The anti-abortion movement's tactic known as a "personhood amendment," which legally defines a person as existing at the moment of fertilization, has been rejected twice in recent years by voters in Colorado.
But the effort has found new life in Mississippi, where a personhood amendment will appear on the Nov. 8 ballot. Mississippi is, by some measures, the nation's most conservative state, and the proposal has earned the support of both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor, the majority of attorney general candidates, and a host of other state leaders.
If Proposition 26 passes, abortion foes hope it will build momentum for a broader national assault on Roe vs. Wade. Supporters say similar propositions will be featured on ballots in Florida, South Dakota and Ohio in 2012.
Both sides in the debate agree that the measure would outlaw abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest. But there is disagreement about what other, potentially wide-ranging effects it may have.
"Part of the concern is that it's not entirely clear what will happen if this passes," Mississippi College law professor Jonathan Will told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger recently.
The text of the measure proposes that the definition of "person" in the state constitution include "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof."
Opponents fear that could ban some fertility treatments and birth-control methods, including IUDs, which prevent the implantation of fertilized eggs. In the Clarion-Ledger, Will raised the possibility that the legal voting age would actually be 17 years and 3 months after birth, and that population figures might have to be calculated with the frozen embryos housed in fertility clinics taken into account.
Michele Alexandre, an associate law professor at the University of Mississippi, is among those who worry that if Prop 26 passes, women unaware of their early pregnancy might be exposed to prosecution if they are found to have consumed alcohol or engaged in "a strenuous physical competition."
The Yes on 26 supporters argue that the amendment would not ban "most forms" of birth-control pills, though they say it would ban the pregnancy-terminating treatment known as RU486. They deny it would prohibit in vitro fertilization, though it "would not allow unused embryos to be destroyed."
They also dismiss as "silly and cruel" the suggestion that the law would result in criminal prosecutions of women who miscarry.
Personhood USA, which spearheaded the Colorado ballot measures, is heading up the Mississippi effort. The liberal investigative magazine Mother Jones notes that another major player this time around is a man named Les Riley, founder of the group Personhood Mississippi. Riley, the magazine reported, is a neo-secessionist who "once supported an effort to form an independent theocratic republic in South Carolina."
In person, in prison and in the media, the woman convicted by an Italian court of murder — and now exonerated — was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior.
Amanda Knox cries following the verdict that overturns her conviction and acquits her of murdering her British roommate Meredith Kercher, at the Perugia court, in Italy Oct. 3. (Lapresse / AP Photo)
By Nina Burleigh
October 4, 2011
Amanda Knox is nothing if not a good story. The pretty young American who headed to Italy for her junior year abroad, fell for an Italian boy and then landed in the dock with him, accused, convicted and then exonerated on charges of murdering another young woman in a sex game gone wild.
Knox was never one of the usual suspects. Her roommate, Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student, was found on the night after Halloween 2007, raped, with her throat slit, in the Perugia apartment they shared. According to the European Council, 1 in 5 European females are victims of a sexual assault at some point in their lives. Ninety-eight percent of their aggressors are male.
When I went to Perugia in 2009, as Knox's testimony began, to research a book on the case, I didn't know whether she was guilty as charged, but I was certainly willing to believe it. Either way, it was a textbook example of our never-ending fascination with the supposed femme fatale. Men may batter wives and girlfriends daily, sometimes to death, but their perp walks rarely make it onto Nancy Grace's show, let alone through a second cycle of the local news. "Foxy Knoxy" (as she called herself on her MySpace page), on the other hand, has been a continual headline grabber from the moment of her arrest.
After a few weeks in Perugia, I saw that there was something very wrong with the narrative of the murder that the authorities and the media were presenting. There was almost no material evidence linking Knox or her boyfriend to the murder, and no motive, while there was voluminous evidence — material and circumstantial — implicating a third person, a man, whose name one almost never read in accounts of the case. It became clear that it wasn't facts but Knox — her femaleness, her Americaness, her beauty — that was driving the case.
In person, in prison and in the media, Knox was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior. A prison "doctor" (he has never stepped forward publicly) tested a sample of Knox's blood and then informed her she was HIV-positive, prompting Knox to list every man she'd had sex with. Authorities passed the names of seven men to reporters from the British tabloid pack, who printed it. Soon thereafter, Knox was told the doctor was mistaken and she didn't have AIDS.
Outside prison walls, Italian criminologists were opining in the media and eventually on the witness stand that because the body had been covered with a blanket, the killer was surely female because such an act was evidence of feminine "pieta."
Finally, there were the prosecution's operatic closing arguments, repeated almost verbatim in the appeal that ended last week. Knox was a "luciferina" — a she-devil — capable of a special, female duplicity. She was "dirty on the inside." Always, even from the defense lawyers, the closing arguments ended with appeals to God, in a medieval courtroom with a peeling fresco of the Madonna on the wall and a crucifix hanging above the judge.
The prosecution's "angel-faced killer" had arrived in Italy a few months after turning 20, a high school ugly duckling who blossomed into a beauty in college and was still testing her effect on men. She appeared outwardly confident, but, according to people I interviewed, she was deeply averse to conflict. She was also a compulsive diarist, explaining herself in rounded handwriting filling hundreds of journals. She thought of herself as a writer.
But that penchant for unfiltered self-expression hastened her demise.
