unpacking Earls

A young woman working at the front door of Earls wears a short, tight skirt. She totters on high heels. Her top is fitted and its neckline plunges. 

She is sixteen. 

What are the influences that nudged her to put on that outfit? Have you been on Instagram lately? Specifically, the feed of a teen? Or TikTok? Have you looked at the magazines covers at the checkout or perused the women’s health and fitness or fashion mags at Chapters? The women are scantily clad and provocative. Shocking? No. This is how it goes, see. It’s always about the body, we’ve long known that. But what lines have we blurred with our sexified servers, and what does it mean, exactly, when we blur them? It appears, certainly, that we’ve allowed for a few things, chief among them, that if you rock those curves as you seat tables and sling cocktails it says a few things about you, and mostly those things have to do with consent and availability and  exactly just what you are for.

* 

Chanel Miller. Do you know her? You should. 

Her book, Know My Name: A Memoir, was published after Miller’s victim impact statement went viral on Buzzfeed. You know the story. Miller was raped by a university student on the Stanford campus. 

I picked up Know My Name this winter and fought her narrative on a beach in Cancun, sucking back sickly sweet cocktails and looking up for every second “Mum, watch me!” shout from the pool.

Fought her story? It’s the truth, although embarrassing to admit. As a woman who fought off enough guys, did I figure she should’ve taken better care than to put herself in harm’s way? She was blackout drunk when it happened. She doesn’t recall the rape. Did that conscious decision to lose control sit wrong with me, and did I think that, while what her rapist did was wrong, yes, technically and logically and plain old what-the-hell-were-you-thinking wrong, what she did was….stupid? Even as the mother of three daughters – one of whom is old enough to stand at the doors of a restaurant and welcome you – I fought her book. 

I remember holding two thoughts in my head at once when I read her statement on Buzzfeed in 2016. First was that yes, she should not have been raped. Second, though? Second was she should not have gotten so drunk. How do I warn my girls, I remember thinking. How to parse it in manageable bits. Listen, don’t get too drunk. Because it’s stupid, yes. But also, because you can’t protect yourself and honey, no one else will. 

Thank god one of Miller’s gifts is her ability to write. 

Clear and compelling, her prose walked me through details. She made me sit with her through mundane, through exposition, through horror, through pain. She pulled back and let me catch my breath occasionally, but sometimes she made me keep going, one foot in front of the other and deeply alongside her agony. And through that beautiful, raw clarity I learned it was actually impossible for me not to come away with a couple of crystal fucking clear realizations. Regardless of how drunk she was, Miller should not have been raped, and further; that her rapist deserved the full force of the law to come down on him. 

I was surprised by my turnaround and have considered it ever since, rotating it over and over in my head. I went back and forth but logic led me, every single time, back to the stark and obvious truth. That Miller’s drunk, passed out state did NOT in fact give her rapist a green light. Even amber. It was a red, full stop. 

But it wasn’t until a certain comment surfaced on my FB page regarding the Earls culture that I understood the implicit standards Miller raged against. Really understood them. Listen, I have a women’s studies degree. I think about these things. I study them still. I am cautious with absolutes to a fault. But still, for years and years, I had not managed to make meaningful progress on these things until just now.

*

Let’s break it down.  

We all know the old adages. Dress for success. The clothes make the man. 

There are a few less well-known but equally provocative sayings:

“Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.” – Linda Grant

“Clothing is ultimately the suit of armor in which we battle the world.” – Sophia Amoruso

 And, chillingly:

“A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take if off you.” – Francoise Sagan

What a woman wears says who she is. A woman who works somewhere like Earls used to be required (and I assume is still gently nudged) to wear short skirts and heels and the suggestion was always to be sexy. 

What does the woman do with that? She has likely unconsciously inhaled society’s dictates about women dressing for the impression she wants to leave, but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? The debate may have begun in Grade 1 over the thickness of those goddam spaghetti straps or an inseam length on her shorts at school, measured out via fingertip on the playground.

Who is she dressing for, anyway? Her bosses, certainly. The other hostesses who act as enforcers the way women are taught. The waitresses who toe their own lines. The (not all, but some) cooks and bartenders who offer feedback (oh yes they do, catcalling and cheering through the window and peering over the line) or comments on weight or a bad hair day. She’ll hear it all, and she will learn the way we all do. The way the new hire in the dish area hears how the guy working the ovens does his wolf whistle, and when. Leering customers who reflect approval by percentage points with the push of the buttons that are the difference between rent, or not. Cool up-and-down appraisals from the women who choose to eat and drink there, women who dismiss servers with a glance or a tone or a quick bark about perceived slights or - the worst perhaps of all - the refusal to look her in the eyes, the pretending she is not there. 

You know what I’m talking about.  As she dips her toe in the culture, she understands how it goes and she learns who gets what shifts and why, how praise is doled out, and finally, how cash is king and is reflected by how well she chooses to play. 

