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.
I guess if they bought into all those tv shows/movies where the geeky boy hooks up with the hot girl they might consider that some sort of promise that was never delivered on. They are known to consume media rather unthinkingly, after all.
@WWTH – Yeah, that’s what I thought when I originally wrote the comment; most accounts I’ve read about Fundamentalist counselling for rape victims includes lots of cherrypicked scripture and urging to acknowledge your own sin and forgive your abuser.
But I was trying not to be too cynical. And I do hope that those kids get some kind of help now, if they want it.
I’d haven’t run into anybody who’s absorbed that particular message. Those poor guys! It’s bad enough to have to be expected to be polite all the time; I’d hate to feel tasked with making perfect strangers perpetually cheerful.
I’ve also met men who did the “aw, smile!” thing because they like making people smile. They’ll tell a(n inoffensive, genuinely funny joke) or chat with you if you’re having a bad day. Those guys, like the helpful if kind of misguided ones you mentioned above, are lovely.
The ones who complain bitterly because you haven’t greeted them warmly or promptly enough, or the ones who get pissed off when you prefer a handshake over a full-body hug upon meeting them for the first time – those are the guys who need to reevaluate their expectations. Preferably while they take a long, refreshing hike away from me.
Just to clarify, because I’m a snarky snark a lot of the time: I meant “those poor guys!” above in a totally sincere way. That kind of pressure sounds just awful.
sunnysombrera:
AFAICR, research suggests that conservative religiosity with a strong emphasis on rigid gender roles is a major risk factor in child sexual abuse, coming second only to substance abuse in that respect. So I suspect that the Quiverfull movement has a lot of this going on. And don’t forget Warren Jeffs and the FLDS.
Nameless Wonder:
I can’t help wondering whether Jim Bob was aware that the cop was a paedophile, and the latter’s role was to teach Josh how to get away with it (while warning him to keep it outside the family).
@Moggie, I’m wondering that too. That’s one hell of a coincidence for Jim Bob to tolerate his son molesting his daughters for a year and then to “accidentally” become BFFs with the local police officer pedophile.
And all of this is out after only 24 hours! This might be the tip of the iceberg. I wonder how far the Duggar’s ties to social conservative politicians really stretch.
@proxieme Hope you enjoy the book!
Regarding Japanese host clubs, one of the manga my youngest son has read was called High School Host Club. It was set in a high school, but was (probably) not intended for readers in that age group.
One of my small pleasures in retirement is being pleasant to service personnel. I never expect them to smile, though. When I worked at the hospital, nobody expected me to smile – the veterans were usually quite satisfied with being treated like human beings.
Oh, almost forgot – one of the oldest gay bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood (and the first gay bar to have big glass windows facing the sidewalk) is called the Twin Peaks. As a result, I cannot read about this brestaurant without snickering.
You know, I have a small amount of sympathy for Josh Duggar; he was 14 at the time, and in an extremely fucked-up household. By all accounts (from admittedly biased sources), he actually did reform in some key respects, including being honest about his misconduct when he met his current wife. That’s actually a remarkable turn-around.
However, Jim-Bob Duggar and his wife? They seriously need to lose every parenting right they ever had, and be confined to an appropriate penitentiary facility until sterile (yes, this means Jim-Bob probably goes away for life; he’s the top-dog of the house, right?). They were the adults in this situation, and they covered it all up, repeatedly, doing everything they could to NOT separate Josh from his victims.
It’s common for patriarchal churches to encourage members to report to the church instead of the police, in cases of abuse (including domestic abuse). The pastors are usually authoritarian and want to keep things under control while maintaining a positive image of the church – and of course, protect their “brothers in Christ” within it.
