An interview with Dacé, a sex worker at Nevada’s famed Mustang Ranch-turned-up and coming TikTok star.
TikTokers have always found clever ways around the platform’s notoriously strict content moderation policies. Some of the more delightful examples: referring to sex as “seggs” and lesbians as “le dollar beans.” Porn performers have taken to referring to their work by using the corn emoji, while OnlyFans stars have used “accounting” to describe their job on TikTok. Dacé uses another descriptor: The Modern Working Girl.
Since 2016, Dacé — her stage name — has worked at the Mustang Ranch, Nevada’s first legal brothel. Now she’s demystifying what it means to be a legal sex worker in the US on her TikTok account, which she started in earnest a few months ago and where she’s since racked up more than 75,000 followers. Most of her videos are answers to specific questions from commenters: whether she lives at the ranch when she works there (yes), whether she is allowed to leave (yes, but she has to be checked for STDs before returning to work), how much money she makes (probably more than you do).
“I just started making informational videos because people asked questions over and over again,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Man, they really want to know this stuff.’” The comments on Dacé’s videos are perhaps a reflection of the intense curiosity about the function of sex work in society, but also likely a result of Americans’ lack of knowledge on the subject. In our conversation, Dacé cleared up the many misconceptions her viewers have, while also stressing the importance of decriminalizing sex work. “Every single person is deserving of love and a physical touch,” she says in a recent video. “And if they can afford it, they get it. Period.”
How did you end up working at the Mustang Ranch?
I had always had regular jobs: waitressing, working for someone else. It was just really hard. I was always struggling and dating the wrong kind of guy, and I found myself basically unable to support myself with the job that I had. Honestly, I thought I was too young and pretty to be struggling like I was, and I knew that you could make a bunch of money pretty quickly in the sex industry. I did not want to dance [at a strip club] for that long, because it is a really hard job. I also did not want to be subjected to having to do sex work illegally.
At the time I was living outside of Denver, and I knew that sex work was legal in brothels in Nevada. I was like, “Well, I’m not that far away from Nevada. Let me just look up brothels.” The Mustang Ranch popped up, and I just filled out the application and went for it.
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♬ Rich Minion - Yeat
What was it like walking in for the first time?
It was scary. Honestly, I didn’t know if it was going to be a house full of nice women or if they were going to be catty and competitive. I had never worked with women in that capacity before, but everyone was very nice and welcoming. There were the two madams, three girls that worked in the office, security, bartenders, chefs, and like 10 or 15 women.
They don’t really try to make friends too heavily with new girls, because there’s a lot of turnover. Maybe one out of every five new hires sticks it out and works any real amount of time, as in, at least six months. They just may work a nine-month stretch where they’re coming regularly and then we may not see them again. Maybe they’re trying to get out of student loan debt, trying to buy a house. Teachers, especially, come to work just during the summer months to supplement their income.
What’s your schedule like?
I’m at the Mustang Ranch usually two weeks on, and two weeks off when I’m back at home. Typically, I will wake up at seven o’clock, get my coffee, check my social media, respond to any emails, take a shower, and get ready for the day. Usually I have at least one or two appointments set and the rest of the time I’m available for walk-ins, when I’ll be hanging out in the bar and grill area that’s attached to our brothel. We don’t actually solicit in the bar, even though we’re sitting there in our lingerie most of the time. We ask them if they want to go chat in our offices in the back, and that’s where all the business talk happens.
About half the time I’m in parties [i.e. with clients], and half the time I’m chatting with the gentlemen at the bar. The vibe varies from the day shift to the night shift. I’m on the day shift, and we mostly get business people who are in town for conventions and older gentlemen during the day, but that’s fine with me because they’re serious clients. They didn’t end up here drunk with a bachelor party, which happens pretty much every weekend at the night shift.
Sometimes I’ll have a couple appointments and a couple of walk-ins and I’m seeing four or five people a day. Sometimes one person will book me for a whole weekend, which is really nice, because it’s more of a low-pressure situation. You’re not worried about the clock running out on you, you’re just relaxing and having fun, and getting to know a person and they’re generally interested in you. We can stay at the Mustang Ranch for the whole weekend or we can go into town on an out-date, and security would accompany me and watch me the entire time.
