For the Discerning Gentleman Who Likes His Exploitation Tartany

Shark-fu sent me the link to this article about a new franchise of a Celtic-themed sports pub that's opened outside St. Louis. Called "The Tilted Kilt," the pub is, according to its website, "staffed with beautiful servers" wearing "knee-high socks and short, sexy plaid kilts with matching plaid halter tops under white shirts tantalizingly tied to show off the midriff."

In the photo of the uniform provided in the press kit received by the above-linked article's author, who notes that the pictured model is missing her head, one can also spy a replica sporran, a typical element of traditional Scottish Highland dress. You know, to give the wanton appropriation and bastardization of Celtic culture that adorable authentic flair.

Sort of like how the menu serves shepherd's pie alongside "such Celtic classics as the Buffalo chicken wrap, barbecue chicken pizza, and lasagna."

Really, unless you're serving organ meats by the bucketload and airing a sport called football in which the ball is actually footed around the field, you've got no business calling yourself a "Celtic-themed sports pub," which is to say nothing of the ignorant idiocy of calling anything "Celtic-themed," as if the culture of Edinburgh is indistinguishable from the culture of Dublin is indistinguishable from the culture of Cardiff is indistinguishable from the culture of Cornwall is… You get my drift.

But leaving all that aside, and taking as read (and written, and discussed, many times) that chains like Hooters and Twin Peaks, who fill their establishments with scantily-clad female servers and shitty food, are essentially the cafeterias of The Patriarchy, there's one thing I'd like to note about the garments provided for waitstaff at The Tilted Kilt: Kilts are menswear—which makes the tartan costumes less like, say, a Hooters uniform than the Playboy Club tuxedotards, i.e. menswear "girlified" and donned by women to serve men who objectify women dressed in girlified menswear, a concept that just blows my everloving mind.

Of course, most of the men who would enjoy a place like The Tilted Kilt will probably just see plaid and automatically go to "Catholic Schoolgirl," rather than ever realizing they're drooling over a woman in altered menswear.