It is about sex and sin, not authenticity, green pastures and great mountain views. Vegas is a destination that offers the opposite of ethical consumption, caring for the planet and worrying about climate change.
It is about conspicuous consumption and lavishness rather than communities and humanity. The answer is simply sex and sin. Vegas is a sinful city where tourists take a vacation for adult, undiluted erotica. Sex Ever since Las Vegas became a gambling oasis in the Nevada desert, sex has played an important role in its entertainment scene. When Bugsy Siegel first opened his Tropicana Casino in this sleepy desert town, in , he featured beautiful female hostesses and lavish shows with scantily clad women.
That formula is still prevalent in Las Vegas casinos today. In nearly every casino, beautiful cocktail waitresses dressed in ultra-short skirts and low-cut tops float around the gaming tables, dispensing smiles and free drinks.
Just walking along the sidewalks of Las Vegas Boulevard, visitors pass numerous newspapers and posters flaunting revealing photographs of female escorts and nude models. In the streets men thrust flyers advertising sexual services into the hands of passers-by. Jack Sheehan in his book, Skin City describes an advertisement in Vegas showing an attractive woman crawling into the back of a limousine, letting her hair down from its neatly tied bun, fondling the leather interior, flirting with the driver, changing clothes enroute to the airport, and caressing the driver as he drops her off.
The Dark Side Wherever there is tourism there are sex tourists. However, the dark side of this is, :increasingly, people under the age of 18 are being recruited into the commercial sex markets to service the demand resulting from the normalisation of and the promotion of commercial sex across America. These young victims join the adult women who have also been deceived about the kind of work they were being offered and have been coerced into prostitution, becoming victims of human trafficking as defined by the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act of Many Americans believe that prostitution is legal throughout Nevada, including Las Vegas, a belief which is due in no small part to the highly visible, sexually based advertising.