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♬ Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) [2018 Remaster] - Kate Bush
What’s it like negotiating with the clients in the offices?
I’ll ask them what type of experience they would like to have, and they get all nervous. They’re looking around the room and are like, “Oh, I don’t know.” At that point I grab the inside of their knee and I’m like, “I don’t believe that. I think you know exactly what you want.” And then they’ll tell me.
Sometimes you have to do a little bit of digging and take cues. There are men that come in and they want to know that you’ve been with so many men that day. They’ll ask, “How many people have you seen? Has it been a busy day?” If I notice it, I’ll feed into that, but everyone’s different. There’s the people that like feet, they’re looking to see what kind of shoes you’re wearing, they’re going to comment if you have open-toed shoes or tell you they like your pedicure. After you’ve been doing this, you know what to feed into.
Most men obviously don’t like it to feel transactional, . Sso I try to navigate that very carefully and keep the focus on what type of experience they would like to have. And tThen I’ll just hit him with the price: “Do you want to pay cash or card?” We get it over with real quick.
What are your favorite and least favorite kinds of clients?
My least favorite type of man to work with is the misogynistic guy who almost hates himself for even being there and doesn’t talk to you like you’re a human being. Luckily, they only come in like five percent of the time. But I don’t have to work with anyone. I can just say, “Thanks for coming in. Have a great day.”
My favorite type of people to work with are couples that have been with people before or maybe are swingers. In the last year and a half, a lot more couples have been coming in because I think it’s popular now to have a third in your relationship now, or at least have a threesome.
What’s the money like?
I make more than $250,000 per year including tips, before taxes but after Mustang Ranch takes its 50 percent cut. Per Nevada state law, we cannot talk about pricing because it would fall under illegal solicitation, unless we’re on brothel premises.
What are some of your future goals?
I want to advocate for sex workers’ rights, to be able to talk about our careers and not be discriminated against when we’re trying to use our money to better ourselves and contribute to the community. It’s so taboo, and there’s this misconception that sex workers are dirty people. We are honestly some of the cleanest people you’ll ever meet, especially in the regulated legal industry. We’re getting tested once every seven days for absolutely everything, so we actually have some of the best health care for women out there. We get checked any time we physically leave the property and once every seven days while we’re working.
Sex work in so many forms is legal across the country; everyone and their sister has an OnlyFans right now. Only good things can come of decriminalizing sex work and regulating it in the legal system. So many things could be funded if sex work was taxed. I know people have a difference of opinion on whether the brothel system is the right setup or not. Obviously, I’m all for the brothel system.
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♬ Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash
Why do you prefer the brothel system?
I like that we’re safe and protected. They put so much work into having nice facilities for us to be able to use, and they do all the marketing for us. Emails come to my inbox from people Mustang Ranch has found out there for me to see. That’s a pretty great value, especially for the percentage breakdown.
Other sex workers don’t want to give brothels that 50 percent; they want to work out of their own houses or a hotel. In my experience, though, if you’re not in a brothel with management, you’re at a pretty high risk of having a pimp or some sort of manager that’s getting a large portion of your money.
Have you learned anything surprising while working there?
The most surprising thing I’ve learned is how starved our society is of human touch and compassion. People come in and just humbly beg for your affection and a little intimacy, more so than any kind of vulgar sexual act. I get asked a lot on TikTok if people come in for nonsexual parties, and I haven’t addressed this in a video yet, but so often it’s grown men just wanting to be held. People just want to caress you, because they haven’t touched another human being. There are husbands that come in saying, “I haven’t had sex in 12 years because my wife doesn’t want to anymore or her health doesn’t allow it.” They want to be respectful to their marriage and honor the love that they have for their wives, but at the end of the day, humans need that touch.
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Why the years from 1870 to 2010 were humanity’s most important.
“The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.”
So argues Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, the new magnum opus from UC Berkeley professor Brad DeLong. It’s a bold claim. Homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years; the “long twentieth century” represents 0.05 percent of that history.