To imply all women are raised strong enough to resist (and then tell, me why would they resist - if this is the pinnacle of popular and the real-life Instagram scroll why on earth would she back off?) misses many points. Swim against the current and you will – as I was, as others were –  be told you’re at best a B player in a land of only As. Conform, as I then did, and you are awarded coveted shifts in money-making spots where you’ll learn what to do when the guy tells you how great your legs are while his wife is in the bathroom, or how to handle the one who carefully tucks his wedding ring in his pocket as you place his beer in front of him, and then asks for your number. You’ll soon learn the party girls make the most cash and you’ll do shots in the closet at the “safety meeting” and you’ll leave your entire section to run to the Keg to down a pitcher of paralyzers, sucking straws with the rest of the crew, and you’ll feel like part of the funnest team ever when you aren’t throwing up the next morning in a haze of sick and regret and the shame that now burns deep and all the time, its embers tended carefully like a side hustle you can’t let go.

You’ll learn to crave the attention, first because it’s something you never had, but then because that’s what it’s built for. You’ll perform. You’ll agonize over your body and reject the food you serve, choosing instead to count calories and ration and live in a world where food is the enemy even though you sling it all night long. You’ll learn how to drink efficiently, and by that you mean the path of fewest calories to the least resistance, and how to sustain drunkenness with the least possible additives so your body doesn’t pack on the pounds that will send you back to the hinterlands.

One of the most shame-inducing things later is when you realize how complicit you were. How you became the exact person you thought you’d never be. How you helped the machine hold the other women accountable. Isn’t that the thing about power? About how we all believe it’s finite, and if we manage to snag some, we hold on for dear life, prying off the fingers below to ensure they don’t steal some of our sunshine as we claw at the feet of whoever’s above?

*

Now, though. There  are miles of life and time between you then and you now. You’ve sunk deep into those emails and texts and phone calls. Reams of words spill through the warm glow of your phone, those little blue dots undulating until it all pours out. The hurt and the sadness. Sickening embarrassment. Women who suffered and said nothing and ones who still struggle to understand how it turned out so wrong. You’ve also spoken with women who are strong, who were strong. Who say they didn’t take it, they didn’t put up with it, and some (not all) question the women who did. Some tell you about dads who told them to quit terrible jobs and others are joyful as they recount using wit and strength to back the men off, and it’s true. There are strong women out there and you saw them, too. The ones who punched back and refused, and is that part of your shame? That it was always a choice and you chose the wrong side?

Chanel Miller got blackout drunk and was raped behind a dumpster. Two men found her there and dragged her rapist off her unconscious body and the police report says one of them cried because of the state of her. You cried when you read that a long time ago, you remember, and you’d gone and found photos of the Swedes online so you could look at their faces and see if you could tell what was different about them but they were just guys. They could have been anyone. So could her rapist, you suppose.

Chanel Miller wore a short skirt. She drank, she danced, she flirted.

The women who work at Earls wear short skirts. It’s a coveted thing. They’re happy. They sign up for this. Those skirts are a fucking metaphor.

Don’t they get what they deserve, then? When they look the way they do, aren’t they asking for it? Weren’t you basically begging for those phone numbers shoved in your apron, fingers sometimes grasping and grabbing? For the pinch of your bum as you squeezed in between patrons when the football team came back to town? For overt stares? For comments on your body, on weight loss or gain, or how you might like some-such? 

Didn’t you ask for it just the way Chanel Miller did? That’s the question.

*

I spoke with a man who complained this whole thing was unfair. He shared how he’d been at a golf tournament where some of the Earls waitresses stripped naked. He said it made people uncomfortable. He made a point of it, that men and women felt uncomfortable. 

I allowed myself to feel uncomfortable with his message and its dripping misogyny but then, no.

Let’s dig into that, I should have said, and maybe still will. Why did they strip, do you think? What made that their plan for an afternoon? How much drinking had been done, and at whose behest? How much food consumed? How many days and nights had been filled by them being reassured the only thing about them that mattered were their bodies and what someone wanted to do with (to) them? How many times had they seen shifts cut or moved because a woman wasn’t playing the game? Why was stripping their clothes the thing that they did? Tell me. What does that say about our world? Where was their power, or at least, where had they been told it was?

Were you uncomfortable? Was their brazen disrobing just a line too far? Was it upsetting to see it all laid out there like that? Did bare naked breasts and stomachs and asses and vaginas provide too clear a picture of what the golf tournament was all about? Was it more fun when overt sexuality was implied, rather than out in the open? 

Why did it make you feel that way, I wanted to ask then, and maybe still do. Why were you at that golf tournament? Why did you go? Who did you go with? What was the purpose of that afternoon? How was it billed? Who were its organizers? How were the teams developed? Was there an afterparty? 

What was the reputation of Earls? Who was the manager? What did you know? Tell me again how it made you uncomfortable. Did the nakedness jolt you into worries about what it might say about YOU that you were at this tournament where girls took off their clothes?

*

I’m almost fifty and still sorting things out. I’ve mostly extinguished the shame, but it flares easily and will require a lifetime of vigilance, and I’m okay with it. That’s my road. But I’m sick to death of still talking about this - not the talking, no - but the world being this way. We can do better, I know it. Let’s try?