By David Futrelle
Have you heard the bad news about Hooters? The infamous “breastaurant” chain, a place where America’s creepiest dads and granddads could live out their fantasies of gawking at their waitresses’ boobs without the owners of said boobs being able to complain about it, has been, well, sagging a bit lately.
According to Business Insider, “the number of Hooters locations in the US has dropped by more than 7% from 2012 to 2016, and sales have stagnated, according to industry reports.”
Some are blaming the chain’s troubles on millennials’ alleged lack of interest in boobs, at least compared with their breast-obsessed elders. And maybe they have a point. What’s a business based on boobs supposed to do in an ass-obsessed world like ours? Why should millennials pay to eat overpriced wings while staring at boobs when they could be home eating ass for free?
One enterprising young game developer has some ideas. In a series of tweets (starting here), Eric Adam Hovis explained how he would “fix” Hooters to make it more appealing to geeky millennial dudes like him.
Waitresses aren’t there to be looked at! They’re there to be TALKED at!
DEBATE NIGHT! Come on down to Hooters and DEBATE our GEISHAS! Did we mention the FREE WINGS?
Just remember to tip your waitress, at least if she lets you win the “debate.”
What’s better than FREE WINGS? FREE EMOTIONAL LABOR from women with huge bazongas!
But of course. Because millennial men are clearly entitled to all this attention from “smart and pretty women” for practically nothing.
Yes, because what human interaction could possibly be more “meaningful” than a”debate” between some dude and a woman who knows that if she challenges him in any significant way he’ll stiff her on the tip? Especially when she has to endure hour after hour of such “debates,” on topics not of her choosing, every single shift, while delivering up plate after plate of wings and jalapeno poppers with a giant smile plastered on her face?
Well, Mr. Hovis got his free debate all right. His tweets inspired a wave of comments and jokes on Twitter and elsewhere. Let’s just say that his ideas weren’t quite as well received as he was perhaps expecting, particularly by women.
Hovis, who actually sees himself as something of a feminist (or, as he puts it half jokingly in his Twitter bio, as a “Berniecrat progressive leftist sjw libtard feminazi betacuck”), has spent much of the last several days “clarifying” and rethinking his suggestions in a series of followup tweets and in a blog post he’s already revised and rewritten several times.
He insists he didn’t mean to suggest that “waitresses/bartenders should … have to be people’s therapists” — I’m not quite sure how this denial squares with his bit about “‘problem listener’ hostesses” who would basically be serving as therapists. He also declares that everyone at his new, improved Hooters “should be paid a living wage” — despite his demand that the restaurants also be ‘”SUPER CHEAP.” Oh, and he also thinks “Hooters should be more body-inclusive” even though his reference to “smart and pretty” waitresses in his original tweets made clear that he thinks looks should play a big part in the company’s hiring decisions.
But Hovis’ original tweets are much more, well, revealing than his somewhat less-that-altogether-convincing “clarifications.” And that’s because his original tweets reflect something about our society’s insidious tendency to dump emotional labor onto women, and to demand that women do this labor largely for free.
Many if not most of us could benefit from having someone listen to our problems. But this responsibility shouldn’t be foisted off on hostesses working for a casual dining chain famous for its skimpy outfits. Nor should it be foisted on wives or girlfriends. People should be able to get the therapy they need from actual therapists, well-trained professionals paid for their expertise. And, like Hovis’ imaginary improved Hooters, this service should be “SUPER CHEAP” if not free, with costs subsidized by a beefed-up health insurance system based on Single-Payer or Medicare for All (as should the rest of our medical expenses).
And if after all this you still want some hot wigs, well, there are better places to get them from than Hooters.
Dvärghundspossen:
Often it’s camouflage. Many aquatic predators have a dark backside and light bellyside, because when seen from above they’re against dark background and when seen from below they’re against the light.
(Now, THAT would look hot on a humanoid/furry avatar body)
Also, did you mean the merperson has a dolphin-style frontal fat melon, or more like an internal fat helmet against cold? That’s an interesting point.
Guys, he’s just plagiarizing from an old online comic strip called Badgods, by Lore Sjoberg, one of the guys who did the Brunching Shuttlecocks website in the late 90’s. It’s not available any more, but it’s probably on the Wayback Machine. The title of that particular strip is “Pandering to My Core Demographic,” or some such.
Not that you asked but the cartoon was picture of a sign in the style of Hooters saying something like, “Smart, sarcastic women who will be slightly snarky to me and bring me artichoke dip.” It was before the concept of emotional labor became popularized, let alone been explained as “kind of harder on a woman than being ogled, patronized, and groped, in some ways,” and mildly humorously phrased (probably a lot fewer sibilants than I recall, sweet Prince Rogers Nelson on a pogo stick) if you didn’t know what waitstaff (or non-waitstaff) who present as female go through all the darn time.
Re James Bond, I’m pretty sure it’s just a fan theory that “James Bond” is a job title. I think the movies simply play fast and lose with continuity.
Re mermaids I imagined them as having a sort of fat layer all across the skull, between bone and skin. I thought that would be handy when living in cold water!
A Beer For Men?
On the dark skinned mermaid thing, I think it actually makes more sense that they’d be dark. The theory is that they evolved from a very early hominid that moved into the sea and from there developed the fish tail. This would mean they’d be from sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not like it’d be impossible for them to evolve to have pale skin as modern humans did in Northern Europe. But I don’t see why they’d have to have pale skin.
I guess the problem there is that you cannot expect them to work topless, or indeed even know what they look like before you arrive for a consultation!