But to DeLong, who beyond his academic work is known for his widely read blog on economics, something incredible happened in that sliver of time that eluded our species for the other 99.95 percent of our history. Whereas before 1870, technological progress proceeded slowly, if at all, after 1870 it accelerated dramatically. And especially for residents of rich countries, this technological progress brought a world of unprecedented plenty.
DeLong reports that in 1870, an average unskilled male worker living in London could afford 5,000 calories for himself and his family on his daily wages. That was more than 3,000 calories he could’ve afforded in 1600, a 66 percent increase — progress, to be sure. But by 2010, the same worker could afford 2.4 million calories a day, a nearly five hundred fold increase.
DeLong’s book is called Slouching Towards Utopia, though, not Achieving Utopia. The unprecedentedly fast change in the lives of residents of rich nations brought with it profound political instability and conflict. Perhaps the worst-off were residents of the Global South, and oppressed communities like women and racial minorities in the Global North, who were denied much of the benefit of the world’s economic revolutions while suffering the bulk of the harm from the ensuing political and social revolutions.
DeLong and I talked last week about the book, the economic significance of the long 20th century, what caused technological progress to speed up so dramatically, and whether this kind of explosive growth can continue.
A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Dylan Matthews
You argue that 1870 through 2010 were “the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.” What’s your case?
Brad DeLong
It really looks that we had as much technological change and progress between 1870 and today as we had between 6000 BC and 1870 AD. We packed what had previously been nearly eight millennia of changes in the underlying technological hardware of society, which required changes in the running sociological code on top of that hardware. To try to pack what had been eight millennia worth of changes before in 150 years is going to produce an awful lot of history.
Before 1870, most of history is how elites run their force-and-fraud, domination-and-extraction mechanism against a poor peasantry so that they, at least, can have enough, and so that their children are only two inches shorter than we are, rather than five or six as the peasants are. It’s about how the elites elbow each other out of the way as they eat from the trough. And it’s about the use they make of their wealth for purposes good and ill, of civilization and destruction.
But if you’re enough of a Marxist like me to say that the real motor of history is the forces of production, their changes, and how society reacts for good or ill to changing forces of production, then yes, [1870 to 2010] has to be as consequential because there’s as much technological change-driven history as there is in entire millennia before.
Dylan Matthews
You seem on solid ground in arguing that something radical changed that enabled humans to become dramatically richer over the last 300 years; almost every economic historian would agree with that. But many people start the story in the 18th century, with the development of the steam engine and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. You start it in 1870, well after that process was underway.
Why does the story start later for you?
Brad DeLong
When do we start? Let’s start 300 million years ago in the Permian period, when plants die and they get pushed underground and turn into coal. And then we flash forward to 25,000 years ago, when the last glacier episode scrapes all the rock on top of the coal deposits off of the British Isles and then retreats, leaving Britain with an ungodly amount of surface coal at sea level. Since it’s a wet island, it’s thereupon very easy to move by water.
You need a steam engine if you want to dig even 10 feet down in order to get out the coal, and then around 1770, the steam engine and textile machinery attained critical mass and the Industrial Revolution begins, which is usually taken as the hinge of economic history, although some people push it back further.
However, you look worldwide and you take my index of technological progress, and it [grows by] less than half a percent per year from 1770 to 1870. That’s based on exploitation of really cheap coal and also on the productivity benefits of falling transport costs that gather all of the manufacturing in the world into the place [the United Kingdom] where it’s most productive and most efficient, because it’s the place where coal is cheapest.
I was struck by a line I came across from the 1871 version of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy: “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toll of any human being.”
Say you have some slowdown in global technological progress after 1870 because the cheapest coal has already been mined and the deeper coal is hard to find, and say that you have some other slowdown because you don’t get the boost from gathering manufacturing in places where it’s productive. We might well have wound up right with a steampunk world after 1870: a world with about the population of today but the living standards of 1870 on average.
That’s what the pace of progress was, except that we got the industrial research lab, the modern corporation, and then full globalization around 1870. The industrial research lab rationalized and routinized the discovery and development of technologies; the corporation rationalized and routinized the development and deployment of technologies; and globalization diffused them everywhere.
