Event - Nevada Rose Book Release Party

So where will I be this Thursday at 8:00 PM? I'll be in New York attending the book release of Nevada Rose by Marc McAndrews (the Facebook page for Marc McAndrews Photography can be found here) at Bubby's located at 1 Main Street in Brooklyn. Julia Haltigan and Amber Martin will be performing, and both Dennis Hof (the owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch featured on HBO's Cathouse series) and Mika Tan are scheduled to attend. You can get tickets here if you want to attend, although I have no idea how many are still available.

The book Nevada Rose is a photographic journey across rural Nevada that takes a long look at the two dozen or so legal brothels that dot its landscape. I have not yet seen the completed book, but the portions I have seen look beautiful. The best description I can give based upon what I know is that it captures the last vestiges of the Old West that have been crossed with the gaudy glitter of the legal sex industry. The book features many of the women who ply their trade selling sex in the hinterlands of Nevada among them the aforementioned Mika Tan (who I will note has since retired from working at the Bunny Ranch), but also Brooke Taylor, Maya Love, Camryn Cross, and Bunny Love. Not content with merely showing the obvious side of the brothel industry in Nevada, Marc also turned his camera on the other people who make the brothels function - cashiers, cooks, drivers, and cleaning crew among others, giving a much grittier and comprehensive view of the legal sex industry. The book has been reviewed in Publisher's Weekly, Working Class Magazine, City Arts, and Interview Magazine. Once I get my copy I am certainly going to review it as well.

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Biased Opinion - Senator Reid Chases a Red Herring, Ignores His Actual Responsibilities

As some people might have noted, I like the HBO documentary Cathouse (go to Cathouse reviews page), and have written a number of posts about shows from that series (with more to come, as I eventually plan on reviewing every episode). As I have noted before, in the course of researching the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, I have made contact via media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook with a number of working girls (or, as they are called at the Bunny Ranch - "bunnies"), including the lovely and ferociously persuasive Brooke Taylor. As I have said previously, I have found all of the working girls that I have interacted with online to be sweet, kind, and friendly. I have also noticed that they put up with a lot of crap from people who seem to have little better to do than harass them because of the job they do.

But wait, I hear you say, I thought this post was about Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada). Why in the world are you talking about Cathouse and the bunnies who work there? Well, because yesterday Harry Reid voluntarily stepped into a hornet's nest and announced, during a speech about how crappy Nevada has been doing, that what was really needed to fix the state was to outlaw the legal form of prostitution that the state currently allows. Needless to say, the women who make their (apparently pretty lucrative) livings working at these places erupted in response. Brooke Taylor, who is in my opinion the most effective and persuasive advocate for the legal prostitution industry wrote a detailed response to Senator Reid's speech (which I highly recommend everyone go read, as she does a much better job than I could to expose the hypocrisy and lies in Reid's speech).¹ An online petition was quickly put together opposing Reid's proposal. As Brooke noted in her post, Reid's focus on the legal prostitution industry is basically a distraction from the real problems facing Nevada, which boil down to the fact that the state spends less on education than any other and has a crumbling infrastructure. In short, rather than blaming the dozen or so businesses tucked away in the hinterlands of Nevada, Reid should blame the fact that Nevada has lousy roads and an under educated workforce.

Reid's singling out brothels as the problem has generated a lot of publicity, including, for example a Washington Post article. But his suggestion has been ridiculed, with some public officials flat out contradicting Reid's assertion that legal prostitution is hurting the economy, and others pointing out that their local municipalities rely upon the tax revenues generated by the brothels to stay afloat. In a state that is facing massive budget cuts to critical areas (including deep and draconian cuts to its funding for public universities), one wonders why Reid thinks it is a good idea to eliminate businesses that not only provide high volumes of tax revenue to cash-starved rural counties, but provide high-paying jobs to its working girls, and a much larger number of jobs to the people who work as cashiers, caterers, drivers, and other support personnel for the brothels. In a state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation, eliminating jobs seems like a poor decision.

But the stupidity of a Federal legislator poking his nose into a matter under the jurisdiction of the State government (which raises some Federalism concerns to begin with), is only compounded by the fact that Senator Reid isn't even doing the job he was elected to do. Right now, the Federal government is in danger of running out of funding on March 4^th, which would force a government shut down. As the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid is one of the prime players in getting a budget deal done. But what are he (and the rest of Congress) doing this week rather than trying to hammer out a budget deal? They are on vacation for the week of February 21^st through February 25^th. That's right, with the entire fucking Federal government at stake, our legislators have decided to stop working for a bit. Harry, of course, took this opportunity to suggest that Nevada should outlaw thriving businesses because he thinks they are preventing hypothetical businesses from moving into his bankrupt state. But the question one has to ask is what the HELL he was doing there to begin with?

For anyone not clear on what is at stake here, the Federal government represents about 20% of the economic activity of the United States. With a struggling economy, the last thing we need is for a fifth of it to suddenly go dark, even for a couple of days. And a government shut down means that all of those things that the public wants done, won't. Passports won't be processed. Income tax returns won't be reviewed. Income tax refunds won't be mailed. If you were planning on visiting Yellowstone, or Gettysburg, or Mount Rushmore, don't bother - national parks will all be closed. Government contracts will all be put on hold, so if you work for one, or work for a company that supplies one, you're not getting any money during the shut down. Literally hundreds of thousands of government workers will be sent home, and furloughed without pay for the duration of the shut down, threatening the personal finances of many of them. In short, think of something the Federal government does, and when it shuts down, it probably won't be doing that for the duration. And the really sad part about this is that even though shutting the government down will cause disruptions on a massive scale, it won't actually save the government any money (and will actually cost the government more money), because all those things that aren't being done during the shut down are things that need to be done, and will have to be taken care of when the government starts itself back up again. And because the government will have had to delay paying for or terminate contracts due to its inability to pay, the government will end up paying penalties to contractors. And in all previous shut downs, Congress ended up voting to give furloughed government workers back pay (and if they don't, combine that with the two year pay freeze already in effect for Federal employees and see how quickly you can bleed the government of its best people). In short, a shut down will be a disaster in all ways - causing disruptions to the national economy, and costing the government more money than continuing operations.

And what is Harry Reid doing? Trying to distract everyone from his culpability in this mess by pointing at brothels. And even worse, even if Congress somehow gets its act together in the next eight days and pass a funding bill before the government has to shut down, this is probably just a preview of the fight looming on March 31^st, when the debt ceiling has to be raised. If Congress can't agree to a rise in the debt ceiling, then the United States government will default on its debts, something that has never happened in U.S. history. We may be living in historic times. This may not be a good thing.

As a final note, it seems that capping off Reid's silliness, the company he mentioned in his speech that was supposedly scared away from relocating to Nevada because there were legal brothels? It looks like they are moving to Nevada after all.

¹ For anyone who doesn't know, in the picture on her blog post, Brooke Taylor is the brunette in the middle of the picture. Dennis Hof is the bald man in the middle, Bunny Love is the blond facing the camera, and Harmony Gabriel is the blond facing away from the camera. I believe the man in the tan suit behind Dennis is the lobbyist who represents the Brothel Owners Association, but I'm not sure.

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Review - Cathouse: She's Got Game (Episode 5)

Short review: A disjointed episode that covers a pile of random topics.

Haiku
To play the sex game
Some Bunnies get breast implants
Others use e-mail

Full review: Every television show seems condemned to have episodes in which all of the elements of a good show are there, but somehow, the sum of all the parts adds up to a fairly forgettable experience. For Cathouse, the fifth episode titled She's Got Game appears to be that episode. Everything seems to be in place to deliver a solid episode, but there is just no unifying thread that ties this particular episode together. To a certain extent, She's Got Game seems to have been the result of HBO finding a bunch of extra footage that wouldn't fit into other episodes, and throwing it together to fill out a half an hour. Ostensibly the episode is about "game", that combination of sex appeal, personality, and negotiating skills that Bunnies use to persuade men to choose them and then spend lots of money. But as pretty much everything the Bunnies do at the Bunny Ranch is directed to this end, this isn't really a separate topic so much as it is all topics, which results in an unfocused and sloppy episode. The episode also suffers from having what one could term "off-brand" Bunnies front and center - ladies are featured in this episode who primarily appear in the background in most other episodes. And what this makes clear is that there is more to being an interesting reality television character than simply getting in front of the camera. Whether one likes Isabella Soprano, Danielle, or Air Force Amy, or not, they make for good television. On the other hand, Deanna, Felicia, and Jaime Sweet simply do not. I'm sure the latter three are all very likable women and probably good at their actual jobs, but they just aren't good at television. I'll also note that this is the second consecutive episode that has a criminal lack of appearances by Karla.

The episode opens up promisingly, showing Isabella Soprano returning to the Bunny Ranch after an absence (although the exact length of the absence is not specified). This leads to Suzette pointing out that women come and go at the Bunny Ranch on a regular basis. In a brief interview montage, Daisy makes this point more explicitly "I come and go all the time, this is not a lock down house". Felicia says that she is herself at home, and a sexy and beautiful fantasy woman at the Bunny Ranch. Isabella likens being at the Bunny Ranch to being like a princess - since when she is there she gets dressed up, gets her hair done, takes care of her make-up and so on. In effect, for the working girls, it seems that every day at the Bunny Ranch is "date night", because every night they are there they are pretty much hoping for a date. Or three. Amy Andersinn caps off the discussion by trotting out the somewhat overused "sorority house" metaphor - to which I can only say that all the sorority houses I was even passingly familiar with banned men in any of the non-public areas of the house, which probably wouldn't work very well for the Bunnies.

