Little bunny frou frous

Throaty McHuskington (tm "The Daily Show") has apparently gone live and direct into The Moonlite Bunny Ranch, that bastion of legal prostitution in Carson City, Nev., to find out just what goes on in there.

The horrors! These women are having sex for money! And shitloads of it! And they don't seem to be unstable or crazy (though the photograph of them shows that they are going for that pornified Barbie doll look that's leeching into popular culture).

I'm not really sure why Rita Cosby felt the need to investigate -- live and direct -- a brothel if she wasn't going to ask harder questions than "Are you afraid of getting a disease?" and "What do you put in here to get in the mood?"

I can't watch the video here at work, so I can't report for sure if the actual interview goes beyond the portion printed on the website, but if Cosby didn't dig any deeper than that, then what was the point for the interview at all? And why did the women have to do their interview in bikinis and lingerie? Oh, right. It's sweeps.

COSBY: Is it about sex? Is it about acting?

DUSHELL: I'm an actress 100 percent. You have to be to work here. But most of the men don't come here for sex, even though that's the whole premise.

COSBY: They don't come for sex?

DUSHELL: They don't come for sex.

COSBY: What do they come for?

DUSHELL: Attention, someone to look at them dead square in the eye, to touch them, to tell them they're doing something right, to tell them that they're special, to tell them that they are a good person.

Yes, woman as ego stroker. You hear a lot about women craving constant flattery, but it seems to me that men rival women in the fragile ego department and no one -- neither gender -- is better for it. Muffy might go pay $10,000 for a new rack and face to elicit compliments from men, but Biff will go drop $9,000 to have a prostitute tell him he's doing something right. It's a fucked up world of desire and beauty and sexuality any way you look at it. What silly, sad ways we spend our leisure money.

I guess the saddest part of this interview is when one of the women says this:

I don't want to get any young girls into this business. I would never tell a young girl that she needs to do this. But I was having sex at a young age, and a lot of girls these days are, and they're not having safe sex. And they're getting pregnant, they're getting diseases. And they're getting used.

Cosby, instead of exploring the logic behind women choosing to do things for money that they would never wish upon other women or girls, launches into another topic: condoms. It's a worthy topic of discussion, of course, but I would have loved to have her talk with the women about their notions of "getting used" and what that means in the context of high-dollar prostitution. Because I truly don't know who to pity -- the whore or the john -- if anyone is to be pitied at all.

But, alas, this is the crunchy rice cake stuff of television. If I want real answers about anything, I won't turn to Rita Cosby or anyone else on MSNBC. But if they're going to bring up controversial topics with crushing social implications, they'd better at least make the effort to make people think in new ways. If I wanted to see busty blondes selling their sex, I'd turn the channel to ... well ... any other fucking channel on the TV, I guess.