Las Vegas: Taking the Fun out of Sin City

Las Vegas has a reputation for being a "swingers' paradise," among people still usig the word "swingers." For my part, I find it to be relentlessly trashy, and nothing kills libido like pettiness. Like every resort town, Vegas imagines itself to be above the tourists who sustain it, and one way in which they differentiate themselves from those people is their refusal to enjoy, to take delight in, much of anything. Sure, there are events in the major hotels, but the so-called "locals' places" are a boring waste of time for the most part, even seedier and more intent on exasperating their clientele than the Strip properties. (It's a running gag around our house that "locals' casino" means "casino that is geared towards ripping off the locals rather than tourists.") The "need" for a tourist town to believe that it is the dominant one in relationships tells you right away how it constructs "relationships" and has other implications for the subject at hand.

If you can picture southern California with a little less education and a little more contempt for one's fellow man (and woman), you have visualized Las Vegas. We moved here three and a half years ago, and I have never seen a place go from promising to pointless so fast. I spend x% of my time dealing with the vagaries of volatility in business and investment, and even I can't find the words to describe it.

"Gee, Carl, what does this have to do with sex?" Nothing kills the mood faster than a good cocktail of malice and vacuity. If you're going to locate yourself within a basically empty culture, you're going to be consigned to basically joyless sexual encounters. I don't mean to say casual sex is bad: if it is, it's the good kind of bad. I mean to say that even casual sex has a social context. And the locals' predilection for draining the fun out of everything just so they know they're really the ones in control of the tourists and not vice versa extends to other matters. It's a habit they can't break (a popular theme in Sin City). No one wants to be bothered constructing a "meaningful relationship" every time he wants to hook up, but I challenge the reader to find me more than one person whose sex life has been improved by being restricted to people who have gone to such lengths to be impossible to deal with. After a while, the line between "dominatrix" and "irritating backwoods trailer girl who doesn't know when her act has worn thin" gets pretty clear.