Dylan Matthews
For most of human history since the advent of agriculture, we were ruled by Malthusian dynamics: If we gained the ability to grow more food, we would simply have more children, meaning no one’s quality of life could improve too much. And this, of course, put tremendous pressure on women, who were expected to have many children and do almost all the biological and practical work of gestating and raising them.
You cite a very striking statistic in the book: the average number of years of a woman’s life spent either pregnant or breastfeeding. That has gone down dramatically, from 20 years of a typical woman’s life in 1870 to four years today. Explain that number to me, and what it means.
Brad DeLong
It’s from a book called Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. We really do not know much about what human life was really like in the hunter-gatherer age. Once we have agriculture, productivity goes way up. Life becomes somewhat boring because our brains are probably built to be hunter-gatherers. Population grows, and living standards fall.
You have this biological situation in which one in seven women appears to die in childbirth; in which in order to have an expected value of one son surviving, you need to have two kids survive, which means three reach early adulthood, which means four reach the age of 5, which means seven or so babies born, which means nine advanced pregnancies.
Once you become an undernourished, agrarian Malthusian being, all of a sudden you are biometrically close to being effed completely.
Your children’s immune systems are too compromised to fight off the common cold. Maybe you’re too skinny to ovulate. If you aren’t, maybe you lose two teeth and break an arm as the baby leeches calcium out of your body into itself. Then you add on to that the fact that patriarchy means that if you are female, your only durable source of social power is to have surviving sons. And so any temptation to do much of anything other than have surviving sons, and then have more as insurance, is very hard to resist. Those are the biological, ecological, economic forces tending toward patriarchy, of which men as a group then took absolutely horrible advantage.
And yet once technological progress starts to hit 2 percent per year, then some people begin to have incomes above subsistence and infant mortality falls. But those changes came remarkably quickly.
Dylan Matthews
The highlight of the 140 years you study are the Thirty Glorious Years: roughly from 1945 to 1975, as the US and Europe recovered from World War II. They managed to build economies and welfare states that directed substantial benefits to working-class people while sustaining really fast productivity growth. After the 1970s, that regime broke down.
I finished the book thinking, “How can we get back to those 30 years? How do we get fast growth and equitable growth like that again?” But at the same time, many people you might think sympathetic to that vision are instead questioning the value of economic growth or calling for “degrowth” as a way to manage global warming.
Is it possible to go back to the Thirty Glorious Years? Or do we need degrowth instead?
Brad DeLong
We definitely need to decarbonize. But go back to the steampunk world — suppose that we hadn’t had the last acceleration and we’re at the 1900 level of technology. We’d be pumping out only about a third or a quarter as much carbon dioxide as we are now, but we’d be pumping out many, many ton loads of other pollutants.
Think of the amount of farmers and farmland that we would have needed in order to support 8 billion people on 1900 technology. Those were days when we’d send people with pickaxes to islands off of the South Atlantic to knock tons of bird shit off to try to boost agricultural yields by a little bit.
Degrowth is a mistake because we still have our bottom 500 million [people in global poverty], who certainly deserve much better. We certainly need much better technologies to deal with global warming. But do we indeed have to worry more about how to utilize our wealth, and less about how to produce much more wealth? I would say probably so. The best minds of a generation moving to South of Market in San Francisco to figure out how to scare the shit out of people and glue their eyeballs to screens — that’s not a terribly good use of human brainpower.
A former Amazon employee found that, in large areas of Washington state, Prime deliveries can take four to five business days.
The complaints from Amazon customers are similar and popping up across the US. From western New York to central Missouri to rural Washington state, some Amazon Prime members are asking a version of the same question: What happened to Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping?
As Amazon brings next-day and same-day Prime delivery to more parts of the US, complaints from some Amazon customers about long Prime delivery times are still common in other regions. And one of those customers, a longtime former Amazon employee, recently conducted informal research that indicates Prime customers have to wait four or five business days for delivery across various parts of Amazon’s home state of Washington.
