It's FTFNYT and I ain't reading that bullshit, but I clicked-thru and legit LOLed at the headline. Whaaaaat rubbish. It's like "why Gay dads take their straight sons to The Chippendales." I mean, maybe that works on some straight kids, but not on me, lemmetellya.
That is a nice essay, and I think it is in direct contrast with the other tweets. Consider this paragraph:
What explains the connection between Hooters waitresses and young gay men? Perhaps these women -- so often stigmatized as almost sex workers, so accustomed to society's sidelong glances -- see kindred spirits in the boys who aren't quite "right." Or maybe it's simpler: a waitress's knack for reading a room, turned tender for those who need it most.
What he doesn't say explicitly but seems likely is that Hooters waitresses are, specifically sensitive to people's comfort or discomfort with ritualistic versions of public expression of sexuality.
One is a sincere extension of kindness, apart from her job, and the other is a performance which is central to the job.
That's true. The kids aren't the ones leaving tips.
I thought it kind of on the nose that there was a Hooter's just as you entered State College along one of the main drags. Have not been there in years; Google Maps shows it as closed.
But the particular type of sexual repression celebrated by Hooters seems a poor fit for a college campus. It's very 70s or earlier.
but the idea of a using a waitress as cheap conversion therapy seems really tawdry.
Also this amused me. Proper conversion therapy is far more classy in its objectification of only the most upscale gentlewomen.
8: Millennials killed it because they spent their money on avocados.
I'm thinking about opening a slutty restaurant, avocadOOs, to capitalize on this preference. All the breasts will be appropriately pendulous.
9: I'm probably more than a little bit classist.
If someone were going to open a chain restaurant for ogling waitresses today, I'm sure it could be done. You'd just need a different costume.
I think the Tumblr screenshot is wrong. The term "sex appeal" was in their employee handbook as of 2006. it's not deeply repressed, but rather in a weird middle-ground. Founded in 1983, then I believe its major era for expansion was the 90's and 00's, prime backlash era. A time de-repressed sufficiently to make the concept of a horny restaurant viable & investable, while still repressed enough for the desire for such a weirdly heteronormative space to be widespread. What's more sublimated is the desire to assail other forms and expressions of sexuality.
Same era men expressing friendship in any physical way became taboo as "gay", for similar reasons.
If I am to believe the football game ads the proper conversion therapy is to take your kid fishing at a splendiferous location somewhere in the Rockies in a brand spanking new $50,000+ pickup truck.
Apparently "breastaurant" is a term widely known enough to have its own Wikipedia entry. There was a chain of restaurants featuring male servers that was called Tallywackers.
I went to a Hooters a couple times like 25 years ago and what I remember is that the food was really bad. I guess people don't go there for the food.
The same can be said for Applebee's food.
18: why do people go to Applebee's other than the food?
Also I really liked this article and actually considered sending it to heebie as a post suggestion. Thanks for doing that for me, Moby!
When I lived in Morocco studying Arabic my teacher was in high demand for teaching Peace Corps and probably military and intelligence types too. Some institution in the US wanted to poach him for a year or two and they flew him there and when he got back I asked him how it went and he told me the craziest thing was when they took him to a Hooters for dinner. He really couldn't get over that there were places like that.
the food was really bad
I've never eaten there. But I remember the couple - John & Dottie? - who used to write the wine column for the WSJ mentioned it a few times because the chain supposedly offered a screaming deal on Dom Perignon (with wings, if I remember correctly).
That's how the Squirrel Cage serves them.
As far as the hiring criteria for waitresses go, I recall reading that large breasts are required. It's not a matter of trying to avoid a lawsuit. It's that padding things out is so easy with the Hooter's costume.
I found it very on the nose that it ends with a reference to the own as the mythological symbol of wisdom. It wouldn't be the NYT if it didn't have some pretentious allusion in it.
If anything, I'm surprised by how lighthearted the essay is. The writer getting affirmation at 14 or 15, a similar story from a 9-year-old, and a guy of indeterminate age foregoing kisses? They barely even say anything about what the parents were thinking when they brought the kids there. I normally think of conversion therapy as a lot more horrifying than this. Then again, maybe there are horrifying details in the twitter link I didn't follow.
19
18: why do people go to Applebee's other than the food?
Convenience? Predictability? This is ex recto, but I feel like national chain restaurants are going to be killed by the Internet sooner or later just like Blockbuster and JCPenney were. 20+ years ago it must have been a real pain to find somewhere to eat everyone in a family would like if you weren't familiar with the area. Now, Google Maps and Yelp will give me more options than I know what to do with.