I'll digress for a bit here and expand upon Daisy's comment before climbing on a soap box for a bit. While the Moonlite Bunny Ranch is, at this point, the most famous legal brothel in Nevada, it is not the only one (it isn't even the only one owned by Dennis Hof). Apparently, at many other brothels, when women come to work at them, they are required to spend their entire working shift ranging from days to weeks living at the brothel and never leaving the premises, with some fairly weak rationales extended justifying this practice. I'll note that this level of control exerted over the working conditions of the women seems quite inconsistent with the claim that they are "independent contractors" rather than employees. Put simply, a business simply cannot maintain that their workforce is made up of independent contractors while simultaneously imposing stringent work conditions upon them. As Daisy points out, the Moonlite Bunny Ranch is not a "lockdown house", and apparently has not been one for many years. Given that the Moonlite Bunny Ranch is, at this point, presumably the most successful legal brothel in Nevada (and likely, the most desirable to work at), it seems difficult to understand how the owners of the various other bordellos are able to continue to impose lock down conditions until one realizes that they have a government enforced oligopoly that keeps out competition. Each county in Nevada that licenses brothels only permits a very limited number, effectively giving the owners who hold licenses freedom from any real competition. In short, when the government shields you from competition, you can get away with treating people poorly via your business practices and it simply won't hurt you financially. In a less regulated market, Dennis' "no lockdown" model would have likely been adopted by a dozen startup houses as a means to entice the best money making women to come work for them, and the older houses would have been forced to adapt or die. In the regulated market, lockdown house brothel owners can get away with acting like dicks without any real fear of it damaging their bottom line.

To show the girls dressing like princesses, the show moves to a montage of Bunnies trying on various outfits, and since this is Cathouse and on late night HBO we have to have some nudity early in the show, the scene shows them in the dressing room with dozens of outfits on racks, but has the Bunnies mostly only half-dressed for much of the scene. Dennis Hof comments on the Bunnies' proclivity for clothes, pointing out that many girls will go through six or seven outfit changes a day, trying to hit upon something that will attract a man's attention - when one is standing in a line with a dozen other girls trying to catch the eye of the single customer who walked through the door, it is a struggle to stand out. While she is changing into a bunch of cute outfits, Isabella talks about one reason she likes her time at the Bunny Ranch - she can play the role of the glamorous woman and fulfill people's fantasies, which makes her feel good. As has been hinted at before, the Bunny Ranch does not so much sell sex as sell fantasy, and Isabella's statement serves to confirm this explicitly.

This episode could also be called "the episode we recycled some patrons" and the first example is the couple who appeared in episode three Girlfriends in a lesbian encounter with Sunset Thomas who show up in the background of a scene at the Bunny Ranch bar while Sunset preens for Dennis in a very small blue dress. This is part of a montage of scenes showing a variety of Bunnies in a myriad of outfits, with some commentary from Danielle in which she says some of the working girls don't dress up at all, just wearing a t-shirt and socks and that works for them because they have cultivated the girl next door look. Unsurprisingly, the camera focuses on Isabella Soprano at this point, whose more relaxed and natural look makes Danielle's amazon glamour look forced and artificial. Danielle then says that for her, bikinis are her preference for attire, and I'll editorialize and say that Danielle probably thinks they make her look better than they actually do. As with most other things relating the Danielle, I find her bikinis to be not particularly attractive, but that is probably mostly because she is the one wearing them. One secret about men that most of the women at the Bunny Ranch don't seem to know (or if they do, they ignore it) is that we mostly don't care what they are wearing. Ladies: you could be wearing a burlap sack dress and it probably wouldn't have any effect one way or the other whether we would pick you out of the lineup.

The clothes montage ends with Air Force Amy wearing her favorite kind of outfit: covered in shiny baubles, loaded with piled on fake hair, and slathered with thick layers of makeup. This is the lead to the next segment, titled "Master of the Game", which Amy is supposed to be a prime example of. Dennis explains that "game" can be boiled down to confidence, and Amy certainly has boatloads of that. As Dennis says, Amy knows the psychology of the prostitution business better than anyone. Madam Suzette points out that no one has ever made as much money as she has, and this dovetails into a brief sex scene featuring Air Force Amy as she and Danielle do voice overs about what is clearly Amy's favorite topic: what a great party Amy provides. Danielle says that no one can party like Amy - when she has been in a two girl party with Amy the guy will be sweating, Amy will be sweating, and Amy seems to get energy "from the Gods" (or, given how haggard she looks in some episodes, maybe amphetamines, though that's just speculation on my part). Amy herself praises her own skills, and says that she sets high standards. Maybe I am just naive, but it seems to me that one you get the fundamentals of sex down, there is a limit on how good your party can be, and given that most of the Bunnies who work at the Ranch are professionals who do this for a living, they would all be pretty good at it. Which of course leaves me wondering what Amy does that makes her the "best". Everyone seems to agree that she brings in tons of money, which in a brothel seems like it would be the objective standard by which everything is measured, but based upon what one sees on the show, there really isn't any indication as to exactly why that would be so. The scene ends with Amy and her client giggling together as the intercom announces that it is "time to reparty", which is the euphemism the Bunny Ranch uses for "time's up". Amy apparently doesn't want to end the party, leading to an interview segment with Madame Suzette who says they will usually give an extra ten or fifteen minutes before they demand that a girl "hands over the man or gets him to give us more money". The lesson is this: no matter how much fun you may be having, at the Bunny Ranch you are on the clock.

This segues to Madame Suzette on the phone fielding a question that she probably gets about a thousand times a day: "who is the largest natural chested woman at the Bunny Ranch", to which she answers "me". Which leads to a discussion under the header "ABC of Triple D's" of some of the most obvious assets Bunnies use to entice clients: their breasts. First up are the natural chested girls: Danielle is "still natural", as is Vandalia. Sunshine Lane states that natural breasts are better because they shake and move. Deanna, in the most unsurprising revelation in history also reveals that her breasts are natural. Note for Deanna: If you are an A or B cup, most guys will assume you haven't had implants. Deanna then makes another completely unsurprising revelation: lots of girls enhance their assets, and we jump back to Air Force Amy, who says she was an A cup, but loves her larger chest. This, of course, shocks no one, as Amy seems pretty focused on the idea that all guys are drawn to large things like moths to a flame. Jaime Sweet makes one of her very few appearances on the show to declare that she had implants that she is very happy with. This being HBO, we have to get our recommended daily allowance of nudity, so this whole discussion of breasts serves as a set up for a montage of shots of topless and naked Bunnies.

And then the show takes a sharp left turn to focus on Vandalia - a dark-haired, large-assed, and heavily-tattooed Bunny (heavily tattooed for the time in which the show was filmed - several current Bunnies could probably match her for ink coverage) who is given as an example of a woman with confidence. Vandalia asserts that she "can make you feel good", which seems like a pretty basic requirement for taking up this line of work. She says "I'm a chameleon, I can be intimate, but also wild, tied up, blindfolded. It's all about feeling good". We get a brief talking head interview with Dennis in which he says he didn't know if he liked Vandalia with all her ink (he's apparently not a fan of tattoos) but that her personality and the fact that she has "no inhibitions" won him over. Apparently, for Dennis, one of the primary qualifications a woman can have that impresses him is a complete lack of inhibitions. Given that he owns a brothel, this seems unsurprising.

As Vandalia says "you come to a brothel for a reason" we see the return of yet another previously seen customer in the form of the mustachioed man who appeared back in What Men Don't Know (he was the guy who orally pleasured Shelly Duvell while keeping his blue jeans and work boots on), who, given that this segment is about Vandalia, picks her out of the lineup. During negotiations, both Vandalia and her client claim to be Native American, which I suspect is about as valid as my claiming to be French or Welsh. If they discuss price, HBO doesn't show it, but we are let in on what services the client negotiates for - oral both ways and sex. Which seems pretty bland after all the build up about how wild Vandalia is supposed to be. Which leads to a pretty routine sex scene after which Vandalia muses she would have dated this particular client on her own time if she had met him away from the Bunny Ranch, which is the kind of statement that I am sure helps to fuel the fantasies of guys like Mark from the Girlfriends episode.

This being an episode that seems to be constructed out of leftover footage, the show jumps tracks yet again to feature Isabella Soprano and another topic that seems to fascinate HBO - women who come to the Bunny Ranch to have same sex encounters. Isabella says her job involves meeting lots of different people all looking for something different (which falls into the category of yet another completely unsurprising revelation), and that she loves women, especially the many women she has been with who are trying lesbian sex for the first time.

We then get a quick funny scene of Isabella signing her "card" and noting she's running out of space on it (meaning she's gotten lots of customers) and giving a little "woo hoo".

Isabella then continues on the lesbian theme, saying the older she gets the more she loves women, although she didn't start with women until she came to the Bunny Ranch. Recycling a point made in Girlfriends, Dennis says there have always been women coming to the Ranch, but it was hush hush. A couple would come in and arrange for a party with the girl, and then he would head out to the bar. In short, he was not actually her partner, but merely her cover so she could try sex with another woman. Now, he says, they are open about wanting a sapphic sexual encounter. (I have to digress here and say Dennis: get some better glasses. The ones you wear during this interview segment look really dorky). We get a brief segment with Isabella and a female client talking to the camera, although there is no actual sex scene included. The client was apparently there for her first experience with another woman, and says Isabella treated her well.

The story moves on to show how cutting edge Isabella is in her use of technology. And since this is 2005, this means she's using e-mail to set up appointments. She says men can now schedule their trips around the availability of their favorite girl. This seems to be a large shift in the way legal brothels operate. If one looks at the geography of their distribution, one will note that they are mostly located along major highways. A little research reveals that most of them were established to cater to long-haul truckers and other travelers passing through Nevada, making these locations ideal. But that also meant that most business was basically spur of the moment - a client would walk in, select a woman from those available in the lineup, and get to business. But with the advent of e-mail and the ability of the Bunny Ranch to promote which Bunnies would be available on particular dates, the Bunny Ranch could shift to being a destination as opposed to a stopover. And clients could come knowing who they wanted to see ahead of time, and know that she would be there and available for them. Even so, this particular segment seems fairly quaint now, as a lot of hoopla is made over Isabella heavily working her e-mail connections.