In her "prison diary," a document police handed to reporters after she'd scribbled in it for a month, Knox was often upbeat, blithe, clearly a devotee of positive thinking. The reporters who read the diary explained it as evidence of a psychopathic mind. Tabloid reporters from Britain concentrated on the few instances where she appeared to have sex on her mind — when she wrote about the fan letters Italian men sent her in jail, for example. They ignored pages she filled with details about being sexually harassed by a prison guard.
In Perugia, reporters found people to talk about how the young American had attracted sexual desire and attention from men — willfully and not. She may have been doing only what liberated, self-absorbed young American girls do — having fun. But that liberation and fun — breaking into solo singing in a restaurant, doing yoga stretches and cartwheels in a police station — were read differently by Perugia authorities and more reticent peers, like the victim's British girlfriends. To the Italian authorities, her careless seductiveness juxtaposed with the ghastly scene inside her house were clues to the witch, the deliberate player of men: Their theory was that she was not only a murderer but a murderous mastermind.
Knox was put through an extreme version of the test many young women face. She was endowed with compelling, mysterious powers. The focus on her sexuality suggests that civilization can easily tip backward to the primeval era when the feminine was classified, worshiped and feared in the form of powerful archetypes: Madonnas and Dianas, virgins and whores. Knox inadvertently fed these archetypes by the ways she behaved in public and advertised herself on the Web and, eventually, in her own compulsive writings.
In the end, however, it was precisely because she wasn't that monster, because she hadn't perfected that persona in the world, that she could do so little to defend herself. Knox had barely defined herself; she didn't possess the language or the maturity to match, let along overcome, the authority of other people's notions.
In Perugia's archaeology museum, there are hundreds of ancient Etruscan funerary urns. For some reason, perhaps having to do with women dying in childbirth, many of them feature a carved relief depicting the Iphigenia fable. Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon, who agreed to sacrifice her so that his ships might sail to Troy. At the last moment, the goddess Diana replaced the girl with a deer. In prison, Knox's jail mates nicknamed her Bambi, apparently because of her passivity in the face of accusations.
The young woman who first went to jail at age 20 was a cipher onto whose photogenic, smiling face some Italians could see the archetypal Madonna-whore and, in whose pale eyes, others saw a psychopath. She was arrested at a time and in a place where young sexually active women are endowed in the minds of grown men, and maybe women too, with propensities for fantastic adult kink that few possess. The gaunt, tense woman defending herself on appeal bore barely any resemblance to the fresh, pretty girl photographed kissing her boyfriend outside the murder scene. Only now, having lost the power to bewitch and beguile, has she been revealed as human — and also, apparently, not guilty of murder.
Nina Burleigh's book on the Knox case, "The Fatal Gift of Beauty," was published in August.
Reading Alberto Moravia in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy
Paramount Films of Italy, via The Everett Collection
Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 adaptation of Moravia's novel "The Conformist."
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: September 30, 2011
In its culture as in its politics, Italy lives under the shadow of Silvio Berlusconi. With his endless legal entanglements and sexual imbroglios and his colorful manner of governing (or not governing), it often feels as if the prime minister has taken all the oxygen out of the room, the airwaves, the entire republic. “How did we get here?” is the dominant — indeed often the only — topic of conversation in Italy today.
The novelist Alberto Moravia, a 20th-century giant whose work is generally overlooked today, offers one key to unlocking the mystery. Born in 1907, Moravia came of age under Fascism — he belonged to a generation of writers, including Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Elsa Morante (Moravia’s first wife), who found global audiences after the Second World War. In his most important novel, “The Conformist” (1951), Moravia explored the complicated links between sex and politics in a nation of cynical opportunists. The formative moment in the life of the protagonist, Marcello Clerici, comes at age 13, when he shoots a defrocked priest who has tried to seduce him. True to the novel’s title, Clerici, whose name means “clergy,” later joins the Fascist Party more out of boredom than conviction. In addition to exploring the homoeroticism of power (a theme that later captivated Pasolini), Moravia’s novel also delved into a careerism and even nihilism that he identified just below the surface of Italian society, reaching far deeper than any ideology.
Moravia died in 1990, a many-laureled man of letters. Several years later, three unpublished novellas were found by chance in a suitcase in his Rome residence. The manuscripts, which offer variations on a love story set during World War II, were most likely written in the early 1950s, between “The Conformist” and “Contempt,” a brutal 1954 account of a disintegrating marriage. Now they have been published under the title TWO FRIENDS (Other Press, $18.95), in an excellent translation by Marina Harss, offering a fascinating glimpse of how Moravia’s writing evolved. In one particularly revealing moment, the mother of a middle-class Roman family cries, “For all I care, the English can win, or the Germans. . . . I just want someone to win so we can forget all this!” Reading this today, in the long twilight of the Berlusconi era, the line is almost haunting. Deeply cynical and perhaps darkly comic, it speaks to what Italians call l’arte di arrangiarsi, the art of making do — a highly sophisticated skill, a vestige of centuries of feudalism, with which savvy Italians are immediately able to sniff out power dynamics and arrange their affairs accordingly.
Another central theme in Moravia’s works is impotence, both political and sexual. In these novellas, the characters have decent luck in bed but generally feel powerless against the larger currents of 20th-century history. The bedroom becomes a shelter against the world, but the world never fully leaves the bedroom. At one point in “Two Friends,” Sergio, an impoverished, aspiring young Communist, attributes his lack of conviction — about his career, his lover, his politics — to his formation under Fascism. It had “wormed its way into his blood, not in the form of political allegiance, but rather as a kind of torpor and mortal passivity, like a poison that slowly intoxicates and weakens the body,” Moravia writes. “He was confronted once again with his feeling of impotence, but this time it not only affected his personal life but encompassed the destiny of the nation and humanity as a whole.”
