Why do brothels look like that?

My latest article addresses a pressing question: why do brothels look like that? Specifically, I’m interested in the interior décor of brothels. There is a decent amount written about their exteriors, and about where they’re located, in terms of planning and zoning. There’s a bit written about the parts of their interiors which can be seen from the street (their lighting mostly), but there’s much much less work addressing how they look inside. Last year I published an article in Social & Cultural Geography with a colleague, Claire Weinhold, where we argue the interiors of brothels are asked to do lots of things besides providing a functional work environment.

Anyone who has been inside my house will immediately grasp that my enthusiasm for brothel interiors is deeply sincere. I have a TradeMe alert for furniture listings which include the word ‘velvet’, I love a throw pillow or five, and use an assortment of lamps instead of the big light always. I’ve got a neon sign in my bedroom. The kind of brothel interior I absolutely froth over is probably the type which is most immediately identifiable as a brothel interior, but as we discuss in the article, in the local decriminalised context, it’s just one among several types.

Above: decorative details from a brothel I worked at in the mid-2010s (not one discussed in the article). Not pictured, but the intro room carpet was identical to the carpet at my grandparents’ house.

The idea for the article came because Claire and I both had some interesting bits of data about brothel interiors which didn’t quite fit into the other things we’d published. Mine came from the surveys of news reports about sex work I’d looked at through the 2010s, and Claire’s came from a series of interviews she carried out with sex workers, brothel owners and brothel managers. We both felt that brothel interiors were being used as a way to communicate particular ideas about the business and the workers they housed, split into two broad themes: the physical environment as a response to stigma, and the physical environment as a marketing tool.

Brothels have historically been assumed to be sites of contagion, and the sex workers inside are often stigmatized as vectors of disease – arguments about the threat from moral or literal dirtiness are often made when people want to object to the presence of a brothel in a particular location, too. Correspondingly, one of the most straightforward counternarratives which we saw being put forward by brothel owners and operators was about the literal cleanliness of the brothels. They’d discuss laundry, polished floors, and sometimes would explicitly note that the focus on cleanliness and tidiness was intended to reassure clients that the business was ‘nice’.

Another way that sex work stigmatization was countered through the interiors of brothels was by presenting them as being polished, groomed, ‘tasteful’, and looking like well kept suburban homes. Often these would be appointment only brothels, where clients were given the address directly, eliminating the need for any signage or street frontage – in these cases, owners would emphasise that discretion was something they traded on. This both allays concerns from clients who may be concerned about privacy, but also emphasises the relative invisibility of brothels as a brothel. Objections to the presence of a brothel in a particular suburb frequently rely on what we might call ‘stigma nuisance’, or the potential for the brothel to affect a neighbourhood’s reputation and property values. A pre-emptive assurance that the brothel looks indistinguishable from any quiet suburban home, and that inside it is ‘immaculate’ tries to avert this panic. Similarly, the descriptions of the brothels would often situate them as being unthreatening, ‘light and airy’ or soft and acceptably feminine, rather than overtly sexualized spaces. Brothels which resemble cozy, well- maintained homes, can be distinguished from stigmatizing ideas about criminality and transgressive or dangerous femininity: relocated into the domestic sphere.

Sometimes brothel owners discussing the décor of their businesses would do something I’ve described in some of my other research, which was elevating their relative respectability by making dismissive comments about other businesses, shifting stigma onto other brothels. One owner told Claire, “It’s not like a walk-in place where men see the lights and go, oh I’ll have a shag.” In one of the articles I analysed, an owner explained to the journalist that at other brothels “anyone can walk in off the streets and they chuck down a towel.” Again, looking at how objections to brothels and other sexual entertainment venues tend to be structured, they’ll often include some suggestion that the men who frequent them are dangerous and deviant, and a brothel will attract ‘undesirable’ men to a suburb (as though no one who lives nearby will ever be a patron…) What’s happening in these comments is that the interiors of the brothels are being used to communicate something about what kind of man will frequent them (usually a class-based claim) and simultaneously offering a reassurance that their brothel is different.

Brothels in New Zealand are quite limited in how they can advertise. The Prostitution Reform Act has stipulations which prevent brothels from placing ads on radio, television, cinemas, or in newspapers or magazines aside from the classified ads section. Walk-in brothels who advertise their address might be able to put up signage, but this is sometimes restricted through by-laws. Appointment only brothels who want to retain their discreet reputation can’t even do that. So how do you let prospective clients know that you exist? Brothel owners have to find creative ways to get attention on their businesses, and some of the language in news media coverage is pretty unmistakably advertorial. We get brothels described by journalists as looking like “a five star hotel”, or we’re told that “from luxurious bed linen to ornate mirrors and gilded tissue boxes, the attention to detail is exquisite”. As the owners explained to Claire, and sometimes also to journalists, the décor of these brothels is meant to signal luxury, ease, comfort and safety to the clients who visit them, but arguably this actually begins well before they step in the front door. Interiors which are luxurious and which can be described in glowing terms in media coverage are one way to market a business indirectly.

But where does this leave the kind of brothel décor which has influenced my own velvet filled home? Some brothel owners were actively dismissive of these older stylistic signs. One explained that when she bought her business, it had the look of a “chintzy, boudoir bordello” offering details like a “chaise longue with a horrible pattern and twirly whirly details” and “a four poster bed”. Another said that “dark corridors and red velvet curtains” were “dodgy” and ‘long gone”. As with the interiors that look like a neutral and airy hotel room, though, these more traditional décor elements are also doing something; they’re not incidental, they serve a purpose. Although appointment only (usually higher priced) brothels often try to give the impression that only they care about client impressions and cleanliness this is clearly not the case. A shift-supervisor at a walk-in brothel explained to Claire that she’d taken the time to add various decorative touches to each room, and in one of the few media items which does describe a walk-in brothel, the journalist sits in on a staff meeting which includes a reminder about attention to detail when cleaning the rooms, with an eye to the first impression on clients. Brothels do which ‘look like a brothel’ also very distinctly don’t look like a hotel room, or like your own bedroom, or like very many other kinds of space at all. A brothel which has chandeliers, eighteen throw pillows, a giant gilt framed mirror and a velvet chaise lounge looks otherworldly, distinctive and clearly different to client’s day to day lives, which can enhance the experience. Although some brothel owners rejected these aesthetic codes, many brothels in practice do maintain some or all of them, recognising that a brothel which looks like a sleek new build hotel doesn’t reflect the desires of the entire market.

So why does it matter if the interior of a brothel is being asked to do all these different things simultaneously? Obviously to some extent the interior of all businesses communicate some information about the desired clientele, and hope to produce a particular response in the people who visit. The need for the interior to be responding to various stigmatizing stereotypes though, is quite unique to brothels. The stigma of the brothel relates to what happens inside them, and the people who work there. Correspondingly, when a brothel owner emphasises the premises are tidy, hygienically clean, unobtrusive, and reflective of a domestic middle-class femininity, these claims are implicitly also being made about the women who work there. When particular aesthetic codes are dismissed as being unacceptable, stigma sliding from one brothel to pool more heavily on others, that has implications for the workers there too. Who works in what kind of brothel is often (although not always) divided along lines of race, class, age, and body size; the production of one aesthetic norm as less subject to stigma tends to reinforce existing disparities within the sex working community.

The full article is here, and all open access if you’d like to read a more in-depth discussion of this!