But Isabella does lead into the next segment by saying she got an e-mail from a married man, and she doesn't know what to say to him in return, since she's worried his wife might see it. Note for Isabella: Not your problem. If he's dumb enough to send you e-mail that his wife might see if you e-mail him back, he's going to screw things up regardless of what you do. Just send him an e-mail saying you'd be happy to have sex with him for money and don't worry about it. But this little e-mail dilemma leads to Dennis going over another topic that seems to fascinate HBO - married men who come to the Bunny Ranch, noting that "Some girls say that the married men they are with who come in have wives who know they are there. They don't. Unless his wife is actually there with him, she doesn't know. Marriages don't work that way." Although I'm sure that there are probably exceptions to this rule, I am also pretty confident that this is mostly true. Guys who come to the Bunny Ranch without their wives are probably mostly sneaking around.

And this leads us to Danielle talking about her married clients. After repeating Dennis' line that most married men's wives have no idea they are at the Bunny Ranch, she talks about one of her regular clients who is married and who spends a lot of money to have her give him the royal treatment. Apparently he feels under appreciated at home, so he comes in and says he will spend an hour with Danielle. And then he adds more time, and then more time, and eventually ends up spending $10,000 for six or seven hours with her. That's about $1,400-$1,650 an hour for anyone who is interested. Danielle would get half of that, so her pay rate for six or seven hours of sex and pampering is between $700 and $825 an hour. In 2005 dollars. Does anyone really need to wonder why the Bunnies work at the Bunny Ranch? Proving that men are predictable creatures of habit, she says he does the same dance every time.

Dennis comes on to say that Danielle is brilliant, guys will come in looking for a big chested blond (which seems to be Dennis' preferred choice of woman - at least the blond part) and end up with her because of her personality before imitating some of the personality traits of hers that I find most grating - her voice and her constant stream of "don't you want some chocolate?" STOP WITH THE FUCKING CHOCOLATE METAPHOR!! Jesus H. Christ on a cracker but that was tiresome even before Danielle started using it, and now it is just annoying. Someone needs to tell Danielle that this metaphor was worn out before Darryl Dawkins was done with it and just retire it. Better yet, kill it dead and bury it under a slab of concrete so it will never be used again . . .

Oh, wait, back to the show. So Danielle negotiates with a client, and we get one of the handful of concrete references to money as Danielle tells him she charges $2,500 per hour. Once again, despite showing a client interaction, there is no actual sex scene. In a cut away interview Danielle says she tells clients that she's a very sensual lady and therefore they need at least an hour with her, and they usually go for it. Displaying what seems to be the typical attitude towards money, she says that they can afford to spend the money, and even if they can't they spend it anyway. As always in the Bunny Ranch, it comes down to money, which leads us to Danielle at the "hooker booker" window (yes, that's what they call their cashier) asking if she's the top booker for the month (i.e. did she make the most money that month). But she isn't. She's second. As she says, she is frequently the top booker for most of a month and then someone will pass her at the last minute, which seems to suggest to me that she has an odd pattern of doing lousy business at the tail end of a month.

Which is a set up for a segment titled "A Treat from the Middle East" where we see who passed Danielle for this particular month - a never before and never again seen hooker dressed up in a belly dancer's costume named Leila. Dennis says that Leila is often gone for months at a time, but then comes back and jumps right to the top of the earners list. Despite having an entire segment devoted to her, there is no sex scene involving Leila in the episode, continuing the established trend of the episode. One kind of suspects that these segments were relegated to what seems to be the "lefotver footage" episode at least partially because they have client interactions, but no accompanying sex scene. There is some suggestion that her thick accent (which some mistakenly assume is a Persian accent, but Leila is in reality half-Egyptian and half-French), her exotic look, and her somewhat aggressive style account for her success. But after watching the segment in which she clumps about "dancing" I have to wonder why the hell anyone would ever pick her over, well, almost any other working girl at the Bunny Ranch. Life is full of mysteries, and this seems to be one of them.

As if to wipe out the memory of Leila's horse-like clomping about, the show changes to a segment titled "Tools of the Trade" with Sunset, Isabella, Danielle, Daisy, and Felicia (and later, Air Force Amy and Deanna) in which a woman who looks like your grandmother and her red-headed assistant show a variety of large sex toys to the Bunnies. First up is a sex sling, which Felicia hops into to get a demonstration of how it works as she opines that sex machines are a real added bonus to a party. Isabella comments that she should be taking notes (although one would think that these sorts of devices aren't really that new to any but the most inexperienced Bunnies). Next up is a dome-like chair, and because HBO needs some more nudity, Sunset immediately strips down and jumps into it, while in the background Deanna gives her creepy smile (seriously, when Deanna smiles, she looks like she's channeling Spencer Pratt). The final toy demonstrated is the "g-ring", a big double ring with a seat belt that Daisy demonstrates. Though you rarely see on-camera nudity from Daisy, for this segment she goes all in giving a direct view of her vagina before Air Force Amy shows up with a dildo and some lube to work her over. Almost immediately everyone joins in for a massive lesbian orgy with naked bodies everywhere and all the toys getting use, including a set of dildos mounted on power tools. At the end, our grandmotherly saleswoman asks how many of the girls "got off", and in response every Bunny on camera raises her hand. And having given us as much sex and nudity to close the show as they can get away with while remaining in "soft-core porn" territory, the show closes.

It is difficult to assess She's Got Game as a whole, since the episode is so disjointed and to a certain extent incoherent. Though several of the individuals segments are modestly interesting, more than a few cover territory that has already been covered in other episodes - leading one to think that perhaps life at the Bunny Ranch is more routine than one might imagine. After all, if HBO is already rehashing the same topics just five episodes into the series, exactly how much variety there really is to the business conducted by the Bunnies. Either that, or the HBO producers just have limited imaginations concerning what makes for good television. In the end, despite the feeling that it is composed of segments that just didn't fit into other, better episodes, this is a decent enough episode that serves as sort of a "grab-bag" of Bunny Ranch topics and a chance to see some of the more rarely featured Bunnies (and a chance to see, in many cases, why they are not featured more often).

Previous episode reviewed: Getting It Up.

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Biased Opinion - Cyberpunk, Neuromancer, Brooke Taylor, and Facebook

The beautiful and completely
non-nude Brooke Taylor

There is a famous quote attributed to Sinclair Lewis that says "When fascism comes to America it will comes wrapped in the flag and waving a cross". Though many doubt whether Lewis actually said this, and several other possible sources have been touted for it, or something similar to it, the point of the quote is that if fascism were to come to the United States, it wouldn't take the form that most people assume, with jackbooted thugs and concentration camps, but rather as an attractive expression of patriotism and faith that droves of people would gladly voluntarily sign up for.

For years cyberpunk authors like William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, and Bruce Sterling have written of dystopian cyberpunk futures in books like like Neuromancer and Mirrorshades. And an oft-seen element of these dystopias is the domination of huge megacorporations, answerable to no government which use people and toss them aside like used tissues - an element so common in cyberpunk that it forms one of the core components of the GURPS: Cyberpunk campaign source book. One might wonder how such unfeeling and powerful corporations come about. I think I have found one way: They get people to willingly sign up for their service in droves and become so indispensable that they can do whatever the hell they want to. In other words, they act like Facebook.

Another non-nude photo of Brooke

Now, I'm not saying that Facebook is going to run out and hire Sally Shears to bump off the corporate leadership of Myspace, but Facebook is starting to act a little bit too much like a cyberpunk megacorporation. As recently as 2006 Myspace was the largest social media network in the world, now it is a tiny fraction of the size of Facebook. Quite frankly, Facebook deserved to win that battle, as Myspace's layout was really poorly organized and annoying to use. However, the decline (and in my estimation, probable demise) of Myspace leaves Facebook as really the only option for someone wanting to engage in social media. Although there is a vast internet out there that is not dependent upon Facebook (like the blogosphere, of which this blog is a part), for many people, Facebook, and the social network it provides, is the primary reason they use the internet. I'd suggest that for a small but growing percentage of internet users, Facebook effectively is the internet: They don't get on the web for any reason other than to access their Facebook page and see what their Facebook friends are doing. If this continues, having a Facebook profile is likely to be more or less the equivalent of having a telephone or an e-mail address. It will be that basic of a requirement for participating in modern society. I'd suggest that in the near future, being shut out of Facebook will more or less be the equivalent of social death.

So why is this relevant, and why are those pictures of the lovely Brooke Taylor stuck on this post? Well, because Brooke, and a couple of her coworkers have, in their dealings with Facebook, what I think is something of a cautionary tale for the rest of us. In the course of researching for my Cathouse reviews I have found and interacted with some of the women featured on the show via social media: specifically Facebook and Twitter. Many of the women who work at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch are on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or some other web service. Though they are not legally permitted to market their services over the internet, most want to be accessible to their fans, and several have more than enough admirers to max out the Facebook limit of five thousand friends. In my experience dealing with them, I have found them all to be friendly, engaging, and sweet women. They are all also pretty smart ladies, and generally know exactly what they can and cannot do under the terms of service of sites like Facebook, and adhere to those guidelines quite scrupulously.

But the problem is that even if you follow Facebook's rules to the letter, it may not matter, and if Facebook decides they don't like you, there isn't much you can do about their decisions. The reason that the pictures of Brooke Taylor are featured in this blog post is that those specific pictures were repeatedly reported by a user on Facebook for violating the Facebook terms of service because they allegedly included nudity. As I was a Facebook friend of Brooke's at the time, I watched the subsequent events play out first hand. In response to these reports, Facebook removed the pictures. Because they don't actually include any nudity (seriously, go back and look at them and try to find any nudity in those photos), Brooke reposted them, whereupon they were reported again and removed. Brooke attempted to locate contact information so she could speak with a Facebook representative and find out what about them supposedly violated the terms of service. However, Facebook has made it essentially impossible to locate any contact information by the simple expedient of not actually providing any other than a completely generic "contact technical support" e-mail system that requires the use of an extensive checklist that actually doesn't allow for asking questions about reported photos, or protesting the decision to remove photos that allegedly violate Facebook's terms of service. Facebook claims that a member of their staff reviews complaints about photos to determine if the complaints are valid before removing them, but this appears not to be the case, as one of Brooke's photos that was reported and removed for nudity was a picture of Bella, her dog. After her photos were repeatedly falsely reported for nudity, her Facebook profile was summarily deleted for violating the terms of service. The Facebook profiles of both Mika Tan and Bunny Love, two other women who have appeared on Cathouse, suffered similar fates.

