ABSTRACT
In about the mid-twentieth century, professional promotion of tourism in Nevada focused on selling sexuality in urban areas, not selling sex per se. This chapter discusses two main points. First, brothels were a key part of the development of Nevada's tourist economy. Second, there was a diverse array of sexual leisure services in this early tourist economy. In pre-modern cities including Moscow, Shanghai, and Paris, courtesans were important components of elite culture, providing mannered and educated companionship as much as sensual pleasures to men in a society dominated by contractual marriages. Once industrialization began, prostitution changed. As modern cultures and industrial economies dramatically changed social, economic, and political relations, so too was the business of prostitution affected. Prostitution expanded. As industrial factories focused on efficiency and mass production, a new market for quick, reproducible sex opened, which was demanded and supplied by middle- and working-class men and women.
