ThinkProgress has gotten hold of an inadvertently hilarious internal document from the “breastaurant” chain Twin Peaks that provides an interesting glimpse into what those who run the company may actually think of the customers who pay their salaries.
Twin Peaks, as ThinkProgress writer Tara Culp-Ressler notes, is essentially Hooters on steroids, and the chain has been spreading like ebola; in 2013, it was the fastest-growing restaurant chain in the US. It also seems to be quite popular with Biker gangs; the gigantic biker shootout last weekend took place at a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas.
The document — which the company insists was never distributed to employees — was leaked to ThinkProgress by an anonymous Twin Peaks employee. And it’s kind of a doozy, describing the company’s “target” demographic essentially as a bunch of insecure narcissistic manchildren desperate for attention from young women with gigantic bazongas who are required to smile and put up with their bullshit.
According to the document, the restaurant wants to target guys “who love to have their ego stroked by beautiful girls,” and promises to provide an environment “that feeds their ego with the attention they crave.” They describe their typical customer as someone who likes “attention from beautiful girls and being recognized in front of the guys,” as well as someone who doesn’t want to be asked what he’s thinking.
If you leave out the bits about the “beautiful girls,” this strategy sounds an awful lot like the ego-stroking approach of some of the more influential figures in the Men’s Rights and GamerGate movement: pander to insecure men’s fantasies of victimization, tell them that they’re right to hate and fear feminists and women at large, and assure them that the nasty comments they go around leaving on every site that doesn’t ban them are actually a noble form of human rights activism. As GamerGatey YouTubers and Men’s “Human Rights” activists alike have learned, pandering to angry dudes can be a surprisingly lucrative money-raising strategy (at least in the short term).
Like the patrons of Twin Peaks, MRAs seem to especially like getting this kind of validation from women — hence the absurd popularity of Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan’s sophomoric and soporific YouTube videos; hence the enthusiastic embrace of the female-fronted Honey Badgers as free speech martyrs by GamerGaters and others, who have happily sent along $30,000 in donations for a lawsuit against the Calgary Expo that seems highly unlikely to go anywhere, if it even happens at all.
I’ll have more on the Honey Badgers in a bit. In the meantime, I would like to remind you, my readers, my big handsome readers, how totally cool you are and would you like some wings with that?
Er, no, I meant that I would like to remind you that my Spite the Honey Badgers fund raiser is, last I checked, only $39,529 short of its completely reasonable goal of $40,000, which is what all the economists I consulted* told me would be the amount of money I would need to make the Honey Badgers really annoyed.
Click here to donate. You don’t need a Pay Pal account. All you need to have is a little bit of money and a desire to Spite the Honey Badgers.
Thanks, hon. I’ll be right back with that giant mound of nachos.
NOTE: “All the economists I consulted” add up to zero. I did not actually consult any economists. Also, you’re not getting any nachos.
CORRECTION: I originally wrote that the Tara Culp-Ressler piece was on Talking Points Memo; it was on Think Progress.
theladyzombie – That apparently fell through, at least on Lynch’s end: http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/twin-peaks-david-lych-leaves-as-director-1201466709/
Unless he’s returned and I haven’t heard.
re: the good kind of Twim Peaks: One legitimately wonderful thing about being a parent is that I know that there was an extended nod to Twin Peaks in the latest iteration of Scooby Doo (Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated).
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/97AKy7mViBg/maxresdefault.jpg
Another awesome thing is that I spend about half of some days with a toddler who’s morphed into Scooby and has declared that I’m Shaggy.
I know people will mash together sex with the damnedest things, but I honestly don’t even know how to process a topless doughnut shop. …
Yeah, 15 minutes after trying to find a suitable analog, I’m still drawing blanks. It’s the nonnest non sequitur I’ve heard in recent memory.
Lynch is back in.
Yay!
Reblogged this on iheariseeilearn.
As an introvert with social anxiety issues, I find the idea of a restaurant where the waiters flirt with the customers to be kind of terrifying.
@AnAndrejaPejic
At the very least if you enter a restaurant like this, you’re aware that the staff may flirt with you, so you can either prepare yourself or avoid it.
@Chaos-Engineer: I see your POV. I didn’t mean to lump all male restaurant patrons together.
Incidentally, it seems that customer service workers have become more chatty towards their clients in the last 5 to 10 years, at least in the US. I guess it’s a reaction to the poor economy…I worked at customer service rank-and-file jobs for years, myself. Maybe I’m a misanthrope(sp?), but I don’t care about having a social relationship with the person who waits on me at the gas station or convenience store. Just ring me up, and I’ll be on my way!
@proxieme Yay, the best scooby doo they ever made.
I love David Lynch. His visions are nightmarish; literally nightmarish, in that they have a dreamlike quality to them and have that slow inevitability that all the worst nightmares have.
This restaurant sounds like a nightmare of another sort. Being flirted with by some girl whose breasts were her main criterion for getting hired sounds really awkward for both of us. I can’t flirt with her because she may well not have read The Goblin Emperor, and she’s professionally required to keep coming back and flirting with me even though it’ll fall flat. That just sounds really awkward.
