u/Own-Temperature-8018

Having made many bad grape wines, I have wanted to make a lackberry wine for a long time. Thoroughly enjoying the flavor at 7 days already. I think this may be my talent instead of grape.

Recipe used:

5 lbs blackberry

1/4 tsp superfood

2.25 lbs sugar in a simple syrup

Lalvin 71b yeast

Topped off with water to get to about 1.2 gallons

Targeted about 1.090 OG. After 7 days in primary, I am down to 1.000, so close to 12% abv right now. Yeasts are still bubbling pretty hard. Trying to decide how far to take it in secondary, but will likely go about 6 months. May have to stabilize and back sweeten, and I have a bunch of honey I could use for that. Will update later with the success or failure of my adventure.

Northern Indiana. In my neighbor's yard. Working up the courage to ask to harvest later this season.

What’s up guys! Been a fan of Widespread for a long time and finally sat down and drew something that felt very "us." Ended up liking it enough to put it on a shirt.
Not trying to just drop a sales pitch in here — mostly wanted to share it with people who'd actually get the vibe and maybe a laugh. If anyone's curious where to grab one, happy to drop the link in the comments if that’s allowed.

Enjoying a cigar with whiskey inside my apartment with the fan on and the windows open. I love smoking on my sofa, but if my wife sees me doing it, she scolds me for smoking inside the house. A ticking time bomb, but worth it. Good afternoon, everyone!

Hooters is not an ordinary brand. It is a mainstream company that implicates the sexuality and reputations of its employees and customers. Hooters makes an implicit moral argument as part of its sales pitch. For decades, the message has been: “This isn’t pornographic or dirty. It’s wholesome sex appeal. There’s nothing wrong with working as a Hooters Girl or eating here and looking at the girls. It's something you can do openly and proudly. It’s healthy!”

Hooters especially makes an implied moral pact with the Hooters Girls, who are typically normal, well-adjusted young women who go on to live regular lives. They do not sign up to be social outcasts. The implied agreement is that some people may look down on what Hooters asks these women to do, but it’s within the social mainstream. And Hooters will have their backs.

The recent, fumbling "family friendly" rhetoric from Hooters entirely breaks that pact by openly shaming every aspect of the Hooters Girl role that thousands of women embodied on behalf of the company for decades. And to add insult to injury, Hooters still expects these women to fundamentally continue in the same role even as the company describes it as shameful.

From the beginning, Hooters profited from sexualizing the Hooters Girls. And the brand has not been shy about displaying their “butt cheeks.” This is a matter of public record, but by way of example, here are some images from the earliest Hooters Calendars. And this butt-cheek-focused video is from the Original Hooters YouTube channel.

Neil Kiefer has managed the Original Hooters restaurants, from which the above materials originate, since the early ‘90s. He represents the Hooters founders, who recently took operational control (but not ownership, contrary to superficial reporting) of the national Hooters brand.

Despite the clear historical record, Kiefer claims that Hooters was not originally a sexy concept. His repeated refrain is, “It’s a beach-theme restaurant, not a sexualized one." He claims the Hooters Girl look is only supposed to be "athletic," not sexual.

He continually claims, as in this surreal WSJ interview, that the national brand turned Hooters into a sex thing. He shows visceral disgust at the “sexualized” activities that Hooters girls do in these “other” Hooters stores: wearing  shorts that are “offensive to most people,” hanging out with customers, and hula hooping (??). Kiefer’s disgust and moral judgment seem directed at the girls themselves. As a mock customer, he's shocked and offended at a Hooters Girl sitting at his table, saying that’s “too cozy” and that maybe she should sit next to his wife.

As discussed in The Sad Death of Hooters at Its Founders' Hands, Kiefer is actually sneering at the original Hooters Girl concept that made his employers rich. In particular, hanging out with customers was a significant draw from the beginning, as alluded to in this commercial from Kiefer’s YouTube channel.  

Elsewhere Kiefer says, “Somewhere along the line they went to the more revealing [shorts], which to us does not jibe with a neighborhood restaurant that some families choose to frequent” . . .“You don’t want to have a butt cheek in your plate.” "You don't want to walk in after a little league game with your team and have a bikini contest in the store." According to Kiefer, with him in charge, “I don’t think you’re going to see a bunch of butt cheeks hanging out.”