And you guessed it, these pastors rarely report abuse to the cops, but rather pull all the kinds of awful shit that’s been mentioned in the name of ‘mediation’. A particular story comes to mind where a father was raping his daughter in the night, and the church suggested 1) that the mother install locks on the child’s bedroom door and when that didn’t work 2) SEND THE SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL AWAY so the dad could “still be the head of the house.” In cases of domestic violence they usually blame the wife, telling her that she was abused because she wasn’t “submissive enough.”
I’m not surprised that Jim Bob went to the pastors and a corrupt cop. It’s standard practice in circles like his.
Welp, I got my answer after only five minutes.
Mike (my-son-murdered-his-dog-but-it’s-ok) Huckabee is officially endorsing the “good people make mistakes,” narrative, although he didn’t specify whether criminal actions reportedly perpetrated over a year’s time can be defined as mere “mistakes.”
His own fans are slamming him on Facebook. The original comment can be found here.
There is a male version that recently opened in Dallas, TX, called “Tallywhacker’s”
I know of this because the comic “Something Positive” just did a comic about such a place a week before they announced it.
http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp04242015.shtml
And holy crap. I saw something about the Duggars on Raw Story yesterday, but my computer crashed before I could read it.
Horrifying, but simultaneously unsurprising.
Except the part about the pedo cop. That was… wow… just… yikes.
@proxieme and @Spindrift,
You two made an excellent point. The boys that played D&D or video games would rarely reach out to girls that were interested in that, too. Maybe it was in part protecting the boy’s club (which didn’t even exist, even back then), and also they weren’t interested in girls like me, because we weren’t conventionally pretty.
These guys probably complain about being ignored and invisible, but they have no clue what it is like to be a non-conventionally attractive girl during that time. Being a not-so-pretty teenaged girl sucks. There were times that I wished I was invisible–would have spared me some of the public humiliation. And guess what, a good lot of that public humiliation was at the hands of the gamer-boys, who were probably my equals in the attractiveness category. Maybe it was lateral violence, who knows. Highly likely, though, that they felt entitled to the hot babes, and the rest of us unwashed masses could go to hell.
I’m now married to a wonderful, kind, handsome man (who is a couple standard deviations above me on the physical attractiveness bell curve, though he disagrees–ah, love goggles are nice, aren’t they). It wrecked havoc on my self-esteem for sometime. Now I’m over the ill-treatment from high school, but my heart hurts for those girls who are like the way I was back in my teen years. I feel sad for them. Every time I see on the news some girl that committed suicide due to bullying, it breaks my heart, because I can put myself in her place.
Sorry to get off on that tangent, but I see all this stuff as linked. Even this Twin Peaks restaurant, the Hooters restaurants, all of this–it all creates this environment where every guy should feel entitled to the hot babe, and those of us who are not hot are worthless. We’re on the outside. I think girls from a young age can internalize this message pretty easy, and it’s just so toxic.
Fat-shaming is wrong, but so is ugly-shaming, awkward-shaming, and plain-jane-shaming.
Who Knows (@ShiraMK)-She is so passionate and she is absolutely right! Thanks for sharing this video. 😀
I think it might be more that they take how women – any women – react to them terribly personally. Like, if a woman with whom he’s interacting, however tangentially, is unhappy, it’s his fault. The first time a guy friend tried to articulate this to me, I was like, “Oh…” (and thought, “Wow, that’s weird…kind of sweet, but also somehow horrifying.”) Then another guy friend said something similar and I thought, “So…it’s like…maybe just the friends that I have…?” AND THEN MY HUSBAND (who really is a wonderful man – thoughtful, kind, geeky, intelligent, caring, annnnnd sexy) said that he wasn’t sure what it was, but he has a need to try to make women around him – at work, at home, whatever – at the very least at ease, happy if he can swing it. With him (who I know quite a bit better than earlier guy friends), I thought that it might have something to do with his mild/highly functioning Autism (as in “diagnosed with Aspergers* at an earlier time and might fall off of the spectrum with the new DSM guidelines if he had an active relationship with a psychologist or psychiatrist”). He’s constantly checking in on / analyzing how his actions, reactions, and words are effecting those around him because he’s seen (and I’ve seen!) things blow up rather spectacularly when he delves into an area of interest and loses track of how those around him are taking it.