In “Two Friends,” Moravia links a human drama to the struggle between Communism and Fascism for Italy’s heart and soul. Again, reading Moravia in Berlusconi’s Italy, where scores of women offer themselves for the leader’s pleasure, it feels as if the country today provides only bedroom drama, not a larger ideological struggle. Midcentury passivity has devolved into a languid air of late-imperial decline.
lthough it was Jean-Luc Godard who adapted Moravia’s “Contempt” into a film and Bernardo Bertolucci who directed “The Conformist,” Moravia’s true spiritual kin are Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Their devastating portraits of upwardly mobile, desperately unhappy Italians captured an alienation, rootlessness and despair that seemed to rise with every percentage point of gross domestic product during Italy’s boom years in the 1950s and ’60s, as the feudal resignation of the past evolved into aestheticized existential ennui. Indeed, there is something of Marcello Mastroianni in Moravia’s protagonists: they present an endless series of self-loathing, conflicted men who aspire to make art or take some form of decisive action, but who instead are thwarted and trapped by their own lack of nerve; often, they analyze their own failings with great lucidity, creating elaborate psychological monuments to their own passivity.
Like the men Mastroianni played for Fellini and Antonioni, Moravia’s protagonists also routinely mistreat the women in their lives, often in spectacular fashion, as in “Two Friends” when Sergio hits his lover, Lalla, who responds as if the strike caused her pleasure, not pain. But there is one crucial moment in “Two Friends” that goes against that tendency. Sergio hopes to convert his wealthier and more conservative friend Maurizio to Communism, a cause he has only halfheartedly embraced, by allowing Maurizio to sleep with Lalla, if Maurizio then joins the party. But the political seduction remains unconsummated. When Lalla realizes what is taking place, she recoils in a rare act of defiance for one of Moravia’s women, whose hips and breasts are generally more fully fleshed out than their characters or convictions. “Neither of you has shown any respect for my right to choose,” she says. “You have done so in the name of Communism, and you in the name of anti-Communism. . . . You’ve both treated me like an object, . . . but I’ve had enough.” Strong words, and ones that still sting today.
Rachel Donadio is The Times’s Rome bureau chief and a former writer and editor at the Book Review.
Friends of the actress killed by music producer Phil Spector have challenged a famous writer over his pending movie project about the case.
Edward Lozzi, on behalf of the group Friends of Lana Clarkson, took aim Thursday at comments attributed to famed playwright and director David Mamet in a British publication.
Mamet is expected to write and direct a film that would star Al Pacino as Spector and Bette Midler as Spector's attorney, according to industry reports.
"This film may be a valentine for a convicted murderer and 40-year gun abuser," states a letter that Lozzi said was written by the core group of Clarkson's friends.
Those fears were sparked in large measure by comments published June 10 in the Financial Times.
"I don't think he's guilty," the article quotes Mamet saying of Spector. "I definitely think there is reasonable doubt. ... They should never have sent him away. Whether he did it or not, we'll never know but if he'd just been a regular citizen, they never would have indicted him."
Spector was convicted in the 2003 shooting death of Clarkson at his home. Clarkson's friends have long accused Spector's attorneys of painting a defamatory picture of her in an attempt to exonerate their client.
A statement from Lozzi describes Friends of Lana Clarkson as "her girlfriends, boyfriends, hairdressers, agents, managers, casting directors, producers, make-up artists, church-goers and a select group of media reporters."
The letter to Mamet's representatives characterizes the film project as "so wrong and so insensitive in so many ways to the people who knew and loved Lana Clarkson. We are requesting that Mr. Mamet have the good sense and courtesy to write a factual and entertaining film concerning the facts. He does not need to rewrite history so soon. It will back-fire on him."
In an interview, Lozzi said the letter was delivered by email Tuesday and should have arrived by first-class mail Wednesday. He said he has received no response.
"We've offered to look at the script and work with David Mamet," Lozzi said.
Mamet's representative in Los Angeles could not be reached for comment.
The Financial Times article on Mamet also describes the writer's disillusionment with liberal politics.
Mamet is quoted as saying he's "crazy about" conservative favorite Sarah Palin: "Would she make a good candidate for president? I don't know, but she seems to have succeeded at everything she put her hand to."
After Strauss-Kahn’s Arrest, Frenchwomen Speak Out
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: June 6, 2011
PARIS — Claire Nini, now 25, was sexually assaulted as a teenager, and it took her seven years to file a complaint, she said, “because I feared the notoriety of my assailant, a well-known doctor in Nice.”
Feminist groups demonstrated in Paris last month after Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest. The case has increased discussion of views toward women.
Rebecca Marshall for The New York Times
Claire Nini says it took her years to report an assault because her assailant was widely known.
But the furor around the arrest in New York on attempted rape charges of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who had been considered a likely next president of France, has given Frenchwomen and the modest feminist movement here a chance to speak out against sexual oppression and push for a less chauvinistic relationship between the sexes.
“I hope this is going to help the victims to speak,” Ms. Nini said. “If D.S.K.,” the initials by which Mr. Strauss-Kahn is known here, “is really guilty, I think this affair is going to help women,” she said. But if he is found not guilty, she said, “there is a risk that women will not be taken seriously anymore.”
Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former chief of the International Monetary Fund, was arraigned on Monday in New York and pleaded not guilty to all charges, a four-minute event covered live by the main French television channels, Web sites and bloggers. There were experts and court drawings and shots of uniformed hotel workers shouting, “Shame on you!”
The case has also sharpened the debate here about a French way of life, one of tolerance for a male-centric attitude in gender relations, an acceptance of all but the most egregious sexual assaults on women and a reluctance by the authorities to intervene, particularly in cases involving the powerful.
“This is a key moment, a watershed moment,” said Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, an analyst of French politics and culture. Women from across the political spectrum “have extremely unpleasant stories to tell, that men think women are all up for grabs, literally and figuratively,” she said. France is “a difficult country to budge,” she added. “But it’s an important step. Women are emboldened.”
One example of the habits of the past and of possible change inspired by the Strauss-Kahn case was the forced resignation of a junior minister, Georges Tron, who was accused by two women of pressing them to have foot massages that soon evolved into groping. The women said that they were encouraged to speak out by the arrest of Mr. Strauss-Kahn.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been known for his own roving eye, kept his glance on the politics of the matter, with a presidential election next year. He fired Mr. Tron within two days.
Natacha Henry, a French writer and feminist who has written books about the sexuality of young women and about domestic violence, is writing a chapter for a book about the Strauss-Kahn case, concentrating on the more discreet sexual discrimination prevalent in French life.
“Women are starting to speak out now,” Ms. Henry said. “Strauss-Kahn’s friends said he was always a womanizer, a ‘dragueur,’ but we are saying that this is not about seduction, not about ‘la drague,’ but about something else. This is not about sex, seduction, love or an equal relationship, but it is everything to do with power. A lot of attitudes that in America would be considered sexual harassment would be seen here as, ‘Oh, he’s so keen on women.’ ”
She added: “For the friends of D.S.K., feminism and equality hasn’t entered their brains or their political culture. It’s like they were building a sexual planet for themselves, without women.”
Viviane Meunier, a lawyer, noted an important effect. “The simple image that any woman can report what she suffered, that her word can be taken seriously against a high-ranking public figure, is already enough to convey a message to all victims,” she said. “I do not think it will mark the birth of a new feminism, but it will contribute, I hope, to the long evolution of gender relations.”
For Ms. Moutet, the misuse of male power “meets an echo everywhere,” not just in politics or in the capital. She cited a 1990 film, “Promotion canapé,” a title that refers to a casting couch. “It exists in the civil service, in companies, in the post office,” she said. “This will definitely impact women, it will filter down.”
She and others pointed to interviews with nine female politicians published May 31 in the daily Libération, under the headline, “Sick of the machos.” They described “incredibly gross jokes” in the National Assembly and feeling the need to wear trousers to make a speech. But some, like Cécile Duflot, leader of the Greens, noted that “there is a quite sharp difference between people under 40 and those who are older,” while Roselyne Bachelot, a minister, said that “in 30 years of political and feminist engagement, of course I saw real transformations. But the battle is never won.”
Not everyone is optimistic. Marine de Tilly, a journalist and book critic, said nothing would change in France. “There is nothing new under this sad sun,” she said. “To me, this affair is only another sordid story on the long list of sexual aggressions perpetrated against women by men.”
Georges Tron, a junior minister, quickly lost his job when accusations of groping arose.
Many women, even those outraged by the Strauss-Kahn and Tron cases, still see a difference between France and America that they do not want to lose, including both flirtatiousness and discretion about the private, noncriminal lives of adults.
Flora Saladin, 28, a Socialist who works in government pressing for women’s and minority rights, says that flirting does not bother her at all, “so long as it stays respectful,” she said. “It doesn’t bother me if someone tells me I look more attractive with my hair a certain way. You can’t stop men from making compliments, and there’s nothing wrong with it anyway.”
Ms. Henry says there is a problem with the image of French feminism itself. “If you’re a feminist, it means you are not feminine,” she said. Even the tolerance of sexualized compliments is a form of power play, she said. She told of a friend being called into the chief editor’s office at a radio station. The editor shut the door and said: “Oh, I see you’re in a skirt; I can see your legs. Please wear a skirt every day.”
To Frenchmen, she said, “it’s a way of maintaining a reputation of being nice to women.”
“But it’s all about power,” she said. “At that moment the woman cannot answer and thinks: ‘He wants to talk about my skirt; I want to talk about work. I’m stuck, I’m stuck, I’m stuck.’ ” But Ms. Henry says she, too, values French discretion about the private lives of public figures.
Sylvie Kauffmann, the first woman to become editor of Le Monde, wrote in an editorial that “suddenly tongues are untied,” and women are sharing stories of sexual harassment. “Without falling into puritanism,” she wrote, “there is a remedy for those excesses: male-female parity.”
Emeline S., 24, works as a junior manager at an international company and asked that her surname not be used out of concern for her career. She finds that a degree of flirtatiousness and seductiveness helps her in the job. “I think you can manage to make many things happen by playing on seduction,” she said. “Smiles, that sort of thing, it really works on men,” she said, adding: “I have the feeling that I put myself in a seduction relationship with both men and women.”
For ordinary people, she said, “I don’t think that it’s going to change anything at all.”
