On one lonely Thursday night not too many weeks ago, I was flipping through the bevy of cable channels only to let the dial settle on the last bastion of quality entertainment: HBO. Nominated for 109 Emmys, this network is home to such fine programming as ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Sex and the City.’ For those media patrons tired of the rules and regulations served up by network television, HBO, with its characteristic no-holds-barred approach to entertainment, has become a refreshing change of pace.

So what, pray tell, was this avid premium cable subscriber watching? Well it wasn’t exactly Sex and the City; in fact, Sex in the Middle of the Desert would probably have been a better title. That’s right, HBO capitalized on its vast resources as a subsidiary of AOL-Time Warner to do an hour-long documentary on the Bunny Ranch Brothel out in Nevada.

Tucked away from the rest of the world just a few hours outside of Reno, a building looking like a couple of trailers fused into a one-story structure sits full of barely dressed, busty women waiting for men and their wallets to drop by their casa de amor.

Upon entering the ‘ranch,’ men are treated to a marine-style lineup of women ready, willing and able to do whatever their potential customer may desire. Watching the men judge which womanly woos they should respond to took me back to my days in retail where customers would analyze the products hanging on the wall as if a cure for cancer might be found. The only difference is this ranch was offering women for $1,000 an hour, not golf shirts that cost $35 wholesale.

During the HBO documentary (remember, it’s not TV; it’s low-grade porn) clients ranging from well-dressed businessmen to boyish first-timers to a married couple strolled through the bunny ranch’s poorly lit front gate, grabbed a sexual menu du jour, took a seat at the bar and chatted up their gabby liaisons.

It turns out the program was one part lesson in sexuality and one part lesson in economics. The girls had the final say in who they invited back to their rooms, what exactly their gentlemen caller was allowed to do to them even certain price adjustments were left up to the girl’s discretion. The inside look at the sex for money industry was almost like watching a care salesman at work, except with a hooker you’re paying to get screwed, whereas with a car salesman, the screwing is simply an added perk.

First, the girls would flirt with the men, then do some light touching, maybe a few pecks on the cheek (which cheek depended on the guy), followed by a brief glimpse of the girl’s ‘goods.’ Then, as if having the sexual rug lifted out from under them, the guys were stopped short and the girls would quote prices.

While many would argue that prostitution demeans women, it seemed strangely empowering for the women to dictate rules and monetary charges to a man whose main blood supply was nowhere near his brain.

That’s when I thought how great the bunny ranch was. Here were women earning thousands of dollars a day (one girl said she took in $200,000 a year) for doing what most of us would consider recreation. One girl even said she considered herself a ‘sexual therapist’ for helping to relieve the sexual pressure of pent up men.

Interestingly enough, I found her occupational explanation to be historically accurate. When mining towns would set up in the remote west during the 1800s, brothels were often the first business that would open shop. Even civil war battalions had hookers. Heck, the word hooker was coined after a civil war general named Hooker promoted the mingling of prostitutes among his lonely troops.

So here is a haven for woman to earn money, and an oasis for men to play out their sexual desires. What could be better?

Looking at the bunny ranch from a different angle caused me to dig deeper into my true feelings about the establishment. These women were not goods to be traded, but people with real emotions and real desires. I seriously doubt any of them wished and prayed as little girls that they would one day be working at a brothel.

Then it hit me; the hookers selling themselves were someone’s daughter, someone’s sister perhaps even someone’s mother. How would I feel if my sister worked there? How would I feel if one of my friends who happened to be a girl sold her body in the middle of the desert? Not so great.

Once the pit of my stomach settled I came upon the startling and yet clichéd realization that objectifying anyone, be it women or men, in the long term, never leads to anything good. The act of defining someone’s worth in dollars only lessens that person’s real value as a human being. So, while the women of the bunny ranch are top of the line in price, what was the real cost of their business?

Zach Miller, a senior in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.