Ken M.
Yelp
After another visit, everything I wrote in my previous review still stands, except for the secondhand cigarette smoke. I was with a group who decided to come here.
The club is surprisingly small. The dance floor is too crowded to actually dance. You can't walk anywhere without bumping into people walking the opposite way. Unless you reserve a table with bottle service, you'll be standing the entire time you're there. Patrons treat the DJ like a musician, so everyone on the dance floor faces the DJ booth like they're at a concert.
Most of the reserved tables are large bachelorette parties. These girls are dressed their best--in a way they never would in their home cities. However, their tables are roped off, and the nightclub social norms are in effect. This makes them unapproachable for guys.
The paradox of these nightclubs is that the vast majority of patrons are not meeting strangers. Instead, everyone confines their interactions to the folks they came with. I believe that people lack social skills to mingle with strangers here, which is reinforced by the artificial social environment of a high-end nightclub like XS.
The wall that female patrons put up is largely due to social anxiety, I believe. Likewise, male patrons are immobilized by fear of (the pain of) rejection and violating social norms of crossing into female territory. These anxieties are amplified by increased performance demands: girls dressed to the max, guys expected to spend money liberally, along with the ubiquitous presence (i.e., intimidation) of male security staff.
The bottom line is that a high-end nightclub like XS is one of the hardest places on The Strip for guys and girls to meet. However, we're socialized by default to patronize these places as though they are the ultimate nightlife destinations on The Strip. Culturally, there's no end in sight to this phenomenon.
At these high-end nightclubs, groups of girls are socialized into pretense rather than being their authentic, genuine selves. This relegates guys to gawking at them rather than meeting them. Alternatively, and counterintuitively, people on the Strip who are interested in meeting members of the opposite sex have much better opportunity to do so at bars and lounges, rather than clubs.
On a final note, at the time of this writing, the four reviews preceding mine are apparently shills. All are short, five-star reviews from accounts which each have only written one or two reviews so far. Three of them make reference to the same VIP host and include his cell phone number.