When 20-year-old Alana was 6 months pregnant, she decided to go work at Nevada’s Moonlight Bunny Ranch (a legal brothel). Still pregnant, she talked with Tyra yesterday about her job – fulfilling men’s “pregnancy fetishes.”
Although my knee-jerk reaction to Alana’s insistence that this was her “only option” was to be like, “Are you kidding me?” I’m reticent to condemn her for her choices – she is not a bad person, just a young and naive one – because if we’re gonna embrace the whole “my body, my choice” thing in regards to pregnancy, it should apply to something like this as well. Particularly if, like me, you don’t believe in outlawing prostitution. Still, I think she would’ve been wiser to rely on the Judge Judy-ism: If you can’t afford to have a baby, then don’t have a baby. (Alana is really dead-set against adoption, for some reason.)
Alana is really critical of the other prostitutes at the Ranch who are mothers and try to give her advice, saying rather smugly, “I don’t want to follow in their footsteps.” Meaning that once she has the baby, her financial problems will somehow be solved and she’ll be able to resist the kind of fast cash she is making at the Ranch.
The most interesting part of Alana’s interview with Tyra – Tyra, of course, masks her condescension with concern – was when she discussed the purpose that a very pregnant woman serves at an establishment like the Bunny Ranch – to fulfill men’s pregnancy fetishes. She gets five customers a day, on average, and explains that they can sometimes boarder on creepy, with guys talking to the fetus in her stomach; she also wonders if some of the men are pedophiles who are there for her baby more than her.