The Betamax of Pornography

Last night, my girl and I went to Hooters. Not out of any kind of bi-curiosity over Hooters Girls or anything; we had spent several hours drinking in a couple of Boston dive bars, and when your evening’s Schrodinger’s Box contains going home on a train or in the back of a police car, the only effective way to change your quantum mechanical superposition involves chicken fried in beef tallow.

(Sorry about the complexity of that first paragraph. It’s just that last night, my girl bet me that I couldn’t use “Hooters Girls” and “quantum mechanics” together in a single logical sentence, and I could really use the blowjob.)

I hadn’t been to a Hooters in years before last night, and as I sat in the place, looking at the waitresses in their cleavage shirts and hot pants, I began to really understand that that Hooters only exists to objectify women. And I became outraged, because they were doing it badly.

Let’s not mince words: Hooters exists to provide horny drunk guys hot girls they can drool over because they want to fuck them. It’s the entirety of the social contract under which the place exists; Welcome to Hooters! Your server will be this whore that you want to bone! Hooters is the only corporation on the planet where the part of the mission statement that says “Enhancing shareholders’ holdings” actually is double-entendre for cranking one out.

Which sounds good on paper, and may have been gold back when Hooters was founded back in 1983. But the problem is, this is the twenty-first century. Which means that, at least for me, I subconsciously compare every girl I see to:

• Supermodels (Who you want to bone because the media tells you so)
• Pornstars (Who you want to bone because you’ve seen them do it and respect their work ethic), and
• Strippers (Who you want to bone because thorough inspection of the engineering gives you a certain amount of confidence in the smoothness of the ride)

All of which makes me infer that Hooters Girls aren’t hot enough to be supermodels, are too prudish to be pornstars, and are, in fact, totally unwilling to get naked. To my estimation, that makes Hooters Girls fourth-tier hot girls. Fifth-tier hot girls have harelips and colostomies. Sixth-tier girls are inflatable.

Hooters may have been a scandalous exploiter of women back in the heady, pre-VHS days of the early eighties when it was founded in the Deep South, when the only people who could effectively objectify women needed both proximity to a porno theater and a dry cleaner too stupid to question mayonnaise stains on the inside of their raincoat. It’s a little less scandalous twenty-four years later, when I can close my eyes, blindly pound my fist on my keyboard three times, and open my eyes to a free video of a woman blowing a horse.

I’m just saying: it’s hard for me to imagine anyone getting upset about guys going to Hooters and spending a hundred bucks for an evening of beer, wings and staring at two inches of cleavage when the same money will get you a pantsless evening at home with the same Pabst Blue Ribbon and the same wings from Dominos and a Webcam girl who’ll stick Weebles in her ass while screaming, “By the power of Greyskull!” until you ruin yet another sock.

(Note to self: stop sharing so much.)

Hooters may have been a WMD in the Sexual-Political Wars of the late-eighties and early-nineties, but like the Republican Guard, it has outlived it’s usefulness. Hooters is dead tech, just like DOS, the IUD and the McDLT. If Hooters wants to stay on the cutting-edge of female objectification in the new century, it needs to take a page from DOS and come up with a new image and function.

If I can make a suggestion: Hooters needs to ditch the tired double-entendre owl logo, and maybe strike up a partnership with Dyson and rename themselves “The Best Suck”. Because with a name like that, I’d go out of my way to get their chicks covered in beef tallow. Until then, I have an appointment in Eternia.

With my girl, who idle rumor has it, was once at minimum, a third-tier girl.

[tags]Hooters, porn, pornography, quantum mechanics, He-Man, Masters of the Universe, feminism, dark humor, satire[/tags]