Kiefer’s moralizing is ostensibly about the cheekier shorts that corporate Hooters introduced in 2021, which soon became optional, though most Hooters Girls continued to voluntarily wear them. But even if Kiefer disagreed with that decision, he represents the brand now. Those women wore the uniform that Hooters assigned to them. If Kiefer wants to take away the option, that’s fine, but it’s utterly unacceptable for the CEO of Hooters to moralistically rant about how gross and "offensive to most people" the girls' “butt cheeks” looked hanging out of the official uniform. It’s deeply degrading to those women.

But beyond that, Kiefer has framed his concerns as a moral/decency issue, not just a taste issue about the best Hooters Girl image for the stores. He suggests that a "sexualized" appeal is inherently offensive to decent people, that respectable families rightly recoil at bikini contests and sexualized presentations of the body.

Yet the Hooters uniforms have always been sexualized and emphasized the girls’ butts. The girls’ appeal in the stores has always been inherently sexual. And Hooters has always traded in imagery in its marketing that showed more cheek than the 2021 shorts.

So, what is Kiefer saying about this woman featured on his YouTube channel, who talks about how excited she is to participate in the Hooters Swimsuit Pageant while the camera focuses on her butt cheeks in skimpy bikini bottoms? Or the Hooters Calendar girls? Or all the Hooters Girls at Kiefer's stores who embodied this inherently sexualized role for years? When Kiefer clutches his pearls at bikini contests being offensive, treats "sexualization" as inherently filthy, and suggests that decent people are offended at the sight of women's butt cheeks, what is he saying to and about them?

Kiefer’s implication is that these women's behavior was indecent, undignified, and beneath his moral standards and those of mainstream society. And Kiefer insists that only people at "other" Hooters asked the girls to do these shameful, offensive things, not him. His and the founders' hands are totally clean. They have only ever been "family friendly."

Kiefer is lying, of course, and after years of asking young women to go out on a limb for them, expose their bodies, and put their reputations on the line, Kiefer and the Hooters founders are cutting that limb off, and to mix metaphors, throwing these women under the bus after making millions off them.

Many women love working at Hooters, find the experience flattering and empowering, and incorporate their time as Hooters Girls into their personal identities. But in Kiefer's framing, these women did things that were embarrassing and "offensive to most people." They are, at best, victims who fell into an immoral role that they didn't understand.

This is a complete breach and betrayal of the implied moral pact Hooters made with these women.

And incidentally, for all of Kiefer's moralism, archives of Kiefer's Original Hooters website show a tendency toward porn-adjacent talk that national Hooters has always been too professional to indulge in. Here, images of a Hooters girl are said to be "better than your blow up," and the user is invited to "check out her DNA" for a large-sized version of the image. A version of the image viewable with 3D glasses is also available.

And the most ridiculous thing is, Kiefer hasn't changed enough to plausibly lie about what Hooters is. As I discuss here, the new shorts Kiefer introduced are significantly less flattering than any prior version of the Hooters uniform, but they are still skimpy. The place is still called Hooters and staffed exclusively with attractive young women in tight outfits.

Kiefer isn't fooling anyone. Hooters is still and always has been a sexualized concept. Except now, management clumsily lies about that and asks the women to participate in a role that management signals is indecent and shameful even as they profit from it. What before felt cute and lightly sexy now feels weird and dirty.

Hooters used to clearly and honestly explain what the brand was about, and the public and the women who worked there could make their choices: “Hooters Girls are sexy and vivacious. The element of sex appeal is certainly prevalent in our restaurants, and is the essence of the Hooters experience, but the Hooters brand of sex appeal is wholesome and that of the all-American cheerleader, not a seedy strip club.” Agree or disagree, this was an honest framing of the concept that preserved the women’s dignity.

By ineptly trying to gaslight what Hooters Girls represent and shaming behaviors that they profited from for years even as they continue to profit from them, Kiefer and the Hooters founders truly are betraying and degrading all the women who ever worked for them.