Paris, France. Saturday, payday, around nine o'clock in the evening. There is still daylight because it is June, and on the small streets off the Boulevard Barbès the men line up outside the doorways. Almost all are Algerians, neatly dressed. One holds a bouquet. They stand quietly, orderly, except when the door opens and they strain to see the half-dressed woman who lets a customer out. The police station is a few yards away, but the officers on patrol show no interest in the line of customers. It is like other poor neighborhoods in Paris—drab houses, small shops, and cafés—but something is different. After a few moments, the observer realizes there are no women in the streets. They have been left behind in Algeria while their husbands earn a living at the lowest-paying jobs in Paris.

Far apart both geographically and culturally, these three scenes have one significant common ingredient: sex is bought and sold with, if not the approval, at least the tolerance of both the police and the community.

The picture in most American cities is very different. The prevailing policy toward prostitution is "get rid of it." No one, including the state legislatures which mandate this policy, believes this is possible. But the consensus that official recognition of sex as a business would be immoral prevents thinking about prostitution in any other way.

The burden of enforcing the policy, of course, falls on the police. And they are attacked from all sides. Required by law to be enemies of the prostitutes, the police are also harassed by the public they are trying to protect. If the crime rate goes up in a city, the police are criticized for using scarce resources to chase whores. If, in order to make an arrest, a cop disguises himself as a customer, civil libertarians charge "entrapment."

Lawmakers bold enough to propose licensing prostitution or zoning for it make few friends. Neighborhood groups and business associations say, "Sure, an entertainment zone is a great idea, but not here." Feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women oppose licensing and support decriminalization of prostitution, insisting that women have a right to do what they want with their bodies. They also argue that it is unfair to arrest the prostitutes and not their customers.

In 1971, the Nevada legislature authorized any county with less than 200,000 inhabitants (thus excluding the counties in which Reno and Las Vegas are located) to license brothels. No state has legalized prostitution. So far four Nevada counties have exercised this local option. Almost all of the licensed houses were in operation before the law passed, but now each house pays the county a business tax of $1000 per month ($500 if there are less than seven prostitutes at work in a house).

Lyon County received $42,000 in taxes last year from its four brothels. It is not an important source of county revenue compared with taxes from Anaconda Copper, which has its largest open-pit mining operation there. On the other hand, neighboring Storey County, which ekes out just a little tax money from the tourist business at Virginia City, gets its largest revenue from Joe Conforte's Mustang Ranch, the biggest and best-known of Nevada's brothels.