Is Las Vegas really so bad?

Abigail Goldman, Las Vegas Sun

Saturday, Sept. 8, 2007 | 6:56 a.m.

"There is probably no city in the world where women are treated worse than in Las Vegas."

New York Times columnist, writing about prostitution and the rampant marketing of sex in Sin City

NO, IT'S NOT SO SIMPLE

"Just because a woman works in the sex industry doesn't mean she's victimized."

UNLV sociologist, arguing that the idea that prostitution degrades all women in Las Vegas is just wrong.

A Las Vegas phone book, flipped to page 862, features an advertisement for a "SMALL PETITE & VERY PRETTY" 18-year-old Korean girl who promises "NO HAPPY, NO PAY."

The ad was propped open before a panel of speakers to serve as a symbol of all that is exploitative and degrading to women in Clark County's "culture of prostitution." It was the centerpiece of last week's news conference called by researcher Melissa Farley to release her self-published study , "Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections."

Farley told the gathered media that prostitution creates an "atmosphere in the state where women are not seen as equal to men."

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert drew from Farley's study to conclude: "There is probably no city in America where women are treated worse than in Las Vegas."

Farley and Herbert are the latest entries into the ongoing debate over morality and civil liberty in Nevada.

For some Las Vegans, sizing up the city by its sins - the strip clubs, the explicit advertisements, the promise of girls direct to your room, the ubiquitous illegal prostitution - is too simple.

UNLV sociologist Barbara Brents said the notion that prostitution in Las Vegas degrades all the women who live here is wrong.

"The whole idea that just because prostitution exists here means that all women are sexually powerless and victimized is ridiculous," Brents said. "It's as if people are afraid of women's sexuality."

But UNLV communication professor Erika Engstrom said Las Vegas' hyper-sexualized environment - its advertising in particular - normalizes a dangerous vision of a woman as no more than her body, as if a cocktail waitress in heels and a low-cut leotard becomes her cleavage.

Farley and Herbert made much of the mobile billboards that roll up and down the Strip depicting a half-dressed woman begging to come to your room. Las Vegas residents are all too used to this cheap marketing, Engstrom said, and that's disturbing.

"The very fact that people think it's not a big deal tells you something," she said.

Selling sex is nothing new, but the line between what is and isn't acceptable is always moving in Las Vegas. Sometimes, MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman said, the line is hard to identify.

"There are a lot of things that we do very badly here when it comes to the images of women," Feldman said. "But there are a lot of things that we do well, like giving women really extraordinary opportunities in the workplace, by which I don't mean strippers."

Strippers are a delicate subject.

Herbert wrote , " Many of those girls are either prostitutes or one short step away."

That's a dangerous assumption, one that's out of date with feminists who see empowerment in the sex industry, said Brents, who studies prostitution in the state.

"Just because a woman works in the sex industry doesn't mean she's victimized," she said. "There are women who don't feel victimized at all , but they have a stronger sense of their own sexuality," she said.

That's the sort of statement that makes Farley and other activists who see all prostitution as exploitation cringe.

Dehumanizing women is excused by the cliche that anything goes in Sin City, Farley said, and that encourages sex traffickers to capitalize.

"Sex trafficking happens where men demand to buy women and where there is a context of impunity for buyers," she said. "It takes a village to build a prostitute."

Family Court Judge William Voy spends several hours a week reviewing the cases of juvenile prostitutes who are caught in Las Vegas. He told Herbert: "These cases will tear your heart out."

But he told the Sun he doesn't think that Las Vegas alone is creating these victims. Seventy percent of Voy's juvenile prostitution cases involve minors who come from out of state, from cities where they already worked as prostitutes. Voy noted that most jurisdictions practice a "catch and release" policy when it comes to child prostitutes.

"We're trying to help these kids," he said. "We're trying to make a concerted effort."

Terri Miller, civilian director of Metro's Anti - Trafficking League Against Slavery, said the shadow of the sex industry is cast on every woman who walks the Strip.

"It sets up women to be looked at in a dehumanizing way," Miller said. "Even women who might be just dressed in club attire, cocktail attire, are looked at askew."

Las Vegas, so often marketed as a place to do anything, is what you make of it.

"We build Las Vegas on the concept of adult freedom," Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority spokesman Vince Alberta said. "And that is defined by each individual."

Herbert singled out Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman for his notion that a legal red light district of "magnificent brothels" could eliminate the ills of illegal prostitution in the city.

At a news conference Thursday, Goodman explained there was more to the quote, that he couched his statement with the acknowledgement that his constituents were not ready for legal prostitution in Las Vegas. At least not yet.

"Smart people shouldn't be ostriches," he said. "They should recognize that prostitution takes place throughout the land."