VS Naipaul finds no woman writer his literary match – not even Jane Austen
Nobel laureate says there is no female author whom he considers his equal
VS Naipaul, no stranger to controversy, has lashed out at female authors, singling out Jane Austen for particular criticism. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
VS Naipaul, no stranger to literary spats and rows, has done it again. This time, the winner of the Nobel prize for literature has lashed out at female authors, saying there is no woman writer whom he considers his equal – and singling out Jane Austen for particular criticism.
In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".
He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."
The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.
He added: "My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way."
The criticism from the author is unsurprising. Naipaul is no stranger to criticism. In the past Naipaul has criticised India's top female authors for their "banality" on the topic he is best known for writing about, the legacy of British colonialism.
He also had a long-running feud with US travel writer and author Paul Theroux.
Their 30-year friendship came to a sudden end, after Theroux discovered that a book he gave Naipaul had been put on sale for £916. The comments were dismissed by the Writers Guild of Great Britain, which said it would not "waste its breath on them". Literary journalist Alex Clark said: "Is he really saying that writers such as Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt, Iris Murdoch are sentimental or write feminine tosh?"
Literary critic Helen Brown described them as "arrogant, attention-seeking".He should heed the words of George Eliot – a female writer – whose works have had a far more profound impact on world culture than his."
Guest Connection: A Tilted Kilt pub in Tempe, Ariz.
Photography by Jeff Newton
Franchises inspired by the Hooters model--such as Celtic-themed sports bar chain Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery and faux mountain sports lodge chain Twin Peaks--have expanded rapidly over the last half decade, while corporate-owned chains like Brick House Tavern + Tap and Bone Daddy's House of Smoke are picking up steam regionally. In fact, for the next couple of years, this segment (often referred to as "breastaurants") is poised to be one of the fastest-growing restaurant categories.
Sales figures for this specific niche aren't available, because they are lumped in with the broader casual dining segment--and numbers for the privately held companies aren't publicly reported--but sales at Hooters alone have increased in the last couple of years and average $1 billion annually.
The concept has grown in spite of the recession by focusing equally on upscale comfort food, full bars with extended beer choices, a full menu of sports on TV, and waitresses in tight shirts and short shorts. But the most important aspect of these restaurants is the same element that powers most successful eateries: customer service.
Why is this segment so popular? "It starts with comfort," says Darren Tristano, executive vice president of Technomic, a food-industry consulting firm in Chicago. "These concepts are growing by offering a different level of service and attentiveness.
They provide a service to men who may not have a person at home to take care of them in the same way. That's important to a number of people, and it drives them back."
It's hard to say exactly why these public man caves took hold in the last few years. Some think a shift away from political correctness or toward a more sexualized culture made the concepts more acceptable. Others believe that as Hooters sales flattened and expansion stalled, like-minded entrepreneurs saw a niche that wasn't being filled.
Ron Lynch, CEO of Tilted Kilt, stands by the concept.
Ron Lynch, CEO of Tempe, Ariz.-based Tilted Kilt, thinks his concept has been well-received because customers were ready for something new.
"Friday's, Chili's--those kinds of concepts came to be very similar in menu and look because they were chasing the same dollars," Lynch says. "When we sprang up, people were looking for something different."
That's what attracted Lynch to Tilted Kilt in the first place. In 2003, Harrah's in Las Vegas asked restaurateur Mark DiMartino if he had a concept for a space in the Rio Casino. He came up with the Hooters-goes-to-Scotland concept that is still the restaurant's theme. When Lynch--an area developer for Schlotsky's Deli--saw the place in 2005, he was hooked, and approached DiMartino about buying the franchise rights. By 2006, there were three Tilted Kilt franchises in the system. The concept has doubled each year. Lynch estimates Tilted Kilt will have 80 units open by the end of 2011, with another 70 deals for new spots in the pipeline.
There's a lot more going on at the Kilt than just men watching women, Lynch says, pointing out that one of the company's key offerings is "sports-viewing excellence," which translates to 50-inch plasma TVs throughout the restaurant, a full bar with a minimum of 24 beers on tap and a menu that ranges from inexpensive snacks to $19 steaks.
But he acknowledges that the cornerstone of the restaurant is the Tilted Kilt waitress. "We make no bones about it--that's what brings people in," he says. "We sell on sex appeal, but we are sexy classy, sexy smart or sexy cute. Not sexy stupid or sexy trashy."
Randy DeWitt had the same idea back in 2004. After growing his Rockfish Seafood Grill franchise too quickly in the Dallas area, he was faced with having to shut down stores. But instead of writing the locations off, he drilled down into the data and realized that while casual dining was tapering off, Hooters and similar concepts were doing well.
That's when he came up with Twin Peaks, a franchise based on a mountain lodge theme, where the girls wear plaid tops, suspenders and hiking boots.
"I knew guys like me would like a man cave where the waitresses are pretty and friendly, and we thought we could create a concept sufficiently differentiated from Hooters," DeWitt says. "I thought Hooters had taken the low-brow route, and we're taking the high road. We have higher-quality food, and the uniforms on our girls are more finished. Hooters is more blue collar. We do well where Hooters isn't accepted."
DeWitt's experiment worked, and he soon began converting more of his seafood restaurants into mountain lodges. Now Twin Peaks has 14 locations, with two under construction and five more in development.
What makes the restaurant stand out, besides the waitresses, DeWitt says, is its commitment to quality. All mugs are frozen, and a special draught system ensures that every beer pours at 29 degrees. They have a full line of top-shelf whiskey, and their skilled bartenders know their booze. The food is all fresh--even fryer items like mozzarella sticks, which are hand-cut, breaded and cooked to order.
