House of Eratosthenes

Patricia Bellasalma, NOW’s California president, asserted that Hooters is violating state and local laws prohibiting sexually oriented “adult” businesses from serving minors. The chain is also violating federal employment standards, she said.

Bellasalma said the federal government has not subjected Hooters to the rules requiring employers to protect their workers from harassment by customers. The Atlanta restaurant chain has successfully argued that its employees know they will be working in sexually charged surroundings, Bellasalma said.

But in recent years, she said, the company has promoted itself as more family-friendly. She cited a statement on hooters.com that “10 percent of the parties we serve have children in them.”

“If they want to switch and turn the chain into a family-style restaurant, more power to them,” but Hooters would then have to follow the same anti-harassment rules as other restaurants, Bellasalma said.

This has nothing to do with following law; I can tell that because no law is cited. I suppose I could go digging around to find more stories about the same issue, but why should I? If you’re arguing about the law, wouldn’t you be taking the initiative and talking some about the law?

No, it’s the same leftist crap as always: “Someone is having an influence on the next generation…besides us!”

Yours Truly is having none of it:

I suspect there are some good Americans who have infiltrated NOW, and are sabotaging it from within. NOW’s credibility is diminished every time they do this. If they go after Hooters a few more times, NOW may be utterly destroyed. They have never restored themselves to the lofty position of power & influence they had before Clinton/Lewinsky, when business executives immediately did anything-&-everything once they found out NOW was so much as thinking about coming after ’em.

This isn’t about skinny girls in skimpy outfits or hot wings & cold beer. This is about red state versus blue state. The truth of the matter that nobody seems to want to acknowledge, is there is an order of cultural expectation in the red-state culture that the blue-state culture does not want to acknowledge is there. It isn’t perfect, but it’s there, and it works. It works pretty well.

It works so well that if “mistreat a lady” is an item on your things-to-do list for the day, Hooters is the *very* last place you should go. Sure the girls are dainty, sweet, skinny and young — but they’re surrounded by these gentlemen who don’t want to put up with your crap, they’re there to watch the game, and some of ’em are as big as a house. You’re better off going to Denny’s to harass the waitress. I’ve spent some time in Hooters, believe me. If there were stories to be told about young ladies being heckled or harassed or propositioned inappropriately, I’d be able to tell ’em. In short: NOW talking about the Hooters environment is very much like the liberal talking about Rush Limbaugh’s show. They don’t have to get too many words into it before they’ve proven they’re just repeating the cliches they’ve been given, and have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

Yup, women men do not want to see are bitching away about the women men do like to see. Hey, I wonder if that simple statement just sums it all up. Ya think?

As a matter of fact, I do!

Recently I was dumb enough to make a comment about this “burlesque” fad at a gathering in my college town. At the time, I assumed it was one of those blips on the cultural radar, like the brief infatuation with swing dancing in the mid-90s. I predicted its demise would be even faster than swing, since one actually sorta has to be in decent shape to do burlesque…

Hooo boy, did I get an earful! Turns out “burlesque” has been around for years and is especially popular among, ahem, full-figured women as a way to– and I quote– “celebrate their sexuality.” Which, when you think about it, makes watching a burlesque show far more of a circle jerk than going to Hooters. Classic.

In fact, when you look at the number of prohibitions, the left is far more Puritanical than the right. Even the strictures of the Falwell types mostly boil down to “no sex outside of marriage,” whereas the proggies’ list of anathematized items would fill up a phonebook: non-organic food, non-“fair trade” coffee, cigarettes, most booze, leather, paper products, rock salt, salt in general, fatty foods, the internal combustion engine…. and that’s just a partial list of the consumables. When it comes to speech, any public utterance to the right of a Mother Jones editorial is likely to contain something offensive to some leftist somewhere, and as for behavior…. well, it seems like the only thing Our Betters are 100% in favor of is exhibitionism by ugly people. They’d be superduperfine with Hooters, I submit, if all the wing girls looked like Andrea Dworkin and there was no evil, dirty “profit” involved….

[oh, shit – I think I just gave the Berkeley city council an idea…]
- Severian | 12/17/2010 @ 11:47
Google Patricia Bellasalma. Find an image of this woman. That will explain it all…
- BillW. | 12/18/2010 @ 09:02
Morgan, why do you care so much about what the self-described feminists say about this restaurant chain? You never seem to miss an opportunity to say, “Hooters is NOT a strip club” or some other strident defense of their operation. Do you own stock in them or something?

I confess I’ve never been to a Hooter’s, but my perception is that the place is actually family-friendly, albeit on the expensive side.
- cylarz | 12/20/2010 @ 14:32
It’s such a great beacon of the deficiencies of our modern culture. We seem to have a whole lot of exuberance about getting past differences, reaching conciliation about things, finding common ground, etc. etc. etc. If you ever work your way through a randomly-selected swath of consecutive Star Trek Next Generation episodes, you’ll find that particular show placed such great emphasis on this that it could be truthfully said it didn’t concern itself with much else. And still we maintain this excitement about reaching accords that could not have otherwise been reached…

But we don’t stick to our knitting on it when we react emotionally to things like this. Hooters just captures all of the fundamental elements that are askew in this equation. The critic — who may in fact have a valid point — feels personally threatened; and so she seeks, not to find a way to reach agreement with Hooters or their sympathizers/apologists about anything, but instead to take the easier, childlike route, declare the opposition “bad,” and work to make them go away. This is just one of many complaints I have about modern liberalism, although liberals do not monopolize this by any means — nevertheless, they do dominate it.

It leads, as Yoda might say, to the Dark Side. Here’s a good litmus test: Approach the critic with some pejorative about the target she has selected, one that is completely off-topic. If she has succumbed to the Dark Side, she’ll agree with it no matter what it is, as long as it’s negative. Say that Hooters girls are sluts or are stupid, and she’ll agree. Say that when they change out of their uniforms they have abysmal fashion sense, she’ll agree. Say they have bad skin, she’ll agree…doesn’t matter what the evidence says. People like this seem to coast along on a sort of “enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing.

Besides of which, generally speaking they know absolutely nothing about Hooters! The same is not true of strip clubs; as a rule-of-thumb, you could ask one of them to describe a strip club, then go in and visit one, and you’d find their description to be more-or-less on target. But with Hooters they aren’t even approximately in the ball park, certainly not when they talk about the propriety or lack thereof of taking a child there. They’re talking out their asses and they want to monopolize all control over the outcome anyway. They feel justified in this, just because they feel threatened, and for no other reason.

Besides of which…a whole lot of them, from what I can see, could choose to look younger, tighter and slimmer if they chose to. They choose not to. And that just pisses me off. If you’re afraid of being rejected because you haven’t been taking care of yourself, well then, take care of yourself. Don’t take choices away from others to give yourself some guarantee you’ll be accepted. You do that, and it seems to me this conjures up exactly the same selfishness that was supposed to be an object of avoidance in the first place.
- mkfreeberg | 12/20/2010 @ 14:55
Oddly, every time I’ve been to Hooters, I’ve seen tables of women, tables with families with children… just folks.
- philmon | 12/20/2010 @ 21:44

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NOW Talking About Hooters is Like Liberals Talking About Limbaugh’s ShowFriday, December 17th, 2010

NOW Talking About Hooters is Like Liberals Talking About Limbaugh’s Show
Friday, December 17th, 2010