Hooters just opened in South Park, the first national chain restaurant in that defiantly unchained pocket neighborhood.
(Update 10/11/09: I got there today. It’s really in Boulevard Park, a tiny commercial strip separated from the South Park neighborhood by a lonely highway overpass. A McDonald’s already exists along this strip.)
I don’t particularly care for Hooters.
I really don’t care for essays that attack Hooters from the standpoint of simplistic gender-ideology, such as Lindy West’s piece in the Stranger.
On the other hand, I love the comment thread following West’s piece.
The commenters hit upon some important points West had elided past:
West, most of the commenters, and I agree on one point—the Hooters Girl look (apparently inspired by the sorority-slut uniforms in the 1979 sexploitation film H.O.T.S.) is, to all of us, decidedly unsexy.
And the whole Hooters aesthetic/experience conjures association with/nostalgia for fraternity-sorority bonding, but is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-education. The apparent ideal Hooters customer is an adult who went to college but didn’t learn anything.
Thanks to Jennifer Manlowe, I’ve heard of two researchers who’ve got a new book called Why Women Have Sex. I haven’t read the book itself, just the UK newspaper story about it.
The story claims the researchers have deteremined there are exactly 237 reasons for a (hetero) woman to do the sex—no more, no less.
You know most of the common reasons—lust, love, baby-making, social-ladder climbing, cash, barter, kicks, comfort, novelty, submission, empowerment, celebration, consolation, getting/keeping/dumping a guy, because all the other girls are doing it, because parents/teachers/preachers say not to, and so forth.
But let’s imagine some reasons that might land a little further down on the list of 237, some of the less-common reasons for sex:
Then there are the “reasons” that would fall off the 237 altogether. For instance, I’m pretty sure no woman has ever had sex with a man just because he used a certain brand of deodorant body spray.
Some research study claims “love inspires creativity, but thoughts of sex stimulate analytical thinking.” The reasoning: “Love… is dreamy, and dreams are linked to creativity. Sex, on the other hand, is about achieving an immediate goal.”
…has been blocked by Indian authorities, who cited a “national security” law authorizing the restriction of material that could damage the nation’s cultural integrity or some such. But not to worry: The site’s safely based in the UK; and, as an Indian columnist notes, “there are ways of getting around the ban by using proxy, anonymiser websites that cover your tracks.”
(Hardcore photo and video Web sites can still be viewed in India without restriction.)
While our country faces the folly of abstinence-only sex-anti-education, and the resulting ignorance/pregnancies/STDs, Britain’s National Health Service (you know, one of those efficient, money-saving, inclusive government health systems we’re supposed to hate) just published a leaflet recommending that teens have an “orgasm a day” to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.
…got to pout n’ protest against California’s supreme court when it upheld that state’s anti-gay-marriage initiative.
As I wrote here last fall, it’s always fun to snipe about the state that thinks it’s so superior to the rest of us.
(Of course, longtime readers know that when I snipe at Calif., I also snipe at people here whose only idea how to improve Wash. is to blindly copy everything that’s been done there.
As if everything done there would always work here.
As if everything done there even worked there.)
But, as speakers at Tuesday’s Westlake Park rally asked, why don’t all these local protesters do more to get legal gay marriage in this state?
Well, some are.
We’ve now got the great compromise that is “civil unions.”
(And as one Daily Kos diarist put it, Tuesday’s Calif. ruling seems to pave the way for a similar compromise there.)
But plenty of activists insist that “the legal equivalent of marriage under another name” just ain’t the same thing as marriage.
And they’re right.
…one Sam Schulman argues what just might be “The Worst Case Yet Against Gay Marriage,” as described in a New Republic snark post. Schulman goes beyond the normally accepted bounds of reactionarydom, to posit that marriage is necessary to keep straight men in proper society and to keep women from “concubinage.”
By the way, this is the Sam Schulman who used to own the short-lived magazine Wigwag–not the (now late) Sam Schulman who used to own the Sonics.
Item: Mary Kay Letourneau and her grownup boytoy Vili Fualaau will cohost a “Hot Teacher” night, this Saturday at the Fuel sports bar in Pioneer Square.
Comment: What, that guy’s old enough to be in bars now?
…“Erotic Services” ad categories: That’s OK. Those listings were full of scam artists anyway. Other sites have far more reliable referrals.
So, Playboy came out with a list purporting to rank “America’s sexiest CEOs.” The 10 women include one porn producer, two lingerie company bosses, and the head of an L.A. gym called “Flirty Fitness.”
All proper meaningless entertainment fluff so far. Then, Huffington Post puts up a link to it. The link item led to a comment thread that runs the gamut from “objectification” gripes to “homely” gripes.
Why do the dumbest bits of media draw the dumbest responses?
Look: There have been plenty of women in business. A few of them, too few, have reached positions of leadership. Of those, several have had, or acquired, faces and figures that conform to commonly held notions of physical attractiveness. Yawn.
I do concur with one HuffPo commenter, who noted the Playboy list didn’t include any women who ran really big companies (other than Victoria’s Secret). There haven’t been enough females atop Fortune 500 companies; those who have could use more recognition, even if it’s for their more peripheral achievements.
