Column: The Whiteboard Jungle: Restaurant’s name is insulting to women
“Daddy, can we eat breakfast at Eggslut?”
“Sure,” replies the father to his 10-year-old daughter. “What do you want to get there?”
“The Slut, of course,” answered the young girl.
Call me 20th century, but I don’t understand why this hypothetical exchange would not bother a parent who cares about his daughter’s self-esteem and how women are viewed in this world.
Still, many parents and their children are waiting up to an hour to eat at this breakfast spot which recently opened in Glendale.
I feel embarrassed even writing the word down for this column. In fact, when I type the restaurant’s name in Google on my work computer at Glendale Unified, a filter blocks it out.
But having the word on a business stirs nary a protest.
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I tried contacting Eggslut’s part-owner and chef Alvin Cailan about the word he chose for his business but received no reply.
However, in a 2015 interview with the Asian Journal, he explained that he selected the name to “make waves.”
He said that not everyone liked the name, calling it “disgusting and vulgar” and, because of that, “we couldn’t do [some] events.” Still, he continues using the name.
One popular dish on the menu is even called the “Slut.”
I don’t care if it is the most delicious food on the planet, I won’t patronize a business that is so insultingly named, just as I wouldn’t support one with an ethnic slur.
Didn’t Cailan feel his food was good enough without having to insult over half of the U.S. population?
People go to the streets to protest the policies of President Trump, especially the words he uses to describe women. Why aren’t the same people in front of this restaurant protesting its name?
What I don’t get is how women’s issues have grown in prominence since the Equal Rights Amendment days of the 1970s, yet the proliferation of sexual insults against women has likewise risen in songs, TV programs and social media.
The ubiquitous B-word is to women what the N-word is to African Americans.
People are becoming desensitized to words and, in doing so, have no barometer, no sense of when their words are ones others may want to hear.
That is why more and more I get looks of puzzlement from students whenever I ask them to watch their language. They apparently do not know what words are appropriate to use. For many, the way they talk at school is the same way they talk to their friends and is the same way they talk at home — no sense of adapting to various environments or being sensitive to others.
If the name of an establishment pushed the envelope further such as Bacon B----hes, would that be OK as long as the BLTs were delicious?
It is difficult to have serious conversations about campus assaults when women are vulgarized throughout mass media and popular entertainment.
As a society, how do we reconcile mandating sexual-harassment job training while allowing a free-for-all outside of the workplace?
For all our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, the message must be clear. If we want to view women as equal to men in every way, then we need to clean up the language and stop accepting hateful words that demean them. Not in locker rooms, not on iTunes, not on Neflix, and definitely not for breakfast.
BRIAN CROSBY is a teacher in the Glendale Unified School District and the author of “Smart Kids, Bad Schools” and “The $100,000 Teacher.” He can be reached at briancrosby.org.