There was even an MRA who alluded to what seemed to be the same argument (but whinier) during a sea lion a while back here (can’t remember the thread).
Maybe it has to do with volatile Moms – my husband certainly had one – and a drive to keep things copacetic. I don’t know. There’s probably a thesis for someone to research in there somewhere.
* I’m going to note that I think that his Aspergers – I know that it’s not technically used anymore, but I think that the term’s still a useful informal signal for “exhibiting Autistic traits but can be high functioning in social situations” – is a freaking superpower rather than a disability. I can’t even begin to touch his grasp of systems and abstract components. In fact, he’s described to me how he handles social interactions as navigating behavior matrices that he’s formulated – “types” for those with which he’s not familiar, based off of past behavior for those with which he is – rather than engaging in intuitive interaction. Freaking amazing.
I’m really enjoying listening to stories like proxieme, Spindrift and A. A. Wils; it gives me a new insight into what it was like being a teenager, one which I couldn’t have seen at the time. Thank you all so much for sharing.
@proxieme:
Mr Proxieme sounds like a cool guy. My best wishes to you both and a big congrats to him for being smart enough to find someone who loves him for being him rather than trying to squeeze himself into another box.
One effect of my ongoing education as an ally is an awareness of how I can be perceived by women. Being polite and respectful of personal space is part of it. I don’t necessarily want them to smile, but I feel the need to behave in a way that signifies ‘I am not a threat’. It’s little enough to do, really.
And the Duggar horror – if you put that story in a work of fiction, your editor would ask you to tone it down. Just – how can people bring themselves to defend such things? And there are people doing just that. I’m glad for the news from Ireland so I can hold onto some hope for humanity.
You know, I wonder if it’s just that they don’t want to be perceived as threatening. (Especially when they’re genuinely not trying to be threatening.)
I generally try to be as generous as possible in ascribing motives to people I don’t know, and that would explain a lot of it. It’s still awful to tell someone to smile, but trying to get them to smile with humor and the like would make more sense from this point of view. Might still be wrongheaded, but it would be coming from good intentions rather than assholery.
Heh. The Duggar story doesn’t shock me at all. I’m only surprised that the dad didn’t get in on it himself.
I mean, I come from a family where the grandfather assaulted my mother, an uncle, and presumably an aunt, and the uncle then assaulted someone else, and the aunt became the grandfather’s helped in future rapes, including ours.
People hate the idea of incest and child rape in theory, but in practice rally towards the abuser and preach forgiveness. It’s the same old story over and over… which is why I’m making my comic about those dynamics and blowing all that secrecy out the fucking window.
Reblogged this on XCLUSIVX DIY fanzine collective. Hardcore. Veganism. Politics. and commented:
Ugh!
And we are cheering you on, LBT!
It came from the Welcome Package!
Go over there —-> and click on the Scented Fucking Candle link. All will become clear.
And … Welcome!
@A.A. Wils
..Oh I’m going to be accused of ‘what about the men’ing here, but ugly shaming occurs towards men too.
No flying under the radar for us. I was called “gross” quite a few times growing up by women/girls around my age (“gross” is a commonly used in place of “ugly” over here). I overheard a girl on the bus comment to her friend that I was so ugly she wanted to kill me.
Then can be an additional tier of invective levelled at unattractive, single men; that of being considered a threat, particularly if you haven’t had the validation of a partner at some point in life.
This only gets worse as you age.
An example: what are some of the things that commonly spring to mind when people see an unattractive, painfully shy man, say in his mid 40’s – someone for whom it’s fairly obvious that they’ve never been in a relationship.
Something’s wrong. Something’s ‘off’ about him. He’s a creep; a would-be rapist, and possible pedophile. People will be wary. And we notice it.