So what is the point? Well, the immediate point is that Facebook treated these very nice women quite shabbily. But the larger point is that Facebook was able to do what it did, and shunt these women off of the social media center of the universe based upon false information, without giving them an opportunity to be heard or appeal the decisions that were made concerning their content. In fact, it seems that Facebook has made it impossible to contest or even get an explanation for the decisions made in matters like these. Making matters worse, Facebook's reporting system is completely anonymous, so anyone can submit a false report complaining about another user without revealing their identity, or without any fear of any possible negative consequence. In effect, we have willingly and cheerfully turned over control of our social address book, our photo albums, our home movies, and our ability to communicate with our friends, to an entity that reserves the right to snuff all of that out on, essentially, the whim of an angry anonymous jerk with an axe to grind. This is most obvious in the case of Brooke and the other bunnies, because they are polarizing figures to a certain extent, as many people have a prejudice against them because of their perfectly legal profession. But what should concern the rest of us is that everyone is susceptible to this sort of treatment. That jerk of a neighbor who is angry with you because he thinks your patio is ugly doesn't need to take any real effort now to get petty revenge. All he has to do is search for your Facebook profile and begin reporting you for posting nude photos, even if there isn't any nudity at all in them. And Facebook doesn't care that they are being used as a vehicle for personal vendettas, they just don't have to care. After all, who is going to make them care? And we have put Facebook in the position to be able to do this by flocking to them in droves. Just as fascism would come wrapped in a flag and waving a cross, the megacorporation seems set to take over our lives with a happy facade and the promise of an address book full of friends. If a cyberpunk dystopia comes about, it will be because we cheerfully made it come about by putting the megacorporations in control so we could play Farmville and Bejeweled Blitz with our friends.

Special thanks to the beautiful and gracious Brooke Taylor for agreeing to allow me to use the disputed pictures as examples for this blog post. As a side note, both Brooke Taylor and Mika Tan have new Facebook profiles, but both have decided to limit their Facebook involvement on the grounds that their new profiles might suffer the same fate as their previous ones. As of this date, Bunny Love has not created a new Facebook profile.

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Review - Cathouse: Cat Call (Episode 25)

Short review: The Bunny Ranch gets a whole bunch of new bunnies, and Brooke meets Dennis' new girlfriend.

Haiku
Lots of new bunnies
Like Ally, Barbie, Jazzy
Who cares? Brooke is back

Full review: In December 2010 HBO came out with a new installment of their late night adult program Cathouse starting with the episode Cat Call. HBO calls it the start of the third season. Dennis Hof calls it the start of the ninth season. I would call it the start of the fourth season. No matter how you count seasons, by my reckoning it is the twenty-fifth episode since the program began running in series format. One thing this episode does demonstrate is that HBO wants to pack as much drama into one episode as it can. Whereas in previous seasons they would have likely split these topics up into multiple episodes, Cat Call features new girls coming to the Bunny Ranch and learning the ropes, the introduction of a new girlfriend for Dennis Hof, a pretty obviously staged confrontation between new girlfriend Cami Parker and old girlfriend Brooke Taylor, plus some bonus material in the form of the colossal ego of the train wreck that is Air Force Amy.

The episode opens with a topic that is the subject of recurring fascination for HBO: The induction of new bunnies into the sisterhood of legal prostitutes. The first scene is a brief sequence showing Madam Suzette in her office during which we are informed that the Bunny Ranch has over a thousand applications per month, but that she whittles that down to the top twenty or so and then schedules interviews to evaluate them. As she says, in that applicant pool, a girl has to be "drop dead gorgeous" to get her attention. Because of this, being pretty isn't enough - the key qualifications a girl has to display in her interview, we are told, is competitive spirit, interesting personality, and they have to have the fire to succeed. Dennis then says that he "doesn't usually get to do one-on-one interviews" but that Suzette had blocked out time in his schedule so he could do, umm, not one-on-one but rather American Idol style panel interviews with him, Madam Suzette and Air Force Amy filling in the Randy, Simon, and Paula roles.

Before we go any further, I'll note that the years that have elapsed since the first episodes from 2005 appear not to have been kind to Air Force Amy. Though I never found her appealing to begin with (and thus was never able to figure out how she was able to consistently be the top booker in the Bunny Ranch - for the record, if I had ever been given the choice between "sex with Air Force Amy for free" and "no sex", I'd have taken "no sex"), in the scenes she appears in in this episode she appears haggard and almost out of place, like a former top pro athlete on their last legs desperately trying to come back from retirement one last time. But she's the wily veteran prostitute, and thus sits on the panel evaluating the new blood.

Moving on the the American Idol interviews we get treated to numerous potential bunnies making their case to become independent contractors for the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. First up is Camille, a petite round-faced girl with very large breasts makes her case by asserting she likes everything "natural", is a licensed massage therapist, and a licensed herbalist (although I'm not sure what herbalism has to do with being good at selling sex). After some prodding she admits that her very nice looking (and on display) chest is somewhat enhanced, which seems to make her a little ;unusual among the girls that are featured in this episode. Next up is Ally Ann, a slender blond with some pretty amazing flexibility who says she would deal with rejection by telling herself that the next guy to come in would be a guy who might pick her, a supposition that seems to be fairly reasonable. Jazzy Jones touts her oral sex skills before stripping and doing a "booty dance". In a cutaway interview Jazzy reveals her trepidation at getting undressed in front of Suzette. Charisma also touts her oral sex skills, and then demonstrates them on a banana.

After a series of promising interviews, the process hits a slight snag with a candidate who says she would have to find something attractive about a customer before she would be willing to do anything with them. This prompts Dennis to tell her "this is not about you picking hot guys". Too much selectivity, it appears, is not a trait that makes for a successful bunny, and since she doesn't appear further in the episode, one would conclude that she was told thanks, but no thanks. This segues back to Suzette at her office computer looking through rejected online applications stating that the Bunny Ranch had 8,284 rejected applications for the year as of the date of filming. For anyone who was worried that the Bunny Ranch would not have sufficient staff, there is, it seems, no shortage of women clamoring to become working girls.

The action moves back to the interview stage and we are introduced to Cami Parker, a rail thin bleached blond with improbably large breasts who HBO clearly wants to try to establish as a star for the season. She climbs on stage and announces that she decided to become the "perfect woman", and to this end learned to do three things. She became (in her words) a "really good cook", studied to become a massage therapist, and learned how to be an expert at sucking dick. Of course, she says this all in her affected baby girl lisping voice, which is an immediate turn off for me, so I'd say her plan failed, at least as far as I'm concerned. I'd also note that if I were imagining the perfect woman while all three of Cami's touted qualities might be on the list, they wouldn't be the top three, and there would be a host of other qualities as well, including not having a lisping infantile voice. Though Cami says she is "far from dumb", well, I'm doubtful about that claim, since everything she says and does on the show points towards her being a fairly dim bulb. She jumps at the chance to strip, revealing a pair of very artificial looking breast that don't fit her frame at all. I'm not opposed to augmented breasts, but there is always the danger that they will detract from, rather than enhance, a woman's appearance, and I suspect that this is the case with Cami, whose chest appears immobile and whose skin appears stretched unnaturally tight over her too-large implants. Highlighting this, Cami talks abut how her breasts are "bouncy", but when she jumps up and down they move almost not at all.

Having had enough of interviews, HBO moves to "Booty Camp" in which Ranch veteran Bunny Love, acting as a drill instructor, breaks in the new girls. They run to a mock lineup wearing the impossibly high heels that the women at the Ranch all wear, and while running down a fairly dangerously placed slope in one of the hallways Jazzy Jones loses her balance and wipes out. Jazzy later quips "I never thought it would be this hazardous just to be a ho". Once they've lined up, Bunny does her best Lou Gosset, Jr. impersonation berating the new girls, finally commenting to Jazzy that she can't yell at her because she fell, but pointing out that in a real lineup such a tumble could cost her $30,000. After the mock lineup is a discussion between Dennis, Bunny, and the new girls in which the perennial question of "how much to charge" is raised. As always, the Ranch veterans are somewhat coy about pricing, refusing to give any kind of guidelines or suggestions beyond the vaguest and most general advice. Bunny suggests that a girl should start high and work her way down in price, and that they should always be cognizant of the volume of traffic in the house - on a slow day a small amount of money might be the only income they get. We get a little bit of "new girls teaching new girls", as Jazzy Jones (easily the most interesting of the new girls featured) gives a pole dancing demonstration, starting off by showing how to make cleaning the pole sexy.

In an all too brief segment, Barbie Girl and Jazzy Jones are shown discussing their previous lives. Barbie says she is completely new to the sex industry - never having worked as a stripper, porn actress, escort, or any other sex industry job. In fact, she reveals, her previous job was at Red Lobster. One assumes that she will find the Bunny Ranch considerably more lucrative. Jazzy Jones also reveals a mundane working background as a certified dental assistant. She describes the decision to make a career change as being based on the fact that she likes sex, but given her skills displayed on the stripper pole, one suspects that she isn't as green to the industry as Barbie Girl. Once again, it is made clear that the women working at the Bunny Ranch aren't some strange alien breed but are actually just ordinary women who have decided to take up an unusual career. They not only could be the girl next door, they are the girl next door. Or in some cases, the girl serving you seafood or cleaning your teeth.