But as restaurant consultant Tristano indicates, the true differentiating factor of the modern "breastaurant" is service. Most customers aren't satisfied with brusque service--they want a conscientious server and a meaningful connection.
"Everybody else is rushing toward technology with kiosks that you order off of and servers who slip food to you around the corner. We're going the other way," Lynch says. "One of our mantras during training is that we want to make a connection with our guests. We practice 'touchology,' which means touch the table often, and make guests feel at home. Sometimes waitresses are providing the best part of a guest's day."
Twin Peaks' DeWitt agrees that fostering connections is the key to a restaurant's success, especially when it breeds repeat customers. In fact, some waitresses become mini-entrepreneurs on their own, using Facebook or Twitter to let regulars know what shifts they'll be working or what specials the restaurant is offering.
"When we see regulars walk in the door for lunch, the hostesses and waitstaff greet the guy by name," DeWitt says. Regular customers often ask for certain employees to wait on them, he says, and waitresses are instructed in how to connect with guests.
"We have a certain language and we train that among our waitstaff," DeWitt says. "If you ask for a beer, the waitress will ask 'Do you want the man size or the girl size?'"
Tristano confirms that the servers drive the concepts. "The increased service is absolutely the core, not the food," he says. "I suspect a lot of this segment's success has to do with server training and hiring the right people."
Though this segment of the market is definitely heating up, none of the concepts thinks they are in danger of saturation, especially since their numbers are fairly small and they're not targeting the same geographical areas. Instead, they worry about competition from sports-oriented concepts like Buffalo Wild Wings. In fact, DeWitt says today's market is similar to the one from which Hooters emerged in 1983.
"It seems like Hooters had the whole segment to itself back then, but if you do the research, they had a raft of competitors that popped up--often with really crass names like Mugs 'N Jugs--before Hooters emerged as a clear national leader," he says.
DeWitt is wagering that most of his competitors in the male-bastion market will try to grow too fast and flame out at the regional level.
"Every concept wants to grow and be nationwide, but you have to lay in the infrastructure for growth before going into build-out," he says. "You have to bring in highly talented operators that can manage rapid growth. We're not trying to grow faster than we're capable."
The concept is still evolving. Brick House Tavern + Tap--owned by Ignite Restaurant Group, the company behind Joe's Crab Shack--touts itself as the ultimate man cave, with more than 70 beers, alcoves filled with theater-style seats outfitted with trays where customers can watch the game with friends, and special 100-ounce beer bongs with their own taps. So far, the concept has opened in seven states.
As innovative as they might be, can these concepts survive if they cater only to half the population (and the one that doesn't always choose where to dine)?
"I think these concepts have to target women to be successful," Tristano says. "One third of their customer base is female, and they have to make an effort to make women feel comfortable."
Lynch thinks Tilted Kilt, at least, is succeeding with the female demographic. "I characterize ourselves as very PG-13," he says. "When a guy empties his pockets on the dresser and his wife sees a Tilted Kilt receipt, it's going to be fine. I was surprised when franchisees started asking for high chairs. We are no threat to women, and we train our servers to make a connection with women at the table first."
Although the women may be on board, there's no question that these concepts cater first and foremost to manly appetites.
"Why do regular customers come in three times or more a month?" DeWitt asks. "What more could a guy ask for: great food, sports, beer and a cute girl to look at. We don't go real deep."
NEW DELHI — While I was pregnant, we moved from one area to another within New Delhi. After having my baby, I went back to visit my old neighborhood.
As I was pushing the stroller up the driveway, my erstwhile upstairs neighbor waved to me from her balcony. She was a sweet old lady who lived with her daughter. I used to sometimes stop in and have tea with her.
“Is it a boy or girl?” she asked excitedly.
“A girl,” I shouted back, expecting coos and an “isn’t-that-sweet.” I wasn’t prepared for her response.
“Oh well, don’t worry, you can have another one.”
In India, ancient tales and old sayings reveal a deeply engrained preference for boys over girls. The attitude that girls are inferior to boys has soaked in over the centuries.
Even today, a young bride is often given the blessing, “May you be the mother of a 100 sons.”
When my daughter was a toddler, my mother-in-law used to lovingly coax her to eat all of her food by saying, “If you eat the last bite, you’ll be the mother of a king.” That is, until the day my daughter said, “But I don’t want to be the mother of a king; I want to be the king.”
And during my own childhood, I remember on several occasions women pityingly telling my mother, in front of me and my sister, “Oh, you only have two daughters. Not even one son.”
Traditionally, girls are thought of as a liability — financially, emotionally and spiritually. A girl’s parents need to pay a dowry to get her married. Once married, the girl is considered part of the boy’s family, not her own, so whatever her parents have invested in her is considered a sunk cost. Her allegiance is now solely to the family she has married into. Even if she is ill-treated by her in-laws, it’s all-too-often considered shameful for her to return to her own family.
What enables and perpetuates these attitudes?
Part of it may be due to an unquestioning respect for tradition, patriarchy and the elderly. Part of it may be the extended-family system.
The bride, often as a young girl, enters a fully-formed household, with revered elders and vested interests to conserve. She is one against many, an outsider against a consolidated group — until she conforms, or better yet, has a son.
Part of it may be the traditional and highly-effective socialization of women themselves. As women become older, have sons, and their sons get married and bring home wives, the older women gain more prestige and power — something they won’t give up easily.
