’s worst conceit is that the brothel is about more than exchanging sex for cash:
The ladies who worked in the brothel were indeed dream makers. They weren’t giving fifty-dollar blow jobs in someone’s back seat or giving twenty-dollar hand-jobs in an alley. They fulfilled fantasies. They took you to heights you’ve always dreamed about experiencing. They role-played and pampered and catered. (p. 210)
There’s certainly an argument to be made in favor of legal prostitution. I’m not saying it’s a good one, but there merit to the idea that two consenting adults should be allowed to do what they want. But it’s still selling sex for money, as opposed to sex between people who feel a shared intimacy (or shared whatever). I can understand not being judgmental about it, but there’s no reason to glorify it as something that it isn’t. Similarly, Harper spends a great deal of time talking about what smart businesswomen the “ladies” are, and how they earn more than professionals in more traditional areas like real estate, finance, or retail. But she shoots herself in the foot by discussing the large number of brothel workers who have brutal pimps and are addicted to drugs. There’s a real disconnect, it seems, between the marketing material and the reality here.
There are certainly some interesting stories in here, but the writing style tends to drag the narrative down. Reading the book, you’ll find out that brothels are businesses just like any other, with all the petty bickering and dickering that you’d see anywhere else. That may be Harper’s most significant contribution to the debate about legalized prostitution.