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tame. For each of the two months she spent at the Chicken Ranch, she cleared $14,000. She didn’t enjoy sharing her earnings with management, but she did like the feeling that she was safe inside the brothel walls. “I knew I wasn’t going to be harassed,” she says.
    Joi, who is now an independent sex worker running her own escort service, says there is still drug use among women working in and outside the brothels in Nevada. “I still keep up with things, and from what I’m seeing, they have a heroin problem really bad in Reno. Heroin and meth are kind of taking over,” she says.
    At Sheri’s Ranch, however, management says it has zero tolerance for illegal drugs. “The girls know that drugs are totally illegal at the ranch; their luggage is subject to be searched when they come to the ranch,” owner Chuck Lee says. “And we check the entire premises with trained dogs,” including the women’s private rooms. Their alcohol intake is also restricted. According to Anna, she and the other ladies are allowed six drinks a day, one per hour. And that’s fine with her. “That helps keep us sharp and not make silly decisions while we’re negotiating,” she says.
    If management does find drugs in the workers’ rooms or luggage, they are asked to leave, says the madam at Sheri’s Ranch, a plump, maternal-looking woman in her forties who wished to be identified by her first name only: Dena. “Some brothels are more tolerant,” Dena says. “I know we lose certain girls because we are so strict about it. But we don’t want them here anyway.”
    Dena first came to Sheri’s Ranch on a tour with her then mother-in-law, who was a member of a senior women’s group called the Red Hats. Dena had been working in the Las Vegas casinos and was a stay-at-homemother at the time. But she seemed so curious about life at the brothel that the general manager asked if she would like to work there part-time as a hostess.
    â€œIt eventually evolved into a full-time job,” Dena says. The job of a hostess is to chat up the customers who walk in the door and see what they’d like. Some have already been corresponding by email with a specific woman (the women’s work emails are posted with their profiles on the Sheri’s Ranch website), so they will ask for her directly. Other customers might venture into the dimly lit bar, where they can sit and drink with several of the ladies and make their choice that way. And still others prefer the old-fashioned ritual of the lineup.
    The day I was at Sheri’s Ranch, a twenty-something couple dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts strolled in, the woman hanging nervously onto her partner’s arm. Dena greeted them in the bar and later told me they asked for a lineup. “Threesomes are one of our specialties. Usually, there’s a lot of correspondence between couples and a particular woman, but this is a very young couple and they may not have known they could do that,” she says. “They wanted to base their decision off visuals. They’ve done this before; they’re from Iceland.”
    The lineup takes place in the main lounge at Sheri’s Ranch, a large, elegant room with high ceilings, ornate light-yellow couches, and a wall of windows open to the pool and waterfall in the backyard. Several large paintings of Rubenesque nudes adorn the walls, and a black baby grand piano sits in one corner of the lounge, right next to a mounted poster explaining the services that Sheri’s offers, everything from a “straight lay” to a drag party and a ménage à trois.
    The lineup for the Icelanders occurred while I was having lunch with Dena and two other staff members in a red-leather booth in the bar. Several of the scantily dressed ladies who had been sitting in the bar began strolling out into the main lounge, although I didn’t really take note until the music