Naturally, these attitudes are also reflected in more concrete metrics. According to the 2011 census, India’s Child Sex Ratio (covering children birth to 6 years of age) is 914 — meaning 914 girls for every 1,000 boys. This is not only a reduction from the 2001 figure of 927, but it is said to be the worst since independence.
A recent study by Prabhat Jha of the University of Toronto shows that when a first born is a girl, the C.S.R. for second born children is 836. And interestingly, for the richest 20 percent of families, this value is 750, while in families in which the mother has more than 10 years of education, 700. It seems that neither affluence nor education are obvious solutions.
Because we travel often, my daughter has several points of reference to compare and contrast. During middle school, she asked several times why there are so few women on the streets here. In the area of New Delhi where we live, it would not be exaggerating to say that more than 80 percent of the pedestrians are men. Many feel free to stare at a woman, and even make rude comments. Women avoid eye-contact and go quickly on their way.
For her independent study project, my now-teenage daughter decided to look into female infanticide. What she found upset her: “I never knew until now that girls are considered to be less than boys,” she said.
There’s no advantage to being a girl in India, and yet, at the very least, they are needed as sexual partners, wives and mothers. But right now, instead of a real change in these traditional views, we are witnessing more cases of gang rape, men marrying younger women and importing brides, and women being pressured to work as sex workers.
In the coming-of-age movie “Gigi,” the charming cad Honoré Lachaille sings the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” and asks hypothetically “Without them, what would little boys do?”
Unfortunately, with the decrease in female births, we are about to find out.
Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is a writer and business/academic editor.
PARIS In Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” an American writer clambers into a yellow vintage Peugeot every night and is transported back to hobnob with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gertrude Stein in the shimmering movable feast. The star-struck aspiring novelist from Pasadena, played by Owen Wilson, gets to escape his tiresome fiancée and instead talk war and sex with Papa Hemingway, who barks “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” “Who wants to fight?” and “You box?”
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Many Frenchmen — not to mention foundering neighbor, the crepuscular Casanova Silvio Berlusconi — may be longing to see that Peugeot time machine come around a cobblestone corner. Some may yearn to return to a time when manly aggression was celebrated rather than suspected, especially after waking up Tuesday to see the remarkable front page of Libération — photos of six prominent French women in politics with the headline “Marre des machos” or “Sick of machos.”
“Is this the end of the ordinary misogyny that weighs on French political life?” the paper asked, adding: “Tongues have become untied.”
In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, as more Frenchwomen venture sexual harassment charges against elite men, the capital of seduction is reeling at the abrupt shift from can-can to can’t-can’t. Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, still argues that “News always stops at the bedroom door,” but many French seem ready to bid adieu to the maxim.
As Libération editor Nicolas Demorand wrote in an editorial: “Now that voices have been freed, and the ceiling of glass and shame has been bashed in, other scandals may now arise.”
After long scorning American Puritanism and political correctness on gender issues, the French are shocked to find themselves in a very American debate about the male exploitation/seduction of women, and the nature of consent.
Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to reverse his spiraling fortunes by shaking off his old reputation as a jumpy and flashy Hot Rabbit and recasting himself as a sober and quiet family man. One newspaper noted that the enduring image from the G-8 summit meeting in Deauville was Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, in white smock, showing the other leaders’ wives her baby bump.
The French president wasted no time jettisoning a junior minister — also the mayor of Draveil — who was accused of sexual assault by two former employees. Georges Tron resigned on Sunday after the two women in their mid-30s said they had gotten the courage to come forward after the Strauss-Kahn arrest.
Tron, it seems, liked to give foot massages and sometimes more. It got to the point where some women would wear boots if they knew Monsieur Masseur was coming to a meeting.
“Yes, my client is a reflexologist,” riposted Tron’s lawyer, Olivier Schnerb. “He’s never hidden it. He has given conferences at the Lion’s Club. It’s a healing treatment.”
In Le Journal du Dimanche, Valérie Toranian, the editor of Elle, wrote about the puncturing of France’s “Latin culture of seduction:” “We laugh about our Italian neighbors, but the stone today is in our garden.” (She probably didn’t want to use a shoe-on-the-other-foot metaphor given the foot fetishist on the loose.)
On Tuesday, Libération presented interviews with a parade of women who poured out long-stifled grievances about their paternalistic culture: How they feel they must wear pants to work to fend off leering; how they’re tired of men tu-ing instead of vous-ing and making comments like “O.K., but just because you have pretty eyes;” how they’re fed up with married pols who come to Paris three days a week and sleep with their assistants; how, as Aurélie Filipetti, a socialist representative, complained, male pols and journalists squat on 80 percent of the political space.
Filipetti remembers hearing a male representative say during a ceremony, in front of three female representatives, “Hunting is like women. You always regret the shots you didn’t take.”
Corinne Lepage, a former environment minister, talked about the de trop dirty jokes, recalling how once, when a female representative mentioned a rape, a male colleague called out: “With her face, it’s not going to happen to her.”
Nicole Guedj, a lawyer and former minister, said wistfully of male colleagues: “One thinks, ‘I wish you wouldn’t just look at me. I wish you would listen to me.’ ”
Roselyne Bachelot, a government minister, warned about lechers: “Something important has happened in these last few days. The lifting of a very real omerta, which had been reinforced by a legal arsenal that protected private life. I think that public men have understood that the respect of privacy now has some limits.”
