Licensed Brothels: Another Target to Control Women

One of the Nevada businesses hit hard by the COVID pandemic were brothels and the women who work in them. As in legalized prostitution. Brothels were forced to cease operations in 2020 per government edict, though there’ve been many attempts to shut them down—by morality fanatics far too obsessed with consensual sexual activity of others.

In Alienable Rights, first novel of my Other Worldly series, protagonist Rowan Layne is heading home from California to the rural Nevada county where she lives:

Driving past the Mustang exit, I thought how brothels are a Nevada tradition that alienated it—pun intended—from the puritanical and pious, often leading to hyper-drive hypocrisy. The famed Mustang Ranch was the first legal brothel in the US.

Unlike the rest of the country, prostitution, along with gambling, was legal in Nevada, but only in counties with under 700,000 residents pursuant to state law.

In the rural central Nevada county where I once resided, prostitution was legal, but there were no brothels in the economically blighted county seat. Yet the town had three casinos for gambling, and of course a gun store—a stone’s throw from public schools.

An evangelical county sheriff supported an attempt to shut down legal brothels in a place called Mound House, near the county line by Carson City. Efforts instigated by a group called “No Little Girls” that proclaimed: “No little girl wants to grow up to be a prostitute.”

There are any number of red flags with this inordinately patriarchal and patronizing edict, wherein fanatics think it’s their prerogative to decide what’s best for anyone else, especially women and how they choose to make a living. Unfortunately, local government punks on power trips are merely the tyrannical tip of this puritanical iceberg.

Isn’t it ironic how we’re supposedly so concerned with how the Taliban mistreats women in Afghanistan when we have plenty of their twisted conservative ilk shoved onto our judiciary at an alarmingly undemocratic rate?

And funny how this “No Little Girls” group had no concern whatsoever about men who frequent brothels, paying to have sex. Not being able to control the bodily functions of grown women is their greatest picadillo. Yet they never seem to voice outrage at women brutalized by domestic violence. Or parental child abuse.

This sly, secretive group claimed publicly to be about preventing not only prostitution, but human trafficking. Apparently, they chose not to realize such criminal activity victimizes not only girls and women, but boys. Yet they steadfastly and somewhat sickeningly insisted on focusing on “little girls.”

The heinous crime of sex trafficking is an issue for law enforcement and the judiciary, not a private pseudo religious group applying its sanctimonious spin to rid a county of legal brothels.

Additionally, and most pointedly, licensed Nevada brothels don’t employ girls. They are regulated by government officials, including monitoring the age of women who work in them.

Unlike illegal prostitution in larger counties, specifically Washoe encompassing Reno, as well as Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. Fact is, it’s counties where prostitution is illegal that human trafficking and other forms of abuse run rampant.

Nevertheless, fanatics focus on legalized prostitution because they are against it, hence, the rest of us are supposed to be. They base such dictatorial diatribes on religious morals, ordaining that we must practice what they preach, and only have sex in a manner they proscribe pursuant to their evangelical edict. Which they themselves likely don’t practice, given scandalous headlines over decades.

Their beliefs are also all but guaranteed to be bigoted. These vigilantes aren’t simply aiming to control women and the legal, private sexual lives of everyone else. They desire to eradicate anyone who doesn’t look like them, who doesn’t follow their ignorant lead and froth at the mouth over Second Amendment gun rights while being adamantly and autocratically against the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.

Anyone who speaks with adults employed in Nevada’s brothels will quickly learn that some choose this work because it’s lucrative. There is no dearth of men willing to shell out for sexual encounters. Because in regulated brothels, men have to pay, and they are required to practice safe sex.

Is it because male behavior is controlled in legal brothels that some don’t like them? Is this akin to the hypocrisy of males who want to control female reproductive rights, yet they claim “my body, my choice” when it comes to their wearing a mask or getting vaccinated to prevent the spread of COVID?

In Alienable Rights, Rowan Layne discusses the county sheriff’s efforts to shut down brothels and proclaim sex with aliens to be illegal:

It wasn’t his first attempt to boot brothels, this was a renewed effort aiming to stick it to aliens. It failed because the county worried about losing lucrative tax dollars.

This month, a county commissioner was gunning for aliens again. Kip Finkler had no shortage of ideas about controlling how others lived their lives. Except if it involved guns. Then he’s for no restrictions. Unless, I suppose, someone wanted to have sex with a gun.

And as I said in my May 2018 local newspaper column:

Anyone that disturbed by legal brothels perhaps should not reside or hold office in Lyon County, or any other county where state law allows it. They can always move to a county with a population too large for legal prostitution pursuant to state law, or out of the state altogether.

Then again, they’re bound to encounter a greater problem with illegal prostitution and sex trafficking in those counties, and in other states. Because where prostitution is outlawed, only outlaws profit from prostitution. Isn’t that how the argument goes? That and banning something doesn’t solve the problem?

Lyon County, Nevada, 2021 update: The gun worshipping, supposedly anti-prostitution right-wing county commissioners recently voted to rename the justice complex in the county seat of Yerington after the former president. You know, the guy with countless sexual assault claims against him. The degenerate who thinks he’s entitled to grab women by their genitals because he’s famous.

Nevada 2021 update: A certain former Nevada attorney general who was allegedly also backing “No Little Girls,” as well as what he sees as a “God-given Second Amendment right,” has announced a run for the US Senate. He’s of course a Republican, and also attempted to intimidate progressive Clark County voters in the 2020 presidential election.

Meanwhile, anyone want to lay odds on when that bible-quoting Republican senator from Florida who worships a false god will be indicted for sex trafficking?