Since we haven't had one yet in the new season, HBO serves up a client scene, starting with a lineup in which the customer uses the tired metaphor that the lineup is "like a candy store" (seriously HBO, feed some better lines to these guys: "like a gourmet buffet", "like being at Baskin-Robbins", "like being in front of a lineup of hot willing women", just anything other than the worn-out "candy store" metaphor, please). This lineup marks the one and only appearance in the episode of the ultra-sultry Mika Tan, and her appearance highlights two things: (1) she is really tiny, and (2) she is much sexier than any of the new girls. This being HBO, and since these scenes have to be prearranged (so as to permit them to obtain filming releases), the client picks one of the new girls: Ally Ann. After a brief scene on the parlor couch, they move to her bedroom for negotiations and sex. In a side interview scene Ally talks about how she is becoming able to "get inside" her customer's heads and "see what they are all about". This customer, apparently, is all about contortionist sex, and Ally's previously demonstrated flexibility is put on display, with some of the positions being ones that seem, well, interesting but uncomfortable and probably not worth the effort.

The obligatory sex scene done with, HBO turns to another subject it has always been fascinated with: Dennis' girlfriends. After his breakup with Brooke Taylor, it seems that Dennis decided to trade down and fawn over the vapid Cami Parker. In a voice-over Suzette talks about what it takes to be Dennis' girlfriend, stating that he "likes to mold them into what he wants, and is doing it with Cami now". It seems that what Dennis primarily wants at this point, based upon his interactions with Cami, is an almost anorexic blond with red nails and lipstick. Dennis then starts giving Cami advice about how she will have to be thick-skinned because the other girls will be jealous of her status as his girlfriend, closing with "girls can be catty". Cami protests that she's always nice, and then shows her appreciation for his advice with the grating endearment "Thank you, Daddy". I've said this before, but it bears repeating: it is creepy for a woman to call the man she is sleeping with "Daddy", and coming out of Cami Parker's mouth with her baby girl lisp it is especially creepy.

The show then gives a flashback to the days when Dennis and Brooke were together, showing the vibrant and glowing Brooke Taylor in a montage of scenes from prior scenes while Suzette's voice-over proclaims that she "truly believes Brooke loved Dennis", a fact that even from the distant vantage point of a viewer whose only window into that relationship is the Cathouse episodes should be able to figure out. This leads directly to the highlight of the show, titled "Brooke's Back" as Brooke Taylor, now a brunette heads to the Bunny Ranch in her car. When asked if she misses the old Brooke who was dating Dennis, she responds "I don't miss the Brooke of two years ago any more than I miss being twelve". After watching her forlornly walk down the Bunny Ranch hallway before packing her belongings in the last episode, it is apparent watching her roll up to the Ranch in her cute little Mercedes that Brooke seems to have moved on and adjusted.

As she pulls up to the Ranch, it becomes clear to the viewer that even though she isn't Dennis' girlfriend any more, Brooke is the Queen returning to her kingdom. In fact, Brooke's appearance at this point in the show just highlights exactly how colorless and bland the episode had seemed before. Without Brooke to anchor it, the show is simply rudderless and adrift. Of course there is friction, and it comes from control freak Dennis, who despite not wanting to have her as his girlfriend any more is miffed that she elected to change her hair color and personal makeup style. Gone is the platinum blond hair, the red nails, the red lipstick. Instead, Brooke switched to incredibly sexy brunette hair and complimented that with understated makeup, according to Suzette, for example, either no lipstick or pink. The resulting look is amazingly attractive, but Dennis grumbles that he doesn't like it and maintains that "she did it just to piss me off". Brooke, for her part points out that she wasn't blond because he told her to, but because she cared what he thought, and now she really doesn't. It seems that one person in the relationship has moved on, and it isn't Dennis. (Note to Dennis: If she isn't your girlfriend any more, you don't get a say). Suzette then has a voice-over in which she says that Brooke, working two weeks a month, is making more money than ever, which in the world of a brothel seems like it should close the book on whether the new look is a good one or not.

Suzette then gripes a little bit about animals at the Bunny Ranch, first talking about how because Brooke obtained her dog Bella when she was Dennis' girlfriend they are stuck with Bella at the house. She then says Bella isn't a problem, but opines that she can't imagine a guy having a party with Brooke with Bella yapping in the background. Just as an FYI for Suzette, I'll suggest that when a guy is having sex, especially with a knockout like Brooke, he wouldn't notice a nuclear attack, let alone Bella.

This leads to Cami's pet, a cat coincidentally also named Bella (and if you think Cami's pet having the same name as Brooke's is a coincidence, I have some Pacific beachfront property in Nevada to sell you). Cami leads the cat about on a leash, and the animal looks terrified in every scene it appears in. Comparing the two girls' pets is just a lead in to the clearly staged scene in which Cami comes to talk to Brooke. And when I say "clearly staged" I mean that HBO seems to have pushed Cami to go and "confront" Brooke in the hopes of having some on camera fireworks. This seems very similar to the hideously contrived "confrontation" between Brooke and previous girlfriend Sunset Thomas. And as before, Brooke deftly avoids the trap set for her and is enormously classy, even giving Cami some advice telling her to play up the "new girl" thing, stating that she had lots of "first parties" because that is clearly enticing to a lot of men. (I suppose this means the cat is out of the bag, and most of you guys who think they had "first parties" with Brooke, Cami, or probably any other girl at the Bunny Ranch should now realize that there is a much smaller chance that this is actually true). Cami, perhaps realizing that no one is paying any attention to her while Brooke is on camera, unsuccessfully tries to rectify this by whipping off her top for no apparent reason, after which she comments that before her breast implants she was "about Brooke's size". Unwilling to rise to the bait, Brooke graciously says that Cami's breasts look nice, but that isn't anything she would do to her own body. Brooke finishes off the awkward encounter with a brief comment to the camera that while she isn't going to be friends with Cami, she isn't going to try to cause her any problems either. In short, Cami still seems like a nervous child with an inflated chest, and Brooke seems like a confident, sexy, and fully grown adult.

Having tantalized us with enough Brooke to show just how pallid the new girls are in comparison, HBO decides to shift back to the new girls for a little comic relief as Madam Suzette shows how difficult it is to break them in and make them follow the rules of the Bunny Ranch. She is shown admonishing girls to put their breasts away, put their computers away, and put their robes away, all of which are apparently forbidden in the parlor. To illustrate the newness of this crop, we get a lineup scene with a new customer, who picks Barbie Girl, who then turns and yanks Air Force Amy along for backup. In some camera interviews Amy proudly says that Dennis has told the new girls to bring her in to help negotiate, and that when they do, it usually means that Amy will negotiate, the guy won't have enough money for both girls, but Amy will get the new girl more money than she would have otherwise gotten. At this point, the action shifts to the bedroom and Amy pounces on the client to begin negotiations in her usual hyper-aggressive used car salesman style. This being an HBO shoot, the three end up having a threesome, which serves to contrast the faded veteran Amy with the brand new teenage Barbie Girl. Although neither girl particularly appeals to me, I wouldn't have sex with Air Force Amy with someone else's penis, while Barbie merely gets a "meh" reaction from me. The scene seems intended to be a "passing the torch" scene, and I hope it is, because that might mean that we won't have any more Air Force Amy scenes.

Finally we get to the denouement, with Cami cuddled on Dennis' lap as he announces that they are going to get burgers, fires, and malts. After saying she would put out for anything, Cami snuggles up to Dennis and coos "I love working here" in her little girl lisp. One has to wonder if she will love working there as much when she is no longer the princess around whom the Bunny Ranch revolves when, as is inevitable, Dennis breaks up with her. One suspects that she won't adjust nearly as well as Brooke seems to, and even though it seems clear that not being with Dennis won't bother her, not being the center of attention probably will. To underscore this, the show moves to a shopping scene in which the bunnies try on sexy outfits and try out sex toys - and to make sure she is the center of attention, Cami is the first to whip off her clothes before she wheedles a pair of stripper shoes out of "daddy". Before long, all of the girls are naked and tying out products. Every season seems to ramp up the amount of sex and nudity in the episodes, and this one is no exception, as there is more nudity in this scene alone than there probably was in the first five episodes combined.

The good news with this episode is that Cathouse is back with new material. The bad news is that with the exception of Jazzy Jones, none of the new girls are interesting enough to make you really care. Though she doesn't come into the show until it is more than half over, and is on for too brief a time, it remains clear that Brooke Taylor is, at this point, still the undisputed star of the show. Although it must irk Dennis no end, none of the new girls, including the insipid Cami Parker, have a hope of replacing her in that position. As a general rule of thumb at this point, the more Brooke Taylor there is in an episode, the better it is. Based upon the material presented in Cat Call, I don't see that changing any time soon.

Cathouse     Television Reviews     Home

Review - Cathouse: Getting It Up (Episode 4)

Short review: The Bunnies sell fantasy while trying to keep from getting bored waiting for clients to show up.

Haiku
Old men use viagra
Alexis does contortions
Selling fantasy

Full review: Although every episode of Cathouse seems at first glance to be a disorganized mess, most have at least some semblance of a theme running through them. The theme for this episode appears to be "how to keep men interested and how to keep Bunnies from getting bored". Or, more bluntly, "how to keep customers buying, Bunnies selling, and money flowing". I'll note at the outset that this episode has what I consider to be a fairly major flaw - Karla and her razor sharp humor doesn't appear in the episode at all.

In keeping with the show's title, the opening sequence deals with older men, and the difficulties that crop up with age. More simply, as a rapid fire sequence with Danielle, Deanna, Sunset Thomas, and Isabella Soprano discusses, older men have trouble getting erections because of the infirmities of age or simple nerves. And this leads directly to a discussion of the modern cure-all for this problem: Viagra, which Dennis is quoted as saying his customers believe will make them "as hard as Chinese arithmetic".