The idea that mermaids would have human like skin doesn’t compute. Our skin is adapted to dry air with brief dips in the water. I imagine our skin would be a dark leathery blue-grey with an actually literally white underside. Not pale-tan that we call white skin on the surface.
What merfolk actually look like:
Hope that works!
Pitshade: 😀
J: Yeah I always imagined them to have more dolphin-like skin. Thick and sort of a little rubbery.
A cuttlefish-type mermaid with chromatophores would be neat. Then she could be any color she wanted. Which on the surface would probably be dark, because sun, or would be whatever color her surroundings were, because camouflage.
For the black mermaid, there was actually a Kickstarter last year for children’s party supplies using that as a design, which I think I read about here originally:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/craftmyoccasion/party-supplies-celebrating-children-of-color
So, individual agents are just canon fodder?
(Yes, I know “canon fodder” is a tvtropes page)
@Aunt Podger, Ketchup-Spewing Feminester
“Appealing to My Demographic”, apparently. It’s actually a (ugh) Flash file where the still image is accompanied by the first four lines of “Fake French” by Le Tigre.
Close enough:
Soo, it was a garbage take on the issue, even back then.
Especially Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — sure, there were gadgets, but Bond was played by Dick Van Dyke, Truly Scrumptious had a punning but insufficiently-naughty name, and Goldfinger was suddenly ruling his own country; total break with series continuity.
@Moon Custafer:
You know, despite having known for years that they were written by the same person, it would never have occurred to me to try to put them in the same universe.
Besides, Caractacus Pott was obviously Q, not Bond.
The demented 1967 film version of Casino Royale took that premise and ran with it.
Nequam, the 1967 “Casino Royale” was the first Bond film I saw. Looking back, I didn’t get a lot of the jokes.
When I read the novel, it occurred to me that Bond doesn’t do any actual *spying* in it – his entire brief is to prevent Le Chiffre from winning at baccarat. Then his KGB paymasters will discover his financial malfeasance, losing a deep cover asset in the process. Bond isn’t a suave playboy, he’s a nasty thug stuffed into a tuxedo.
I’ve a weird fondness for that acid-trip of a film, or parts of it, anyway. Especially the possibly-a-dream sequence with a non-sequitur Peter O’Toole cameo.
@Robert:
There’s a reason why a lot of the fans who are familiar with the books say that Daniel Craig is a much better ‘Bond’ than Roger Moore was… he’s a lot closer to what was in the books. In the books, Bond was an alcoholic, womanizing sociopath. And the last word was actually a job requirement. The whole ‘Licence to Kill’ thing effectively required a sociopath who could be kept on a leash.
Granted, Bond being a card shark was a plot point in other books as well… I’ve noted before that one of my favourite scenes from the books is the first section of Moonraker, which involves Bond beating Drax at bridge at M’s gentlemen’s club. The club had figured out Drax was cheating, but not how; by watching for a few minutes, Bond figured out exactly how Drax was doing it (using a mirror-finish cigarette case to see the cards he was dealing), and concocted a plan to punish him. A plan which ended up with Bond and M winning the last hand with seven clubs, doubled, re-doubled, and vulnerable, at something like a pound a point, back in the 1950s.
How does the “James Bond is a job title” theory make any kind of sense? Why would MI6 need to do that? I have more respect for Bond fans who just shrug off the change of actor, or the fact that the character would be almost a centenarian now. I don’t have any problem with George Smiley being both Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman. It’s just fiction.
Anyway, the real explanation is that Bond is from Gallifrey.
Sam Mendes did want to utilise the ‘codename’ theory in Skyfall; but EON vetoed that. He wanted to bring Sean Connery back as a retired Bond. You can see the remnants of that idea with that Scottish groundskeeper character; that would have been Connery.
This idea sucks but you know what would make a good restaurant?
Heres some ideas:
A restaurant where you have a private closed booth and a little window where they slide your food through and you order off all screen because you hate the awkward experiences of being in public. And comes with a theme screen of your choice plus music (ok that’s more my dream restaurant )
A restaurant where the waiters play video games with you that would be fun
@opposablethumbs
That’s just one awesome part of your extremely awesome post! (“mass-debaters”, ahahahahahaha).
And you’re right when you note later that arguing well is indeed a valuable skill and can be used to good effect. I think of this often when teaching my academic writing students; their main assignment is an argumentative/persuasive essay, where they have to ‘pick a side’ and defend it using evidence. I’m careful to emphasise that this helps cultivate essential skills, but it’s just one way of dealing with a topic. Evaluative and analytical writing, for example, is very different and in my opinion, takes greater skill.
The posts here on mermaids and aquatic creatures are amazing, by the way, and Dvärghundspossen’s mermaid is adorably terrifying 🙂
Dalton’s Bond strikes me as a pretty close take to book Bond. Dalton played the character with the sort of weariness an operator with a couple of decades in the business of stopping the world’s deadliest conspiracies would have.
Trivia quiz: What does this have to do with James Bond?
@Mish, yes it always feels like such a – such a waste, kind of (wasted opportunity?) when we (I, me, I hate this but in practice when a dispute arises I can’t seem to find a way of circumventing it) muddy the waters of what could be a productive/informative/exciting discussion with the red-mist baggage of an adversarial model 🙁 (mixing metaphors, moi? Shirley not)
Scildfreja’s comments really brought home to me how difficult it is not to feel defensive and get caught up in that (she’s kind of like a ju-jitsu ninja the way she cedes all possible points and graciously leaves no ground for the bad argument to stand on 🙂 ).
(I can’t claim credit for mass-debaters, though, I’m sure I read/heard “mass debate” and nicked it from somewhere 🙂 )
I bet your classes are brilliant. Are these undergraduate students?