Call it what it is, or, If so, they'd have a "Boingers" too
Coturnix, filling in for Echidne, makes a classic mistake.
In any case, as a whole, as much as Hooters brand is about selling sex, from what I could see first-hand, neither managers, nor waitresses, nor most of the customers really bought into it - they treated is as any other family restaurant. A place in a good spot where there is no other food around. I feel more comfortable there than in some more hyped establishments in town (I mean restaurants - I have not visited a strip club and do not intend to ever, so I can retain my own biases and stereotypes about strip clubs and can yell in blog comments against them).
So, yes, the corporate idea is to sell sex. Like Maxim. It may work in some places, but in others, it is just another restaurant. It makes money for the company, so the bosses do not care how it does so. It is in a way a spoof and a put-down of misogyny - "we get money out of suckers" - and the waitresses are in on that plan, not the slaves of it.
Let's leave aside the question of to what extent taking money from someone whose ethics you disapprove of is an unacceptable compromise, endorsement, or linkage (consider the haste with which GOP politicians returned Delay's campaign money after it got too rank) and also the question of just how free, really, all those happy bimbo waitresses are (and how Coturnix, being a john male customer would ever have the chance to actually know) and just focus on that one claim, which Coturnix makes over and over again, and that is that Hooters, Maxim, and all those other companies just "sell sex."
No, they don't.
They sell women.
If they "just sold sex," they would be staffed half-and-half with handsome, scantily-clad young men in spandex, to appeal to the heterosexual majority of women, too. There would be as many ads showing well-muscled males with strategically-placed leaves or soap bubbles, advertising anything from soap itself to automobiles, as there are with mostly-nude females. If it was just business, and they were just selling sex - or using sex to sell other things, really, let's be accurate here, since neither Hooters nor Maxims doubles as a brothel or runs mail-order escort services, as far as I know - then they would work to appeal to at the very least the circa-90% majority of heterosexual customers equally - and while they were at it, appeal at the same time to the other circa-10% of GLBT customers who don't even figure into their calculation. (Don't try to tell me that MadAve is trying to appeal to that key lesbian purchasing demographic, that it even crosses their mind, with their "sex-selling" pictures of women.) If it was a matter of pure profit, then we'd have "Boingers" along with "Hooters."
But we don't.
"Selling sex" is just a euphemism for "using the accepted portrayals of women as objects for het male appetite to sell things to men, since only male purchasing power, and opinion, counts." --And an endorsement of the baseline belief that women are sex, and only sex, and that we owe it to men to "give it up" on demand, and that men are entitled by their chromosomes to be pandered to with attractive, objectified, undemanding, submissive female objects to titillate their lusts.
If it were really "sex" being "sold" - the media world would look a lot more like this:
In any case, as a whole, as much as Hooters brand is about selling sex, from what I could see first-hand, neither managers, nor waitresses, nor most of the customers really bought into it - they treated is as any other family restaurant. A place in a good spot where there is no other food around. I feel more comfortable there than in some more hyped establishments in town (I mean restaurants - I have not visited a strip club and do not intend to ever, so I can retain my own biases and stereotypes about strip clubs and can yell in blog comments against them).
So, yes, the corporate idea is to sell sex. Like Maxim. It may work in some places, but in others, it is just another restaurant. It makes money for the company, so the bosses do not care how it does so. It is in a way a spoof and a put-down of misogyny - "we get money out of suckers" - and the waitresses are in on that plan, not the slaves of it.
Let's leave aside the question of to what extent taking money from someone whose ethics you disapprove of is an unacceptable compromise, endorsement, or linkage (consider the haste with which GOP politicians returned Delay's campaign money after it got too rank) and also the question of just how free, really, all those happy bimbo waitresses are (and how Coturnix, being a john male customer would ever have the chance to actually know) and just focus on that one claim, which Coturnix makes over and over again, and that is that Hooters, Maxim, and all those other companies just "sell sex."
No, they don't.
They sell women.
If they "just sold sex," they would be staffed half-and-half with handsome, scantily-clad young men in spandex, to appeal to the heterosexual majority of women, too. There would be as many ads showing well-muscled males with strategically-placed leaves or soap bubbles, advertising anything from soap itself to automobiles, as there are with mostly-nude females. If it was just business, and they were just selling sex - or using sex to sell other things, really, let's be accurate here, since neither Hooters nor Maxims doubles as a brothel or runs mail-order escort services, as far as I know - then they would work to appeal to at the very least the circa-90% majority of heterosexual customers equally - and while they were at it, appeal at the same time to the other circa-10% of GLBT customers who don't even figure into their calculation. (Don't try to tell me that MadAve is trying to appeal to that key lesbian purchasing demographic, that it even crosses their mind, with their "sex-selling" pictures of women.) If it was a matter of pure profit, then we'd have "Boingers" along with "Hooters."
But we don't.
"Selling sex" is just a euphemism for "using the accepted portrayals of women as objects for het male appetite to sell things to men, since only male purchasing power, and opinion, counts." --And an endorsement of the baseline belief that women are sex, and only sex, and that we owe it to men to "give it up" on demand, and that men are entitled by their chromosomes to be pandered to with attractive, objectified, undemanding, submissive female objects to titillate their lusts.
If it were really "sex" being "sold" - the media world would look a lot more like this: