So where I am brothels are legal and are run as legitimate businesses, taxes paid, equal opportunity, etc, etc. From what I hear the ladies that work there are anything but the drug addicted, down and out types that one usually associates with prostitution.
The dope is pretty diverse, anyone willing to share their experiences (as a John or a working girl)?
I can tell you about working at an illegal brothel if that’s any good (as someone who wasn’t working for crack/human trafficked/doing it out of desperation or anything like that).
Where are you, Incref? Just curious. (I don’t have any brothel experience to relate.)
HBO had a reality series about a legal brothel in Nevada. Think it was called Cat House. One of the regular customers was the guy who played Grizzly Adams. It’s probably available on DVD, or maybe by On Demand viewing if you have cable.
Sure - I’d like to hear about it.
Okay - what do you want to know? Background: I worked in a “massage parlour” and an “escort service” for a few months when I was 18. I only had sex with four people for money, one at the brothel (wasn’t there long) and three through the service. Both employers treated me extremely well and whilst I wouldn’t exactly call what I was doing fun nor was it the worst job I’ve had (by a long shot). No I don’t regret it but no I don’t really recommend it either.
If you don’t mind my asking, how well did it pay?
– How did you come into the work?
– Did any friends/family know about it?
– Why did you start/stop?
I wonder if he was actually, secretly gay and just wanted to be seen there…
“Grizzly Adams DID have a beard!”
/Sorry.
//Obscure?
///Sorry.
Dan Hagerty? Damn. I thought he was in family entertainment production. If he were visiting hookers, I wouldn’t have thought he’d have done it on a TV show.
Were these businesses that catered to gay men, or were you having sex with women? 
I’m in Queensland, Australia. Brothels were made legal in 1999 and there quite a few of them in South East Queensland (I would say mostly as I live near a very touristy area with a lot of money and international business). They are only allowed to operate in industrial areas (from memory) and you wouldn’t even know they are there unless you were looking.
Here’s a wikipedia article on it(though I would question the 12 to 16 million visits made each year, the Australian population is only 20 million!).
No personal experience, but a couple of reports on Las Vegas brothel workers gave the following interesting items:
The overall effect seemed to be that it was a rather dull job where you’re with someone or being watched by someone at every moment like cattle.
Living in Vegas I’d be curious to know where these brothels are. I have visited many strip clubs and quite a few prostitutes here and I’ve never heard of any brothels. I have been out of the loop for 15 years though.
There are no legal brothels in Las Vegas or Clark County. The nearest ones (The Chicken Ranch and Sheri’s Ranch) are in Pahrump.
Though she lived and worked in a legal gray area, you may be interested in this book by a prostitute who worked with Ashley Dupré and was sent to Rikers thanks to Eliot Spitzer (oh, the irony! It burns! Well, it did, until Spitzer had all his charges dismissed).
At the top of her game, she got $2,000 an hour, but ten percent went to a booker and half of what was left went to her agency. Only she was ‘dating’ the agency owner so now she’s basically in the poor house. With consistent condom use and monthly STD tests, she was probably having safer sex than many New York women.
Although I haven’t worked in one, I did serve as a research assistant and collected data and conducted interviews in legal brothels.
Despite their legality, it is not necessarily a profession that one aspires to. So, most of the women I interviewed still saw it as a “last resort” type of income, and I would describe them overall as “vulnerable”-- meaning that they tended to have drama-filled, unstable personal lives and lacked many other marketable skills. They were doing the best they could with the cards they had been dealt.
I don’t think it was anyone’s 1st career choice, because despite the legality, there was still a certain amount of shame involved in being payed to have sex and pretend to like it.
Forgot to mention that the author of the book I linked to estimates that 80 percent of the high-price escorts she worked with were heavy drug users if not addicts. She did plenty of drugs herself but, a self-described nympho, didn’t really have any moral qualms about screwing strangers.
On my website, if you do a bit of looking around in a particular section, there is a subtle link to brothels in the area…I only put it there as so many people had asked and I got tired of telling people how to find those locations. Yes, they are illegal in Clark County and other counties with large populations, but just about 45 minutes away…
Can’t help you with any factual data, but I’ve heard that the ‘legit’ places in the US are very expensive- like $1,000+ per ‘experience’. In a way this makes sense since a John is paying for a lot more safety in the process.
While not legal there are apartment complexes here in the Bay Area that are more or less like brothels, but I’m sure that is more common than just in my neck of the woods.