Blessèd are the Porn Slappers

I hate these guys.

If you’ve ever walked the Las Vegas Strip, you know them. They stand in long lines, handing out stripper cards, the little advertising cards with pictures of girls and a phone number, promising “girls direct to you,” entertainment right in your hotel room.

As you pass, one by one, relentlessly, they each offer a card. They skillfully stick the card in your face without touching, and they don’t say anything to get attention: instead, they slap their cards together to make noise, the technique that has earned them the name “porn slappers.”

There must be hundreds of porn slappers. By midnight, the Strip is littered with cards.

But enough tourists don’t throw them away to keep the porn slappers, and their employers, in business—by falling for a big scam. Contrary to popular misconception, prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas, and the whole of Clark County.

If they were offering, so openly, what they want you to think they’re offering, they wouldn’t last long. They’re stripper cards, not hooker cards: the only reason anyone infers anything else is the misconception that prostitution is legal here. There are always enough Vegas newbies to keep it going.

The authorities have tried to stop the porn slappers (they call themselves “card workers,” or tarjeteros) but the 9th Circuit Court struck down the ban on First Amendment grounds, so we’re stuck with them for a while. Apparently the slappers make less than minimum wage, and many are illegal immigrants.

They’re less annoying than the time-share guys and club promoters, though, which is something.

Note from a decade later: it took a pandemic, but these guys have mostly disappeared.