Getting French men to change will still, she said, be pushing up “le rocher de Sisyphe.”
For French, Arrest Forces Some Questions of Identity
By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: May 29, 2011
Anne Cottavoz is of two minds about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, her American mind and her French mind, though she concedes that after living in the United States for 27 years, there may be some blurring of the two.
Marcy Powill and Guillaume Grignon, employees of Tout Va Bien, talk with the manager, Michael Touchard, right.
Ms. Cottavoz, a Frenchwoman who owns a health food store on the Upper West Side, said Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest exposed a “slippery slope” in France between what she called “chauvinist behavior” and something more aggressive, like the sexual assault of a hotel housekeeper that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has been accused of.
In New York, she has felt respected as a woman in a way she might not have been in France, where, she said, “Frenchmen get away with too many sexual advances.”
“We know in France that the general culture makes it comfortable for men to take liberties with women, and in America it’s not like that,” Ms. Cottavoz, 49, said.
“In America, if they take liberties, there will be consequences.”
The Strauss-Kahn case has gripped the city’s French-American community of roughly 70,000 as few other recent events have. It is the talk of restaurant workers, academics, wine importers and the Frenchmen in Bryant Park who daily play the horseshoes-like game of pétanque.
The episode has forced many native French people to tease out what part of them has evolved into an American and what part has never left France, which coined the word “chauvinism” in the patriotic sense. (Nicolas Chauvin was a soldier fanatically loyal to Napoleon.)
French-Americans, said Thomas Bishop, director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, do not integrate into the American mainstream as easily as other ethnic groups, retaining stronger feelings for their homeland.
The devotion extends to their passion for French politics. Rather than dismiss Mr. Strauss-Kahn with tabloid descriptions of him as a “frisky Frenchman,” they may view his fall from power as that of a man with “a tragic flaw” who thought he could “get away with anything,” Mr. Bishop said.
And Ms. Cottavoz, who was raised in the Gascony region, said her French blood boiled at some of the ways the police and the news media treated Mr. Strauss-Kahn, particularly how he had been paraded in handcuffs before a crush of photographers. Americans, she said, may see a “perp walk” as a deterrent, but in France it is illegal and considered an unfair humiliation for someone who has not been convicted. Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s defense team has suggested that he and his accuser had a consensual sexual encounter.
Still, French-Americans believe the case has “tarnished our image,” said Marie-Monique Steckel, president of the French Institute Alliance Française, which promotes French culture and language. When she heard news of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, she said, she found herself “extremely emotional,” adding, “My Frenchness came to the fore with more force than I would have thought.”
And although some French-Americans may think Americans react too prudishly to the sex scandals of their leaders, Ms. Steckel said, “There is a difference between a womanizer and rape.”
“A womanizer is more acceptable in France,” she said. “It’s kind of considered good health and vigor, which is different from Americans, who are more puritanical. But violence against women is very different.”
Seeing conspiracy is another matter that divides Americans and French — and that raises issues of identity for French-Americans. Ms. Steckel, who said she had lived in the United States for 40 years and decided to become a citizen only after President Obama’s election, a testimony to what she characterized as this country’s openness, said many French-Americans found it difficult to talk to friends in France who suspect the arrest was a plot by Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political opponents.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn was widely expected to be the Socialist candidate for president. French people who have lived in New York for a long time, she said, have moved beyond seeing the world in such a conspiratorial fashion. “The French adore the idea of plots,” she said. “They see plots everywhere. French-Americans become more factual.”
Nevertheless, some French-Americans evidently still see such schemes. Michael Touchard, 36, manager of Tout Va Bien, a Hell’s Kitchen bistro, said it was hard to believe that “a man with as much power and so much to gain would try something like this.”
Mr. Touchard, who came to New York as a child from Brittany with his restaurateur parents, does not consider it out of the question that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was framed by opponents aware of his history with women. Mr. Strauss-Kahn was rebuked by the I.M.F. in 2008 for an affair with a married Hungarian subordinate.
“If you want to take down your enemy, you have to know his weakness,” Mr. Touchard said.
There is no single French neighborhood here in the way that Astoria is known to be heavily Greek, but many French-Americans are scattered on the Upper East Side — close to the Lycée Français de New York — and in suburbs like Montclair, N.J., and Larchmont, N.Y., home to the lower division of the French-American School of New York.
The 2005-9 American Community Survey estimated that New York City had 15,164 people born in France and a total of 70,600 who claimed French ancestry. In the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania metropolitan area, it found a total of 20,385 French-born residents and 160,439 of French ancestry.
Many of them work for French restaurants, French banks and enterprises specializing in perfume, high fashion and luxury goods. They often prefer French newspapers, where the idea that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was the victim of a setup has been frequently discussed.
Still, Mr. Bishop of N.Y.U. said, French-Americans are aware that in France, similar charges embroiling a powerful politician might have been “swept under the rug” by a justice system he said was more susceptible to political intrigue. The more scrupulous American justice system is something the French here grow to appreciate, he said.
“The system doesn’t always work perfectly,” Mr. Bishop said, “but people cannot just walk away from something.”
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What makes the restaurant stand out, besides the waitresses, DeWitt says, is its commitment to quality. All mugs are frozen, and a special draught system ensures that every beer pours at 29 degrees. They have a full line of top-shelf whiskey, and their skilled bartenders know their booze. The food is all fresh--even fryer items like mozzarella sticks, which are hand-cut, breaded and cooked to order.
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