I have a story about breasts, too, folks! Aren't you glad? A lot of other bloggers seem to be writing about them just now and I thought I'd jump on the breast bandwagon.
Ranking high in the category titled "Phrases I Never Thought I Would Say"--a category that includes such statements as "Does this dress make me look too fabulous?" and "No thanks, I guess I'm just not in the mood for cheese"--was the phrase "Anybody want to come with me to Hooters tonight?"
Let me explain.
Gene Weingarten, who writes for The Washington Post's Sunday magazine and who just won his second Pulitzer prize in the "Feature" category, and I wrote a book for Simon and Schuster about differences between men and women titled I'M WITH STUPID. We're did the book through e-mail and by phone.
This meant we had to figure out how to gauge female/male responses to various cultural phenomena--which we both needed to experience--while remaining in two different cities.
It was, to say the least, tricky.
Weingarten and I were trying to establish what would be an activity in which I, as a card-carrying feminist, was least likely to engage, while also determining what he would not, as a card-carrying married, middle-aged white guy, do.
He said that I had to have dinner at Hooters.
I told Weingarten had to go to a spa.
I suspect our huge leaps of imagination were based on the fact that he wanted to go to Hooters and I wanted to go to a spa.
Nobody ever said writers were selfless individuals.
Frankly, I expected to be outraged by the sexual exploitation of young women at Hooters. As soon as I knew I would be accepting this journalistic challenge, I went to the Hooters' home page and recoiled at the goofy frat-boy mentality I saw there.
I sighed at the clichéd images of bikini clad girls in Farah-Fawcett poses.
I was particularly "skeeved" (as we said in the old neighborhood; "skeeve," which I do not actually know how to spell, and am therefore reduced to representing in a Brooklynese phonetic manner, means disgusted by in a profound manner) by two out of the dozens of dumb pre-packaged "funny" lines you could attach to a Hooters' e-mail postcard.
The two seriously skeevy lines read as follows: "She could be your daughter" and "Now you're old enough to be this girl's father." Messages you are meant to attach to a postcard photo of a babe (and I choose the word carefully), I thought these were not only tasteless, but scary.
I don't need to say anything more, right? Just that if anybody you know should be moronic and/or evil enough to send you one of these and you get an actual laugh out of it, you need to call Dr. Freud immediately.
Have Dr. Freud paged if he doesn't answer. And you might want to reconsider your relationship to the person who thought the message was a good idea.
You can understand why the website made me uneasy; you can understand why I was already to head into Hooters like a suffragette waving a flag. I pictured a sleazy joint straight out of a black-and-white movie where Humphrey Bogart would meet the bad guys to make a shady deal.
What I found was a generic, yahoo atmosphere you might find at any franchise joint, except that there are girls wearing orange short-shorts over suntan tights and tight tank-tops. They did not all have big breasts. They did not look like characters out of Cabaret.
Nor did they look--as the webpage suggested they should--like the "surfer-girl next door." (Must be tough for Hooters in Nebraska to find "the surfer-girl next door.") They didn't look like Playboy Bunnies, either. Bunnies were deliberately sexualized.
These young women could best be described as "good sports" not "bad girls."
The place was certainly gender-specific in one respect: there was a hot and heavy trivia game taking place. And as soon as this competition started, the guys all started paying intense attention to their male rivals and started ignoring the young women entirely, except when they needed another pitcher.
Our server was putting herself through college and almost finished with her degree in elementary education.
Probably good training for the job, since most of the patrons seemed as if they'd be happier playing dodge-ball and having milk and cookies, but had to settle for wings and beer.
My Post counterpart was disappointed in his experience.
I was relieved. I liked the fries.
