Fun Stuff > CHATTER
New trend in Northwest espresso: embarrassingly dressed baristas
tania:
sometimes i substitute "egalitarianism" but then people get just as angry at me and call me pretentious for using a word with eight syllables. now i mostly just tell people i have some opinions.
benji:
--- Quote from: Orbert on 13 Jan 2009, 10:58 ---So basically there are coffee shops with barristas in bikinis, but guys who are normally nice to females anyway don't want to go there because they don't want the barristas in bikinis to think they're hitting on them, or because they don't want to be seen there and have people think that that they're the type of guy who'd go to a coffee shop with barristas in bikinis? And it's embarrassing for the customer?
This is more fucked up than I thought. We've reached the point where servers in bikinis are okay, but guys are too afraid to go there because they don't want to be thought a pervert. Fuck that. I'd still go, because if the girls can't tell the difference between someone being polite and someone hitting on them, that's their problem not mine. And I don't care if someone sees me in there and thinks I'm the type of guy who'd go there, because I am there, so apparently I am that type of guy. Again, all other things being equal, I'll take the shop with the bikini girls over the boring one playing playing bad music. I'll be nice to them and try not to stare, I'll drink my coffee, then I'll leave. Life is too goddamned short to worry so much about what other people think.
--- End quote ---
The social implications of having my coffee served to me by women in their underwear is not something I enjoy. It smacks of female subservience and implies that I'm primarily motivated to interact with women because of sex. Perhaps I think too well of myself, but I tend to think that I enjoy interacting with women because they're human beings and I can have a personal connection with them. The underwear, in this case, reduces the quality of the interaction, or has the potential to. I'm already in a dominant role as a customer. Adding to this that I'm fully dressed, while they're mostly naked, and mostly naked ostensibly for my pleasure creates an atmosphere that I dislike because it places emphasis on the disparity between my power in the interaction and her's.
It also implies that I'm there for something besides coffee. It objectifies us, as customers, as much as it does the women involved. We become nothing more than our sex drives and basic instincts, ready to throw our money at the sexiest girl. I don't like that implication. I prefer to be treated as a grownup customer, capable of enjoying my coffee without sex being brought up. Put another way, when I buy coffee, I am doing it because I like coffee. Sex, or the implied promise of possible sex, is not required to enhance my enjoyment of the experience of buying coffee and I resent the implication that it is. I like coffee. I like quiet little coffee bars with friendly baristas who make the coffee well and leave a newspaper out for me to read. These are elements of atmosphere that I like and that are a part of going out for coffee. Adding sex to that atmosphere isn't something I have a use for. It doesn't add anything I want added. We are bombarded with sexualized images of women in much of our daily lives, and there are times when I enjoy such images. Coffee simply is not one of those times for me.
Dazed:
Feminism is great, and it's done some very good things for society as a whole. Unfortunately, it's become very extreme and perverted on the fringes, and, like so many other social movements, gets judged by its extremes.
You know, stuff like this.
Alex C:
Yeah, I've felt like that too Benji. I believe I brought it up once in the blog thread; one night while watching Futurama on comedy central I saw a TON of Girls Gone Wild ads get played. Seriously, I think it was like two or three per commercial break. I found it a bit worrying that my demographic is assumed to enjoy getting a bunch of young women drunk and encourage them to flash cameras, particularly since the GGW company was once found guilty of failing to properly verify the age of the girls in the videos. When you put together negligence plus the fact that alcohol is clearly involved in their videos, it definitely raises some questions about consent. It makes me feel sort of guilty by association.
jhocking:
--- Quote from: tania on 13 Jan 2009, 11:18 ---now i mostly just tell people i have some opinions.
--- End quote ---
But this would piss people off because after you say that they would wait a beat and then be like "AAAAAND those opinions are?"
you can't win
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