There is a brief lineup scene in which an older man picks out Amy Andersinn, a very tall, leggy blond using the line that most people who have watched the show will recognize from the opening credits "you're so tall and beautiful". Then the action switches to a party scene with Amy showing the downside of Viagra - it allows a man to get an erection, but to paraphrase Danielle's words, it makes it very difficult for a man to achieve orgasm. Though Dennis asserts that Viagra is as much a mental boost as a physical one, as Daisy points out the men are medicated, and able to keep an erection but unable to get to the finish line, which seems to me like some pretty good evidence that Viagra is mostly a physical boost.

Danielle states that a Viagra party is a "longer, harder party" because of the client's inability to orgasm, and the show then runs through several scenes of Bunnies with older clients, all presumably using Viagra, with the Bunnies struggling to satisfy their clients. In some cases they are successful, as Danielle is just before the speaker announces that it is "time to reparty" (at the Bunny Ranch they never say "time is up", they don't want the client to leave, they want him to spend more money by "repartying"). Amy, on the other hand, is apparently unsuccessful with her client.

As has become apparent in the series, what the Bunny Ranch sells is not simply sex. If it were, then I suspect that the business would not be nearly as successful as it is. What the Bunny Ranch sells is fantasy, and "What's Your Position", another classroom segment with Alexis Fire instructing some other Bunnies in unusual sexual positions, shows one way in which the Bunnies keep the fantasy alive. The incredibly flexible Alexis assumes a position against a wall, with her head at her feet and grabbing her own ankles before asking fellow Bunny Daisy to take the role of a client and demonstrate how they would have sex with her in that position. In an intercut interview segment, Felicia muses that with a regular customer, a Bunny has to spice up a party to keep things from getting dull. As Isabella notes, the customers are "looking for something different" than just run-of-the-mill sex, which one presumes potential clients could experience in their normal lives.

The class continues with Alexis putting first one, and then both her her legs behind her head, after which Sunset and Daisy try to emulate her, although they are clearly not as skilled as a contortionist as Alexis is. The positions lead to a discussion concerning penis size, with the girls commenting on whether they like a larger or smaller penis, with a variety of opinions. Alexis leads the discussion, with the observation that her size preference depends on her mood, and describes some oral sex tricks that she can do with a smaller penis that are impossible with a more well-endowed partner. Whether the girls are playing to the camera, or really are interested in smaller sized men, the sequence should give more modestly endowed guys a boost of confidence, which the Bunnies all agree is the real key to performing well with a woman.

We get another title card, this one called "Trying It Out", and a sex scene with Isabella Soprano and a client trying out the various contortionist tricks that Alexis demonstrated in her classroom segment. Isabella tells her client that he's the first to get a little freaky with the contortionist positions, and that several of the positions stimulated her g-spot. As I've noted before, the sorts of things that are labeled as "freaky" on the HBO show seem like they are decidedly tame, especially for a place that is supposed to be "anything goes" like the Bunny Ranch. One of the revelations of the show, it seems to me, is that most people are quite conservative when it comes to sex, even when they are in a fantasy-land like the Bunny Ranch.

The show then moves from the problem of keeping customers interested to the problem of keeping Bunnies motivated. Sitting in the business office Suzette and Dennis discuss the problem, with Suzette leading off by noting a Bunny told her when she came in to work that business that day was "so dead", but when she looked at the register, there was plenty of money flowing in. Dennis points out that as long as they have one customer per hour, they can stay afloat, and if they have two customers per hour then they are doing very well. But with fifteen to thirty girls working at any given time, this means that work will be slow for the majority of them for the bulk of each day. Being a Bunny apparently means that you will spend most of your twelve hour shift waiting for something to happen. To deal with bored, complaining Bunnies, Suzette keeps an arsenal in her cabinet - aspirin, tums, Tylenol, and so on.

Of course, bored Bunnies are bad for business, so we then shift to "Kittens at Play", a pool party scene showing how the Bunny Ranch keeps their Bunnies from getting bored. Dennis explains that they include a huge budget for fun in their calculations, to keep the Bunnies engaged and working hard. The scene is a huge pool party scene, with Bunnies in various states of undress from bikinis to completely nude running about shooting each other with water guns and playing with hula hoops. (With only two real sex scenes in the episode, HBO had to make sure they get some more nudity in the episode somehow). Most of the Bunnies we have seen before are in the scene.

But the episode then shifts to focusing on Dennis' then current girlfriend Sunset Thomas with a segment titled "Couples Therapy" touting Sunset's skills as a sex educator. Sunset asserts that wives bring their husbands in to ask Sunset to show them how to perform oral sex on a woman more skillfully. Dennis opines that "Sunset is a sex machine . . . she has no inhibitions". I'm not sure what having no inhibitions has to do with being a good educator, but she certainly seems to know a lot about sex, which is probably her best qualification. This segment segues to "Home Studies with Professor Sunset", featuring a seminar that Sunset apparently would give to a group of local women twice a month about sex, mostly asking questions about how to have better sex with their husbands. Sadly, the thrust of many of the segments throughout the series discussing Bunnies as sex educators seems to indicate that there are a lot of people out there having bad, unsatisfying sex with their spouses. To cure this, Dennis asserts that "Sunset is a great teacher" and "who knows more about sex than Sunset".

One thing Sunset is not is a comedienne, which she demonstrates by poorly delivering a very weak joke at the beginning of her seminar built on a double entendre for "box". But she quickly moves on to what she is good at, which is talking about sex. After running through a collection of different shaped toys, it is revealed that several of the women present don't know how to masturbate, or simply have never tried. As a guy, it seems almost inconceivable that someone would not know how to masturbate - for men this activity is pretty much as natural as breathing - and it seems quite sad as well, especially in 2005 (when the episode was first released). One would think that in the 21st century this sort of sexual dark ages would be over, but it seems that it is not. Even sadder, some of the women don't even seem to think that it is something they should do, leading Sunset to comments that there is "nothing like going home and curling up and giving yourself a really good orgasm" at which point she gives a simulated masturbation demonstration. She moves on to showing the women how to perform oral sex upon their husbands, which leads to a puzzling scene in which she shows the women how to roll condoms onto dildoes with their teeth. But if these women are married, one would think that they would not have a real particular need to use condoms as part of their regular sex lives (except, I suppose, for the presumably rare cases in which this was the couple's primary means of birth control, which seems odd in the present sexual landscape of the world).

The episode closes with "The Bachelor Party" as four guys, one of whom is apparently getting married come through the front door of the Bunny Ranch. Dennis is quoted saying that the Ranch is "bachelor party heaven", but this is presumably only for men whose future wives are fairly open-minded, since it seems likely that a bachelor party at the Bunny Ranch would often end up including sex, which I'm guessing a lot of potential brides would frown upon. The guys pick four women, starting with the bachelor picking the super cute Sunshine, one of the other party goers picking Danielle (who spouts her tiresome "you want chocolate" line), and the other two picking two Bunnies I don't recognize (as far as I can tell, these two are never identified by name in the series). Danielle says the guys "didn't know what they wanted" (which I doubt, they are in a brothel, they probably want sex), but that they were "rowdy and wild". The shows follows them from lots of drinking at the bar to a four girl strip show before the girls are shown leading the party boys out of the parlor, presumably to their rooms for some after-party sex. The show closes with Dennis opining that the Bunny Ranch is the funnest place on Earth and that he "wants to die here at one hundred having sex with triplets". I'm not sure if that would be every man's dream, but it sure seems enticing.

Oddly, despite the focus of this episode being on how to create a more fantasy-filled atmosphere and keep the work at the Bunny Ranch a more enjoyable experience, the real revelation of the episode is how dull and mundane life seems to be on a day to day basis. From the rather mild definition of "freaky" that is given, to the fact that the management of the establishment has to provide a means to stave off pervasive boredom among the Bunnies, this episode illustrates just how normal life is within the walls of the sexual fantasy factory.

Previous episode reviewed: Girlfriends.
Subsequent episode reviewed: She's Got Game.

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Review - Cathouse: Girlfriends (Episode 3)

Short review: Some men mistakenly believe the Bunnies are their girlfriends. Dennis actually has a Bunny for a girlfriend.

Haiku
They are not girlfriends
Even if you want to wrestle
But you can rent them

Full review: I'd like everyone to meet Mark. Mark is a musician. Mark is a regular client of Bunny Caressa Kisses, a cute woman with long blonde hair and an impressively attractive figure. Mark thinks of Caressa as his girlfriend. He e-mails her once a day and imagines himself making a fortune in the music industry, riding into Caressa's life like a white knight to rescue her from the Bunny Ranch, and heading off into the sunset with her. Mark is deluded.

In a separate interview, Caressa seems to like Mark well enough, but it is clear that to her, he is one client among many. As she puts it, she doesn't want to break it to Mark, but she has many suitors for her attention (and now that she's said that on a nationally televised cable television show, it seems likely that the cat is out of the bag). But this is a turning point for the show, where is grows from the mere mechanical discussion of sex featured in episode one, and beyond the "stare at the freak" oddities of episode two, to deal with the real emotions that underlie sex. For Mark's sake, I'm guessing that as a rule of thumb, you probably cannot credibly call one of the Bunny Ranch Bunnies your "girlfriend" unless she is willing to date you outside the supervision of the Bunny Ranch. Unless this is the case, you are not her "boyfriend", you are her "client". Probably a valued and well-liked client, but a client nonetheless.

But, as the title of the third episode of Cathouse: The Series suggests, this doesn't mean you cannot live the fantasy. Dennis Hof pops up to explain that many customers want the Girlfriend Experience, or "GFE" in Bunny vernacular. Several Bunnies go on to try to define the "GFE" - Felicia says that it is a more erotic and sensual party, Danielle states that these are the clients that want to kiss, cuddle, and otherwise become more intimate (although one wonders what "more intimate" means when the standard party includes various kinds of sex). Isabella notes that a lot of clients pick her out of the lineup because she looks like she could actually be their girlfriend, a clear indication that the "girl next door" look that she cultivated has some definite advantages.

