Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B+ | 2 USERS: C YOU GRADE IT The dangers of little black dresses
By Miss Alli | Season 2 | Episode 4 | Aired on 09.28.2004
Now, that is crude, I agree. But if it were a group of young women, would Chris have said, "I want John to maybe screw them in the coat closet"? I certainly think it's possible. It's hard to say, because it's not like there's not a straight-guy issue of covering discomfort with hilarity, but I didn't really see it as a slam on the gay guys. God knows the women sexed it up for straight boys last year. We watch Chris tell John to go out and flirt with the table. He claims in his interview to have told John to go over and bend over to tie his shoe in such a way that he shows his nice ass to the gay men, but really, I think the message was, "Pour it on." Which, interestingly, didn't bother me at all, that part of it. If you combine this with Chris's "I hate the public" speech earlier, I think he believes there are formulas for getting the public on your side, and a tried and true one is flirting. And since Chris believes the guys to be gay, he sends the best-looking guy to do it. It's not personal, it's just business. While it's possible to read it as sort of demeaningly mocking, it's also possible to read it as a guy who doesn't give a good goddamn if you're gay or straight -- he just wants you to write down that you loved the service. In other words, there's a way to view it that makes Chris look pretty gay-friendly, as much as there's a way to view it that makes him look like a dick. But mere flirtation in the context of waiting tables, in and of itself, doesn't strike me as demeaning to the customer. God knows waiters flirt with me in pursuit of tips, and it's not like I sit there going, "How dare you think I would be that easy!" It would be difficult to do so, after all, while I'm busy trying to calculate 40 percent in my head.
And John does do the flirting, as some Latin music called "Mambo Reason Number Six" kicks up. And John isn't crude, and he isn't gross, he's just smiling and flirty. He interviews that he doesn't even think they were using sex, exactly, just "whatever advantages [they] had." He goes on: "Why, if you've got something that people like, would you not use it?" And see, this is where I think the boys actually looked kind of good. (There's been some curiosity floating around as to whether John is gay and, if so, whether the guys know, but I'm saying even if he's not.) Because for a lot of genuinely homophobic men, the answer to that question would be, "Because I would rather be shot in the chest than flirt with men, particularly if I knew it was going to be on TV." I'm not saying that avoidance of that dynamic is the highest level of tolerance to which men should aspire, but...the fact that the guys flirted with a table of men much as I think they would with a table of women reflects well on them, to me, rather than poorly. Now, the stereotyping about "more interested in fashion," that's...on the one hand, overbroad bullshit, but on the other hand...if you're a brutal pragmatist about the public as Chris is, might you not believe the statistics were with you? You might.
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