Confessions of a Feminist Hooters Waitress
By: Erin Benson
Tags: Patriarchy, Personal Development, Personal Growth, Metoo, Shame

Confessions of a Feminist Hooters Waitress

I recognized the injustice of Hooters, but I filled out the application, put on the uniform and worked hard to become a good Hooters Girl

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I’ve always had an acute awareness of justice, a hypersensitive internal fairness meter. When things are out of balance, it leaves me with an irritating sense of discomfort, kinetic energy that burns until I attempt to right the wrongs I encounter.

Often those wrongs are small, an everyday social accounting of who owes what or who is doing more than their fair share, and my actions serve to merely re-balance social ledgers. I had this roommate after college: Emily. She was always doing thoughtful acts like folding laundry I left it in the dryer, or removing all the grapes from their stems and putting them in convenient, Tupperware containers.

While living with her, I felt this constant, nagging desire to make our relationship equitable. I’d set my alarm a few minutes early to make us coffee in the morning, or I’d rush through dinner so I could start the dishes before she had a chance. I kept meticulous track of who bought drinks, just to make sure I didn’t accidentally miss my turn.

Sometimes the wrongs are bigger and result in public, performative acts of resistance to authority. In seventh grade, my geography teacher — an obnoxious, bulbous-nosed, former NFL football player with a long, curly mullet that he often fluffed during class — enlightened his audience of twelve-year-olds with the claim that women were “the weaker species.” Red-faced and shivering with anger, I stood up, pointed not just my finger but my entire ropey, pre-pubescent arm at him and loudly proclaimed him a sexist.

He promptly sent me to detention, but the collective gasp from my classmates and the look of shock on his face were worth the punishment. In tenth grade, when a teacher called my best friend “dumb” for asking a question in class, I again stood up. “Maybe if you were a better teacher, your students wouldn’t have so many dumb questions,” I sneered. My effort, again, landed me in detention.

It’s difficult for me to rectify this personal history, this idea of myself as someone who fights for fair treatment, with the fact that I worked at Hooters, a cultural institution that denigrates women. But for nearly two years in college, I paraded around a wood-paneled room in a uniform so tight it might as well have been a second skin. I flirted with men three times my age for better tips and willfully subjected myself to objectification and even danger.

How did I transform from a girl who fought injustice to a young woman who labored for a mainstay of American patriarchy, who offered herself as embodied evidence that all the interesting things about women — their personalities and passions and values and ideas and intelligence — were less important than their physical appearance, their meat, and what could be done to it?

Perhaps because I could never find a satisfactory answer to that question, I kept my employment at Hooters hidden for years. I was ashamed. On a few occasions, I did reveal my salacious former employer to trusted individuals, their reactions reinforced that shame. Men I told would look at my breasts. They’d try not to, but they couldn’t help it. They had to size me up, see what I was hiding under my clothes, see if I was worthy of the title: Hooters Girl. Women would retreat, take a step back, say WOW or REALLY!? while actively trying to rid their face of judgment. I could feel their opinion of me shift, feel them situating themselves on a higher wrung. I could never have worked there, they’d think.

It has been sixteen years since I worked there. I’m older now. Wiser. Many of the illusions of my youth have disintegrated in the wake of personal tragedy and a deeper understanding of how social forces limit and shape individual behavior. I know shame hides in the dark corners of our minds and bodies, infecting our thoughts, feelings, and actions. I know that to truly answer the question Why did I work at Hooters? I must release the shame festering inside me, expose my experiences to the world, give them air. So, here I go.