Amazon boosted Prime’s annual price to $139 earlier this year, and its signup page boasts, “Look for the Prime check mark as you shop. It means fast, free delivery!” But Prime members in some parts of the country have been surprised by slower delivery speeds than they were once used to. And it raises key questions: Are cracks appearing in the membership program at the core of Amazon’s e-commerce domination? Or is Amazon intentionally slowing delivery speeds for some Prime customers?
The inconsistency has been especially puzzling to a former Amazon employee named Peter Freese. Freese worked in Amazon corporate roles for more than a decade, including three years leading data analysis work in the company’s transportation and fulfillment divisions. He knows better than most how things work behind the scenes after a customer places an order.
But in July, he was surprised to find that Prime’s free two-day shipping, the hallmark of Amazon’s membership program, appeared to no longer be available on any merchandise whatsoever in his hometown of Omak, Washington, about 200 miles northeast of Seattle. Instead, Prime two-day shipping had been replaced by a delivery speed reminiscent of the 1990s: five business days.
He surmised that he was either witnessing the results of a technical bug that was potentially costing the company sales, or a cost-cutting move that essentially meant Amazon was, in Freese’s words, “redefining the word Prime” for some customers — but with zero disclosure.
After reading similar complaints on social media and suspecting a potential broader issue, Freese ran an experiment in August to test Prime delivery promises in all 39 counties in Washington state. He found that in a third of the counties, 13 in total, Prime orders would take either four or five business days to arrive. (He chose a random residential address in the biggest city or town in each county.) These orders still carried a Prime badge on the checkout page, but had the simple branding of “FREE delivery” rather than any mention of “two-day” or “next-day” shipping. Freese’s experiment included five separate bestselling products, all sold and shipped by Amazon, including an Amazon Fire TV Stick, a pack of Amazon’s own brand of diapers, and a 64-ounce container of Tide detergent. While not exhaustive, Freese’s experiment appears to back up complaints from some customers about bizarrely slow delivery speeds.
Amazon spokesperson Lauren Samaha said the company has not identified any widespread issues with Prime delivery speeds and that Amazon is not slowing down deliveries to some members in an effort to cut costs. Instead, she said Prime delivery promises fluctuate based on many factors including transportation capacity in a given region and a customer’s location. She also denied the possibility that Amazon had stopped offering two-day Prime shipping to some parts of the US where it was previously available, despite some customers having that very complaint. Amazon’s website says that “nearly all addresses in the contiguous US” qualify for two-day Prime shipping.
In his Prime shipping experiment focused on Washington, Freese was especially surprised that one of the counties with slow delivery speeds was Spokane, because Amazon has opened two new fulfillment centers there since 2020. So to dig a little further into potential issues there, Freese tested an extra three addresses in different parts of Spokane County, and five extra Prime-eligible products for a total of 10. He found that only one of the four delivery addresses in Spokane had faster delivery speeds than five business days. And for that faster address, four of the 10 products still didn’t qualify for two-day Prime shipping.
“If this is all a bug, then it’s extra gnarly and will be confusing to unravel,” Freese told Recode, referencing the disparities between Spokane addresses. “If it isn’t a bug, are they actually targeting certain neighborhoods for exclusion?”
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On social media, Amazon customer service reps often counter these complaints or questions by pointing out that Prime’s two-day shipping promise begins at the point that an item is shipped from a warehouse — not at the moment a customer places the order. They also often make clear that the two-day phrasing really means two business days, not two calendar days. That is and has long been the fine print of Prime membership. But any longtime Prime member knows that, for many years, Prime packages usually showed up two days after a customer placed an order. That’s what Prime members have come to expect from Amazon. And that expectation has fueled the explosive growth of Amazon Prime, which today has more than 200 million paying members across the globe.
Freese’s analysis goes beyond those semantics, though: What he’s found is that some customers who once had Prime two-day shipping no longer do, even on commonly purchased items. Yet they’re still paying the full Prime membership fees like everyone else.
So offer an explanation, Ruby.
— Casey Craig (@Iamcaseycraig) August 29, 2022
What changed in mid-July?
Before that, Prime items were being delivered to my house in 1-2 days.
Why is every Prime item now taking 5-7 days?