I’ve been to Las Vegas, Nevada perhaps eight times. Most recently, I was there for my birthday in April 2012 with my sister Renee’ and her husband Eric. I also met Renee’ there for a Kylie Minogue concert in 2009. The rest of my visits have been for media and academic conventions.

I’ve been there enough times that I know Vegas is a unique place. It’s a place that creates and perpetuates the fantasy. A fantasy that it’s all about sex.

There are people who stand on the Strip and distribute playing card size photos of topless women as advertisements for shows or services. Stores and restaurants that might normally be tame in other cities are hyper-sexualized and garish in Las Vegas. The Victoria’s Secret store in Caesars’ Forum Shops, for example, once had several large, red neon displays with the flashing words “Sexy Sexy” and a full-size mannequin in flowing wings and lingerie outside the store.

All this wild exhibition has led people to believe that everyone visiting Las Vegas is seeking and finding sex or at least watching others simulate it at titillating shows featuring nude or partially nude men and women.

My ex Steve refused to let me travel to Las Vegas with a couple of my co-workers without him because, as he said, “I know what they are doing.”

A cab driver taking me from the McCarran Airport to my hotel told me he once drove a husband and wife. The wife said she only came along with her husband because she was not going to let him wander about alone along the Strip. “Who knows what he’ll end up doing,” she exclaimed.

Really? What are all these people doing?

Frankly, unless a huge number of people are lying to me or actually keeping in Vegas what happens in Vegas, there seem to be a greater number of people thinking about others engaged in debauchery more than are actually engaging in it.

Part of the reason is also because the Strip doesn’t even look like anything else in the United States. Las Vegas is presented as a magical and Other-place.

An acquaintance attending the same meetings and workshops as me a few years back said during a car ride to a restaurant that “everything in Las Vegas is from someplace else.” He was referring to the phenomenon of creating themes in hotels to reflect places such as Venice and Paris. Other popular hotel themes include Aladdin (Middle East), Mandalay Bay (Myanmar), and Luxor (Egypt).

It’s the exotic Other-place that really makes us think wild things are happening.

But this is what we do. We imagine other people are doing things that we are not. Just remember, it’s usually not the case in Vegas or anywhere else.