{"id":23706,"date":"2011-11-28T13:30:28","date_gmt":"2011-11-28T18:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=23706"},"modified":"2011-11-29T11:00:55","modified_gmt":"2011-11-29T16:00:55","slug":"the-desert%e2%80%99s-daughters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/28\/the-desert%e2%80%99s-daughters\/","title":{"rendered":"The Desert\u2019s Daughters"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_23708\" style=\"width: 584px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/mcandrews1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23708\" class=\"size-full wp-image-23708\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/mcandrews1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"574\" height=\"459\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/mcandrews1.jpg 574w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/mcandrews1-300x239.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-23708\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From &#39;Nevada Rose.&#39; Photograph by Marc McAndrews.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Not long ago, I became obsessed with sex work. I spent hours poring over the autobiographies of peep-show workers. I grilled my friends who dabbled in fetish work about their jobs, and I spent more time that I\u2019d like to admit in strip clubs and all-nude revues. The tantalizing intimacy of the performance was only part of the thrill; the real allure, the draw that sent me to club after club in San Francisco, Miami, New York, Amsterdam, and London, was the desire to understand what it is like to take off your clothes in front of strangers for money.<\/p>\n<p>I got a revealing peek into this world on a recent Friday, at an event for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Nevada-Rose-Marc-McAndrews\/dp\/1884167152\"><em>Nevada Rose: Inside the American Brothe<\/em><em>l<\/em><\/a>, a book about that illicit alternate reality. Marc McAndrews, a photographer from Reading, Pennsylvania, spent five years in the desert documenting the secret\u2014albeit, legal\u2014world of the American brothel. He visited more thirty brothels in Nevada, often spending a week or more at each establishment, including the infamous Moonlite Bunny Ranch featured in the HBO documentary <em>Cathouse<\/em>, as well as smaller brothels scattered throughout the region, sporting names like Angel\u2019s Ladies and Sue\u2019s Fantasy Club. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>At the event, held in the basement of the Museum of Sex in Chelsea, the space reverberated with a nervous curiosity recognizable to anyone who has spent time in a strip club or a sex club\u2014the uneasy air of a group that doesn\u2019t know quite what to expect and is reluctant to appear unaccustomed to the rites and rituals in the world of sex work.\u00a0Liquor helped even out the mood, as attendees ordered drinks with titillating names like My Bloody Valentine and Hot Sex in the City, and bartenders handed out free shots of spiced rum.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_23709\" style=\"width: 584px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/nevadarose.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23709\" class=\"size-full wp-image-23709\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/nevadarose.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"574\" height=\"459\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/nevadarose.jpg 574w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/nevadarose-300x239.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-23709\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From &#39;Nevada Rose.&#39; Photograph by Marc McAndrews.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>\u201cI had this whole idea about what I\u2019d find,\u201d began McAndrews, \u201cbut I was surprised at what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDid you know,\u201d he continued, \u201cthat the food is amazing?\u201d Or that a \u201cdirty hustle\u201d refers to any act of dishonesty in the ranches, like trying to poach a customer from another woman? Or that some houses have specific protocols, like waiting a set period of time before approaching visitors, so that they don\u2019t feel rushed? With each tidbit of information, the crowd tittered, relaxed, happy to be more confidante than clientele.<\/p>\n<p>The people portrayed in the book\u2014the women who work in the brothels, the men who arrive to pay for their company, and the husband-and-wife or mother-and-son teams that operate them\u2014make for fascinating subjects. But the photographs also humanize the people and places they portray. So, too, did the event.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_23713\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/leglamp.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23713\" class=\"size-full wp-image-23713\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/leglamp.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"382\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/leglamp.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/leglamp-235x300.jpg 235w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-23713\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From &#39;Nevada Rose.&#39; Photograph by Marc McAndrews.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Bunny Love and Mika Tan, two of the woman featured in the book, chatted with the audience during a Q &amp; A about how they balance their lives beyond the brothel.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s paying my bills and I enjoy it,\u201d said Love. \u201cI\u2019m Bunny Love and I\u2019m also Sarah. I have a roommate and a boyfriend, I work half the year and snowboard the rest of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In Love\u2019s photograph, she leans against a sliding door, wearing white heels, a blue bra and neon yellow bikini bottoms, the sun warming her face and figure. Onstage, she made jokes about her job, slinging one-liners while dressed in a black-and-blue checkered zip-up hoodie, distressed jeans, and white Vans.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI worked retail before this, so I\u2019m used to getting treated like shit,\u201d she cracked before turning serious.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople come for more than sex,\u201d said Love, who gave her age as twenty-six. They come to talk, for certain fetish acts, to watch movies with someone, even for informal grief counseling.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the most captivating thing about the hundreds of photographs featured inside the book isn\u2019t the suggestion of sex that seeps out of every crevice, the promise of pleasure that lurks behind each half-open doorway; it\u2019s not the vast expanses of exposed cleavage and thigh, nor the resplendent rooms, draped in gold curtains and leopard sheets; it\u2019s not even the gazes of the women\u2014steady, coy, tired, beckoning, defiant.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_23710\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/mcandrewslast.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23710\" class=\"size-full wp-image-23710\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/mcandrewslast.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"375\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/mcandrewslast.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/mcandrewslast-240x300.jpg 240w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-23710\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From &#39;Nevada Rose.&#39; Photograph by Marc McAndrews.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>It\u2019s the minutiae. It\u2019s the photographs of yellowed time cards waiting to be punched, the shelves of chipped coffee mugs, rows of nail polish in a makeshift beauty salon, a pair of discarded Lucite stilettos. Bureaucracy is everywhere in the pictures. There are stacks of paperwork to be filed, piles of egg timers used to measure out the minutes of each customer\u2019s visit. There are intercoms, telephones, and panic buttons in all the rooms. It is finally not the illictness but the banality of it all that is most riveting: automatic cash machines, heaps of freshly laundered towels, canisters of baby wipes on an end table, shift schedules scrawled in dry-erase marker on a white board. These images make the viewer understand that behind the facade of a world where pleasure and fantasy are distilled to a commodity, there are still the unmistakable trappings of domesticity, of office work: the mundane reality of a job, like any other.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/jennydeluxe\">Jenna Wortham<\/a> is a GIF maker and news breaker for<\/em> The New York Times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not long ago, I became obsessed with sex work. I spent hours poring over the autobiographies of peep-show workers. I grilled my friends who dabbled in fetish work about their jobs, and I spent more time that I\u2019d like to admit in strip clubs and all-nude revues. The tantalizing intimacy of the performance was only [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":266,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[5050,5052,5047,5046,5051,5048,5049,1533,5045,3161],"class_list":["post-23706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-brothel","tag-bunny-love","tag-cathouse","tag-marc-mcandrews","tag-mika-tan","tag-moonlite-bunny-ranch","tag-museum-of-sex","tag-nevada","tag-nevada-rose","tag-photographs"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Desert\u2019s Daughters by Jenna Wortham<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 28, 2011 \u2013 Not long ago, I became obsessed with sex work. 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