This doesn't mean the restaurant industry will devolve to decentralized mom and pop places, it just means the conglomerates will rebrand.
But then again, what do I know. The first time I was in an Applebees in the past 10+ years was probably this past December, just because we got to our hotel that night at like 7 and didn't have the energy to go any further than walking distance, and it was packed.
Maybe I just ordered the wrong thing at Applebee's.
Says something about modern consumer preferences that when the pandemic closed various chains, they thought they would do better selling their food for delivery under less familiar independent-seeming names, like Denny's as "The Meltdown" or Chuck e. Cheese as "Pasqually's Pizza & Wings."
I thought they were trying not to devalue their dine-in for after the plague.
"Pasqually's Pizza & Wings."
It gives the game away when your food is delivered by an animatronic rat.
Once Musk figures out the brain implant thing, they'll use real rats.
Musk is still years behind Bill Gates in chip-based mind control technology.
Some institution in the US wanted to poach him for a year or two and they flew him there and when he got back I asked him how it went and he told me the craziest thing was when they took him to a Hooters for dinner.
This seems like an insane thing to do. When my work is hiring, we take candidates out to the most boring places imaginable. But maybe you learn something valuable about prospective employees when you put them in a tits-themed restaurant and make them eat food with their fingers.
It mostly does seem like an insane place to bring a candidate, but the scenario that comes to mind is them asking him what he'd like and him saying something like "whatever is the most American". I could imagine Hooters seeming like a good answer to that.
I didn't get much in the way of conversion therapy from authority figures, thank God, but one thing the article doesn't get into is that teenage boys and young men do a whole lot of sexuality policing on each other. Not sure how it would play out at Hooters (all my experiences were at strip joints, to my harm), but I never saw any "how about we do bunny ears instead?" moderation.
My teenage son came out to me* but has not yet come out to my husband. It's been about 5 months now. It's starting to be a little weird on my end for me to be keeping it a secret.
I am pretty sure that the reason for the secrecy is:
1. kids are weirdos about time, and he's on whatever innocent schedule he's on.
2. Their relationship is more fraught than mine and my son's, and so he's a little less willing to be vulnerable, even though I'm 99% sure he's not worried about homophobia from my husband. More just that it's a very personal thing to disclose.
If the roles were reversed, I'd be maybe a little stung whenever I eventually found out I'd been kept in the dark for so long. But I also don't feel like I ought to do anything except let my son decide on his own time schedule.
*in fact, I mentioned it here, but now I'm feeling a little more cautious.
There was a reddit thread about a similar thing but where it escalated to the one parent like taking the kids to dates and lying about it to the other parent.
If it were me, I think it wouldn't be out of line to gently suggest that it's been a long time and that its awkward to ask someone to keep something from their spouse without a good reason, and so unless there's a good reason maybe the kid should tell him.
My family has this thing where you need to remember not only what you know, but who doesn't know it and who doesn't want them to know it. It really keeps people sharp.
I appreciate the input. Maybe I'll let it go until summer vacation (since life is way too hectic in general at the moment anyway) and then use that as a reason to give him a nudge.
Oh, I was thinking maybe a family trip to Hooters was in the offing.
39: this is essentially classification and the need-to-know principle.
Not necessarily, because we all suck at not keeping funny secrets.
i'm pretty sure when my kid told me he assumed his father would be in the loop directly? i can't imagine he would have assumed or asked me to keep it to myself. the kid dropped it into a conversation pretty low key & i boringly & earnestly told him the important thing is to find a partner who thinks you are the absolute best & about whom you feel the same, & then a couple of years later the kid mock bitterly remarked that i'd deprived him of a decent coming out story.
There was a reddit thread about a similar thing but where it escalated to the one parent like taking the kids to dates and lying about it to the other parent.
If it gets to this point, you are the asshole. Unless there is some other bigotry at play.
36:
Lightly Presidential
has added you to
"Hey We Have A Gay Son Small Group"
In what I assume is a brave attempt to break the hegemony of the automobile, the Turnpike people put up dozens of signs over several miles warning of a coming lane closure. This caused a big traffic jam ahead of where the closure was to occur. But they didn't close a lane.
Also, the road crews are messing with me on other road. "Aggressive Driver Area" and "Slow Down, Save A Life"? Pick one you bastards. It's not possible to do both.