As if to provide some immediate contrast to Isabella, the show then leaps to Air Force Amy in conversation with Madam Suzette. Amy, whose over the top presentation reminds one of how Dolly Parton might look if she threw all semblance of taste to the wind, asserts that guys like "shiny, big, and bright" to explain her sequined dress, piled high hair and enormous breast implants and collection of jewelry. But given Isabella's substantial popularity, it seems that the qualifier "some" should be added to "guys" in her statement. To be perfectly honest, though I can sort of see the appeal of the hyper-glamorized stripper look that she presents, Air Force Amy does almost nothing for me. Both her over the top appearance and her extremely aggressive personality simply leave me uninterested. (I'll also note that Amy consistently does this strange thing with her mouth, leaving it hanging open all the time, which I think she does intentionally in the mistaken belief that this makes her more attractive in some way. Note to Amy: It doesn't. Stop doing that).

Introducing Amy into the story at this point is pretty much to set up the rivalry between her and the other "big dog" (to use Dennis' words) at the Ranch, Caressa Kisses. Amy quickly asserts her dominance, pointing to the fact that she had, at that time, been the "top booker" in the history of the Bunny Ranch for two consecutive years ("top booker", although never explicitly explained, appears to mean "top money earner"), even though Amy "loves Caressa because she's in the same boat". Caressa defiantly fires back that working at the Bunny Ranch is not her life, but merely her job, and that Amy has a need to be on top, while Caressa doesn't care. But later we see Dennis presenting a gift to Caressa for being the "top booker for March" while Amy stalks back to her room. The gift turns out to be a Louis Vutton handbag, which causes Caressa to exclaim that Dennis is "the best Daddy I've ever had". This is the first time in the series that Dennis' nickname of "Daddy" is used, a nickname that seems both endearing and slightly creepy, especially when used by women that Dennis is sleeping with.

HBO then throws in some purely gratuitous, but very nice nudity, as Caressa bounces on a Bunny Ranch trampoline in her birthday suit. Cut into this sequence are interview scenes with Caressa in which she described Caressa Kisses as a "fictional but fuckable character" that she created, letting the viewer in on the fact that what is being sold at the Bunny Ranch is often fantasy, and not reality. Caressa later talks about how she is naughty, but nice, and "not raunchy". A scene with Dennis eating lunch illustrates this when he says she won't talk dirty, a charge she denies.

The show shifts gears with a new segment - "The Naked Wrestler", in which Caressa's implication that the Bunnies don't sell sex so much as they sell fantasy is given a concrete example. Though the clients says he is embarrassed to talk about his fantasy (which leads one to wonder why he is allowing it to be filmed for a television show), he wants to wrestle a woman naked. Caressa calls in reinforcements in the form of Bunny Felicia, and the three get to business. But both Bunnies are somewhat mystified that their client simply does not want to take the next step to sex, although the wrestling does degenerate into a pillow fight.

But this is a program about a business, and the show shifts to highlighting Air Force Amy's somewhat contentious relationship with her fellow Bunnies - first with a clip of her griping that when you are on top everyone wants to outdo you, and then the follow up observation that Amy always has friction with anyone who challenges her position as top money maker. Deanna, Amy, and Sunset then give a brief lesson in hooker ethics with some rhyming slogans "If you ain't got the money, you can't get the honey" and then "No romance without the finance". In the end, this is a business, the girls are working a job, and they want to get paid for their services.

But emotions get mixed up on the job, and when it is revealed for the first time that Sunset Thomas is (at the time the show was filmed) also Dennis Hof's girlfriend, it becomes apparent that for Dennis, mixing business and pleasure is de rigeur. Sunset explains that if Dennis has sex with someone else while she is away, that's okay with her, later pointing out that even if this sort of relationship is hard on her, it is also similarly hard on Dennis, as she has sex with her clients and costars for her living. This attitude seems to be necessary because when Dennis explains that he is a "serial monogamist" he seems to be using a definition of monogamy that boils down to "the exact opposite of monogamy", later explaining that "if it moves and its warm we want to have sex with it". I'd suggest that Dennis' remarks in this regard don't speak for everyone - there are definitely women I would have no interest in having sex with, some whom appear in the series. We get a window into Dennis' world after he points out that "he owns the candy store and he's eating all the candy" (although he insists that sleeping with him is not required for his employees), and then the camera runs through several members of the "candy" category confirming this, from Danielle who admits that Dennis has "had some chocolate", to Sunshine who bluntly avers "I've had sex with Dennis, and it's fun!", to Isabella, who denies ever having had sex with Dennis. At this point Dennis reveals that he only dates working girls and would "never date a square girl", probably because it would be difficult to find a non-working girl who would be willing to deal with his chosen lifestyle.

Having delved into Dennis' love life for a bit, the show shifts gears to "The Married Couple", a husband and wife who have come to the Bunny Ranch to fulfill her fantasy of being (a) with a woman for the first time, and (b) with Sunset Thomas specifically. I'll note that, like several other people who appear as clients in these early shows, this couple crops up in the background of numerous episodes. But back to the impending sex scene - the husband in this case is so incredibly nervous that he comes off as a complete dork, in his words "stuttering and stupid like he's back in 10th grade", but since he is clearly wanting this to be a great experience for his wife, he comes off as a sweet dork. Once the scene gets started, they quickly make up for the fact that the previous "couples" scene had no sex in it by having some fairly vigorous girl-on-girl sex. As usual, with my minor obsession with clothes, I'll note that both women keep their heels on through the entire scene, and the wife keeps her hose on as well. In an intercut interview, Sunset extols her oral sex skills, asserting that she knows exactly how to please a woman, and loves doing so. At the end, the wife asks if they can take Sunset home with them, leading eventually to an interview clip with Dennis where he says "they can't take Sunset home with them, because she's with me, but they can rent her". Which is how romance works at the Bunny Ranch.

The episode closes with Sunset, Dennis, and the rest of the Bunnies singing a karaoke version of Tammy Wynette's Stand by Your Man, over which Dennis states that by dating Sunset he gets "all the fun of a relationship, but none of the grief". This is yet another indication that Dennis' ideas concerning the nature of what most people would consider a conventional relationship don't match up with my experiences, and probably don't match up with the experiences of most people I know. I might even hazard they don't match up with the experiences of most people, but that would be an assumption on my part. But the episode delves directly into many of the raw emotions of the people who inhabit the Bunny Ranch, from clients in love with their working girl, to Bunnies jealous of each other's success, to the strains of having a relationship in the supercharged hypersexual atmosphere of a brothel. It is this unflinching look at how a business built on sex and fantasy is actually built on very real human emotions that makes Cathouse such compelling viewing, and this episode drills this home.

Previous episode reviewed: Anything Goes.
Subsequent episode reviewed: Getting It Up.

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Review - Cathouse: Anything Goes (Episode 2)

Short review: Come to the Bunny Ranch and indulge your fetishes. Or just have sex with the new girl from Nebraska.

Haiku
Show up in diapers
The Bunnies will baby you
If you have the cash

Full review: How does episode two of Cathouse start? Just in case anyone was unclear on exactly what happens at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, the opening sequence of "Anything Goes" joins Air Force Amy on the road, heading to work, where she will (she hopes) be paid for sex. We are then treated to a swift transition as Dennis Hof argues that the Bunny Ranch is a historic place, citing its statues as a stop on the Pony Express, and then drawing a connection between mining companies bringing prostitutes to Virginia City to service the miners and the Bunny Ranch of the present day. Given that the economy of Virginia City collapsed in 1898 when the Comstock Lode was exhausted, and the Bunny Ranch wasn't established until 1955, drawing a connection between the two seems like a stretch to me. Dennis then caps off his discussion about the supposed historical significance of the Bunny Ranch by explaining that he bought the business because Subway declined to sell him a franchise with a delivery so convincing that one is almost certain that the next option for most rejected Subway supplicants is to find a Nevada brothel in need to a new owner.

The show then shifts to the first of the two themes that run through this episode, with a brief scene involving a rather large man dressed rather unconvincingly as a woman to illustrate that, as the title of this installment of the series suggests, anything goes at the Bunny Ranch. As Dennis says, if a man shows up wearing a dress and pumps, the only thing anyone will say to him is "nice shoes". Reinforcing this are brief clips of various Bunnies, including Amy Andersinn, Danielle, Sunset Thomas, Isabella Soprano, and my favorite Bunny in the episode Karla, all asserting that literally anything goes, but they bring things back to reality by adding "so long as the money is right".

While the Bunny Ranch is a place where people go to fulfill their outlandish fantasies, everything comes at a price. To demonstrate the reality of this, the show presents the viewer with a cross-dresser (not the same one from the first segment) sitting with Danielle and Sunshine Lane intercut with some couch interview scenes where Danielle talks about this particular encounter in which she discusses the mental confusion this particular client caused her - first saying that she would think of the client as a woman, which she says excited her (and seems to contradict some things Danielle says about women later), but then she recognized he was a man, and she couldn't decide which she liked better. After following Danielle, Sunshine, and their cross-dressing client to their bedroom door (and no further), the show then turns to a very brief scene in which Air Force Amy tosses a pile of whips and leather straps onto her bed and then parades a naked and collared client about her room while she cracks a whip. The point of this scene seems to be to allow Amy to talk about just how tough the sex business really is, and how the girls have to be willing to cater to every need.