Personally I love chatty, flirty wait staff. And I will tip more. Not sure though that I’d travel to a ‘beefcake’ restaurant to pay large prices for mediocre food, even if all the waiters were hot. If I want to see fit, attractive and often not completely dressed men – I can just go down the rugby club. Of course, I also have to see seedy, past-their-prime ex-players, too. But I’m friends with a lot of those guys, so that’s alright. I can value them for more than their current state of physical attractiveness.
And waitresses that look like David Duchovny in drag!!
True fact: I used to drive by the place they used as an exterior shot for the biker bar on my way to work!
Twin Peaks is on Hulu!
Gonna go rewatch it, brb.
Ooh, I really kinda want AVFM to pick up on Twin Peaks document and get angry about how restaurant staff on minimum-wage are total b*****s for waving their boobs at them insincerely.
“Misandry! How dare you think we manly alpha men need our egos stroked, without having any intention of stroking our boners while you’re at it! You should be grateful we even look twice at your boobs, w***e! Grrr! It’s a Feminist conspiracy somehow! They’re trying to sexually frustrate us into raping people, because how can we help it? Joke’s on you, we’re MGTOW! We can burn our own chicken!! Grrr!”
Oh, don’t be silly. Everybody knows that there are no introverted women. We all gossip with our girlfriends all the time and travel to the bathroom in large packs. /s
‘Ooh, I really kinda want AVFM to pick up on Twin Peaks document and get angry about how restaurant staff on minimum-wage are total b*****s for waving their boobs at them insincerely.’
I expect RazorBladeKandy would have that exact POV about it, I once trawled through one of his videos where he concluded that prostitutes are worse than paedophiles because they ‘exploit’ men’s sexual desires by making them pay for sex. Uh-huh.
@GiJoel – Right? It’s a crime there are only two seasons.
The problem with restaurants like this is that they’re saying women’s bodies – especially butt and boobs – are for consumption, so much so that it’s sold at a restaurant. By pairing food and boobs, it’s tellling society that woman’s bodies are always avaliable for viewing, not just at the restaurant, but on the street, on the train, at drunken parties. Just a normal thing.
So on the one hand, you end up with waitresses whose jobs depend on how well they gratify men. They’re expected to adhere to a rigid and lengthy set of beauty standards. Hooters, for example, regulates everything strictly, from hair to makeup to nails to deodorant to teeth to weight. Waitresses can be fired for minor infractions like wearing bobby pins or wearing the wrong color bra. They quickly learn that they’re expendable; if they lose their job, there’s always a lineup of women waiting to take their place. They have to put up with groping, disrespect, lewd remarks, harassment, and even stalking, all for the sake of a tip. There’s a lot of cattiness and backstabbing at those places, too; fellow waitresses aren’t seen as comrades, they’re seen as competition.
On the other hand, you have the (mostly) male customers, a self-selected group of oglers, some of whom will undoubtedly have serious boundary issues and confuse paid flirting with actual interest. Remember the guy who shot up the resort buffet in Vegas because he was despondent over losing his free buffet for life? He’d been stalking and harassing the waitresses, showering them with free gifts, and was genuinely bewildered that his overtures weren’t welcomed. After all, they were flirting with him, weren’t they? Weren’t they putting themselves out there for him?
It’s an outdated, bro-y version of sexuality, having women run around in tight tops and tiny shorts bringing food and pretending to be into the customers. Strip clubs are a lot more honest.
The Goblin Emperor!
Love that book!
Wish there was going to be a sequel.
One of the non-misogyny-mocking reasons I love this place is that I keep finding people who know/watch/read the same things I love.
Where I grew up, ptactically no-one did, so the phrase ‘Gilshalos, you’re crazy’ was used a lot. And this was before I was diagnosed.
EJ:
I think Eraserhead is physically seared into my brainmeat. And the thought of the man behind Eraserhead being even tenuously connected to boobs-themed restaurants is kind of freaking me out.
Give me my god damn Nachos already!!
@idledillettante & LBT
Yes, there do exist host clubs in Japan, where handsome guys pretend to be your boyfriend in order to get you to buy bottle service. And yes, having looked at this business model, if I ever walked into one of these places, I would immediately try to pay these men NOT to drink those champagne bottles with me, because imho that is their worst job hazard, drinking so much every night that they can’t see straight and their livers get obliterated in a matter of a few years if they stick with the job. I’d try to start a competitive trend of this among the lady patrons (which is usually encouraged along the drinking lines, i.e. that girl bought her fake boyfriend two bottles to raise his $$ for the night, what will you do for your fake boyfriend?). I’d be all “I am buying that entire row of bottles, they are all mine, and NOBODY is allowed to drink them at all, because I care for my fake boyfriend and don’t want him to die!” Whoever owns the club would make out like a bandit if this caught on, but at least it would keep some of these guys out of the emergency room.
I am only 90ish miles from Waco. In fact, I had driven through the day before on the freeway that passes right by that Twin Peaks. I had even debated making that trip on Sunday instead. Good thing I wasn’t lazy that Saturday.
The idea of flirting with someone who is being paid to flirt just makes me feel sad. That seems to miss the whole point that makes it fun.
We have a Twin Peaks themed restaurant in Vancouver called Black Lodge and its actually pretty rad. The toilet has a woodland themed diorama you can gaze at whilst peeing.