VEGAS INC Magazine - Latest Las Vegas business news, features and commentaries about gaming, tourism, real estate and more
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COVER STORY with the promise that the scene is made for "sun (and moon) worshippers." Rok Vegas, a nightclub at New York-New York, plays off the phrase "rock your ass off" with "Rok" where "rock" should be and a zoomed in photo of a woman's derrière where the word "ass" should be. Going back to a classic, the iconic Crazy Girls ads featured the backsides of seven performers with the wordage "No ifs, ands, or..." 20 ADVERTISING? T TRUTH IN Las Vegas' NC-17 reputation is pitted against the city's PG reality. Does it matter we're selling a half-truth? APRIL CORBIN wants to know. he imagery is everywhere. A billboard advertising Tao Beach at Individually, these ads are a little silly and perhaps the Venetian features a buxom woman and the promise, "You'll see a lot of breast stroke. Just not in the pool." Another of its advertisements features the backside of a thong bikini-clad woman, along all in good fun. Collectively, however, they help define a culture and reputation that, while not exclusive to Las Vegas, are found in their extreme here. "As a city we market sin," says Barbara Brents, a sociology professor at UNLV who has studied the sex industry in Southern Nevada. "That's our niche market and it has propelled us into iconic status." But as one of Brents' colleagues suggests, we might not have a larger sex-oriented industry than other large cities. We simply do a better job of promoting it. Of course, the "Sin City" nickname refers to more than sex. Las Vegas has always been synonymous with gambling, though the mystique of that has waned because 48 states now offer some legal form of it. Drinking and general debauchery, such as the misadventures depicted in movies like The Hangover, are also a factor, but again, neither is mutually exclusive to Las Vegas. Just ask anyone who's partied in Miami or New Orleans. Literal sex, then, in the form of legalized prostitution, is the only perceived sinful act still mutually exclusive to Nevada. Though Las Vegas is in a county where prostitution is illegal, in the public's eye the two are still incontrovertibly linked. Shows like Showtime's Gigolos, a reality television show that claims to follow the lives of five male escorts, and TruTV's Las Vegas Jailhouse, which regularly shows women being detained for prostitution, surely don't help. Though they've never used the word "sin" or promoted excessive drinking and gambling or any form of prostitution, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and its advertising firm cohort R&R Partners have plugged into the idea of the city as a haven for what they call "adult freedom." According to their research, adult freedom is what Las Vegas offers that no other destination city does. What exactly that means on an individual level, well, | 29 AUGUST 2011 | SAM MORRIS