At this point the show shifts gears in a segment titled "From the Plains of Nebraska" to the other theme of the episode - the arrival of a new working girl in the person of Bianca, formerly a dancer (given the context in which this information is presented, one assumes she has worked as a stripper, but this is never explicitly stated). As Madam Suzette says at one point, the customers like girls who are new to the Bunny Ranch, and HBO seems to have decided that their viewers would too, because the story line revolving around Bianca's arrival at the Bunny Ranch is only the first of a couple times that the arrival of a new girl is a highlighted feature of the show. Dennis informs the camera that the Bunny Ranch gets calls from ten to twenty women a day asking about jobs and brings in five or so new girls every week to work. If anyone was wondering just if the Bunny Ranch was ever going to run short of women, the answer seems to be "no". But lest anyone think that working at the Bunny ranch is a cakewalk, we get revelations from Daisy and Vandalia about how scared and nervous they were when they started on the job - Daisy going so far as to say she cried herself to sleep every night for the first week. Sunset Thomas chips in about how nervous she was when she started working, but her complaint is slightly different (probably because when she came to the Bunny Ranch she was already a popular porn actress): she is nervous about handling the money related end of the business.

The story of Bianca's introduction to the world of working in a legal brothel is woven throughout the rest of the episode. During a segment in which she is tutored by a veteran Bunny (Deanna I think, who shows up in several episodes, but is rarely credited onscreen, so I'm not sure if that's the correct name) we learn a little bit about the internal operations of the Ranch, such as the fact that the women work twelve hour shifts and in the jargon of the Ranch, the selection of things a woman is willing to do is euphemistically called a "tour". Deanna also cautions Bianca to never tell a customer with an unusual request that it is impossible for their desires to be fulfilled, because even if she is unwilling to do it, another one of the women at the Ranch probably will.

Bianca then gets dressed for business and is handed a pile of supplied by Madam Suzette: videos, condoms ("snug fit", regular, and large), lubricant, and antibacterial soap. All of these are charged to Bianca because the Bunny Ranch (and apparently all of the other legal brothels in Nevada) assert that the women who work in them are "independent contractors" and thus personally responsible for picking up many of the costs of doing business. This is an arrangement that clearly suits brothel management, as they don't have to absorb those costs, but whether the working conditions actually allow them enough freedom to be credibly called independent contractors seems to be a contentious issue. Given that there is so much competition to come and work at the Bunny Ranch, this doesn't seem to be an issue that anyone wants to jeopardize their job by challenging.

Bianca is quite attractive in her working outfit, but one thing that stood out for me is that she is wearing so much make-up in this scene that her face is a decidedly different shade than the rest of her body. Bianca then learns one of the hitherto unremarked upon realities of working at the Bunny Ranch: there is lots of waiting. She waits, gets in lineups, sees other girls get picked, waits some more, chats up men at the bar, watches Deanna dirty hustle a potential client away from her, waits some more, and finally gets a client. Her client is a guy killing time either after or before picking up a friend from the airport (it isn't clear which). Bianca lowballs him for $400 for an hour long party involving lots of nudity and kissing, but no actual sex (the second "party" featured within two episodes in which there is no actual sex). Bianca then goes to get paid, and learns a hard truth about working in a brothel: even if the client doesn't screw you, the finances might, especially if you lowball yourself. After the Bunny Ranch takes its cut and the cost of her supplies are deducted, Bianca gets $132 of the $400 party, a figure that she seems decidedly nonplussed about (I'll also note that she is responsible for paying income taxes on the $132 as well, as the Bunny Ranch does not do deductions). Before the end of the episode we are told that Bianca left the Ranch - according to Madam Suzette she just didn't have the "spirit of fun" you need to work there. The episode makes it seem much more likely that she left because she wasn't making money.

As a brief interjection, during Bianca's sojourn at the bar, if one looks in the background one will see the dark haired mustached client who was seen in the first episode in the class with Isabella and Shelly, and who had the "clothes on" party with Shelly. I note this because HBO seems to have reused several of the clients who show up in these episodes. If you watch the background, you will often see people who appeared in a scene with a working girl popping up in the background of multiple episodes. The mustached guy is in several episodes, leading me to believe that he either spends a lot of time at the Bunny Ranch, or HBO shot the bulk of the season in a day or two of filming.

But back to the part of the episode that is about freaky people coming to the Bunny Ranch to act out their weird desires. Actually, it turns out, for some people, acting out their weird desires doesn't even require a trip to the Bunny Ranch, as we are introduced to "diaper boy", a shoe salesman who appears to have a baby fetish, when he calls the Ranch and speaks to one of the bartenders (one of the few times a member of the bartending staff gets some serious camera time) and then has a phone call with Madam Suzette and Air Force Amy in which he is told to change his diaper and go to bed. In an aside, we are told that diaper boy is a "nice" caller, as he is not generally vulgar. This makes one wonder just how many crank calls from sex-obsessed jerks the Bunny Ranch must get on a daily basis. Then some home videos diaper boy sent to the Ranch are shown, which to me is the most surreal element of this sequence. Generally one cannot show someone on television without their consent, which means that someone from HBO had to contact this man and ask if they could show the videos of him in a diaper and bra pouring baby powder over himself and dancing in a pink spandex bunny outfit, and he agreed. This requires either enormous amounts of self-confidence, bravery, or merely insanity.

Diaper boy is merely the tip of the iceberg of strangeness, and the show then turns to a series of Bunnies discussing strange parties they have had. Danielle recounts a customer who merely wanted to watch her flex her muscles in various poses. Deanna recollects a customer who wore panties and shaved his chest hair in the shape of a bra. Vandalia remembers giving a customer a hand job while he shook her butt (which is quite ample and on full display in the final shots of the episode). But Karla, my favorite Bunny in the episode, has the best story involving a client who was obsessed with clippers, cutting hair, and watching videos of people getting their heads shaved. Her (unrealized) fear was that he would take his clippers and try to shave her head - a situation so outlandish that she doesn't even have a way to figure out how much to charge for it. Once again, Karla's deadpan delivery sells the story and makes some that was surreal to begin with hilarious. But as interesting as these stories are, the thing that struck me about them was their mundane nature. If a client wanting to watch a woman strike muscular poses is as strange as things get for some Bunnies, then things seem like they would have to be pretty bland most of the time.

Keeping on with the fetish theme, the show moves to "How to Do Feet", an instructional segment in which Alexis Fire, in her first appearance as the resident Bunny Ranch guru on sex topics, gives a class to Sunset, Daisy, Isabella, and Felicia about how to deal with a client with a foot fetish. Now, while I think that many women have pretty feet, in the same way they have pretty hands, or cute noses, when it comes to the raw sexual energy that a foot fetishist focuses into a woman's feet, I'm with Isabella Soprano: I don't get it. But the class is fascinating nonetheless for the glimpse it gives into the sexual fixations of others: we learn the "flex" position for feet, Sunset Thomas (who likens a fetish party to a bit of spice that keeps the job at the Bunny Ranch from becoming boring like flipping burgers at McDonalds) likes to have her toes sucked, foot fetish guys are (as one might expect) also fixated on women's shoes, and if a woman puts her feet together she can make a "foot pussy". Alexis concludes the class by demonstrating how to give a foot job. This may be more about feet sex than I really wanted to know, but like a car wreck, you can't help looking.

Danielle then gets to talk about her favorite topic: herself - expounding upon how she believes that every man desires a black woman. After an odd lineup in which the customer engages in a strange handshake with every girl, he picks Danielle who exclaims "you want the chocolate experience"! This is the first time that Danielle refers to herself as "chocolate" on camera, but don't worry, you'll get tired of it soon enough, since over the course of the series she seems to use this expression about ten thousand times. She then raises another possible exotic experience, trying to interest a man in a party with her and Isabella Soprano, asserting that they would be like "salt and pepper" or "vanilla and chocolate". Danielle then makes the first reference to "game" in the series. "Game" is, apparently, the term used by the Bunnies to describe how they present themselves to customers and convince them to, in Danielle's words "spend what I want them to spend".

But in a segment called "Pussycats" Danielle starts what seems to be a sustained effort (continued in later episodes) to erode her client base. After a scene showing Danielle negotiating with a woman who wants to experiment with being a woman, Danielle reveals that she is "gay for pay", only engaging in same sex activity for money. This seems to call into question Danielle's assertion early in the show that being with a cross-dresser who made her think he was a woman at times excited her. One begins to wonder exactly how much of Danielle's on camera personality is real, and how much is, in fact, just an extension of her "game". Clips of Isabella, Daisy, and Karla are then shown in which all, perhaps understanding that they are in fact on television and everyone will see them, claim they enjoy being with women (Karla noting that a woman knows what another woman likes). Sunset and Karla both go on to describe their first lesbian experiences, Sunset's being a fairly straightforward seduction story involving a shower and candlelight, and Karla's seeming more like an step by step progression of increasing experimentation that has led her to, in her words "like it a lot". The viewer is treated to the show's first girl-on-girl sex scene between Danielle and her client (once again, with the actual sexual activity either cunningly hidden by camera angles or blurred out), and it seems like Danielle does a professional job at satisfying the woman. Even so, one is left with the lingering feeling that this client was mildly cheated out of the experience she wanted that she could have gotten with one of the numerous Bunnies that asserted their love for women.

While this is the second episode in the series, it seems more like the beginning of the show. From Air Force Amy's intro, which lays out in clear terms exactly what the Bunny Ranch is about, to Bianca's introduction to the life of a Bunny, the episode does a good job at introducing the viewer to the fantasy factory that is the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. Showing Bianca as she learns the ropes allows the show to introduce the viewer to the inner workings of the business without resorting to extended (and tedious) exposition. The long running meme of Alexis Fire as a sex tutor is introduced in this episode, and the viewer also gets introduced to Danielle as a (mostly annoying) personality. The interviews with the various Bunnies are better done than in the first episode, allowing more of their individual personalities to show through, and since the personalities of the Bunnies are what separate Cathouse from most of the other sex related (and generally far inferior) shows on HBO, this is critical. Focusing on just how strange things can get at the Bunny Ranch, highlighting their more unusual clients, also serves to elevate this series above merely being soft core porn that HBO shows like Pornucopia seem to aspire to be. Though the series had not yet reached its full potential, this episode goes a long way towards establishing Cathouse as something special.

Previous episode reviewed: What Men Don't Know.
Subsequent episode reviewed: Girlfriends.

Cathouse     Television Reviews     Home