Dirty Girl Things
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Two-Hundred-Seven
Brothels and the Meaning of Life
by Bruno Phillips
Some great libertine and savant once observed, ‘Only in a brothel do men and women discover the true nature of human relations.’ However one chooses to deconstruct such philosophical squibs, nothing hasty should be concluded without knowledge of the Dumas Brothel in Butte, Montana.
The brothel of course has had a long, romantic and (albeit sneakingly) admired place in populist social history since Pompeii got buried. More recently, whilst London had its bawdyhouses and Paris its bordellos, America had its democratic equivalents that ‘came West’ along with the men who drove cattle and railroads and settlements into the heartlands of the prairie and mountain.
What makes the American experience different is that where we Europeans corralled, made urban and attempted to disguise these havens of release, in the great energy of that young nation they were public agents of growth and opportunity. Men and women of humble origin sought escape from straightened circumstances, sought liberation, to achieve wealth, or at least a comfortable life. Men through their muscle, women most often through the skills regarded as peculiarly theirs. This might involve marriage, sewing and child-rearing. In the short term it mostly meant the willingness to fuck.
These natural desires could of course be satisfied, as it were, informally. But humans are creatures of context. Calloused cowboy you might be, but memories of the old homestead and plumpy cushions and little sister made you yearn for some homely comforts.
The Dumas Brothel is a classic of its kind. It was built around 1890 as a purpose-designed three-floor house for prostitutes. It still survives (just), and is probably the only example of its sort left in America. Herein the hairy, horny and hopeful miners of Butte could emerge from the depths and the dust to find a soft embrace, a seductive smile and a place for the one muscle that had not been much called for underground.
It was part of a locale called ‘Venus Alley’ and played a significant role in the maintenance of social order among the mining community. So much so, that when in the early 1940s the Federal Government tried to ban brothels as detrimental to the war effort, the region’s copper and mineral company combined with the local authorities to finagle regulations on the grounds that the miners would leave if denied some rumpy pumpy. The Dumas House survived until 1982. Rumour has it that there was a tunnel from the neighbouring and grand Finlen Hotel to the brothel and that JFK himself used it.
Be that as it may, current owner, conservator and writer Rudy Giecek is an honourable celebrant of a proud tradition. Although he doesn’t run a brothel, he shares with Cynthia Payne an amiable sympathy with human sexual needs and women’s economic pragmatism.
Quite evidently, these old brothels were not paradise. (So where is?) Sex is a transaction of many sorts. It may be conducted with love, affection, as an instrument of power and submission, or a combination of all these. In Butte the Dumas Brothel had a social and economic purpose. This was not without pleasure or reward. Girls could earn real money and escape. Men could find love. That there was also violence and degradation did not single it out as different from other socially sanctioned relations.
In the quixotic and contradictory society that is America today, and in particular in the Midwest, the brothel, the whore and the rumbunctious miner, cowboy and outlaw got together in all that dust and heat and downpour and had a fuck of a time.
Thanks to Rudy Giececk author of Venus Alley.
See also thedumasbrothel.com
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©