The Future Is

Around this time last year the restaurant went through a bit of a social media scandal. One of the line cooks posted -- wow, [name withheld] hates women, just called us delicate flowers and asked for man hands #patriarchy #thefutureisfemale

Upon reading the post, one of the servers walked out on her shift, refusing to work in such a hostile environment. HR was called, meetings were held, sensitivity trainings mandated. The server never returned. 

The incident went down as such -- the restaurant was preparing for a buy-out, a 90 person private dinner which required a complete refiguring of the dining room. The refiguring mandated that we move two, quite large and heavy, leather sofas. The GM raised the call, ‘I need man hands over here to move these couches, all the delicate flowers can clear the way.’ And that was that. Tweets rang out, hashtags employed, an instagram inquiry into the ethics of the company called. 

After the fallout, I discussed the incident with one of the waitstaff, Cain. Cain is 55, the son of Mexican immigrants, a gay man who lived through the AIDS crisis. He was far from impressed. ‘If these girls think speech like that is violent or threatening, well come on. They’d never make it through the shit I’ve seen.’ 

Which raises the question -- if a Seinfeld reference can push you to publicly debase a man’s character and an entire company’s climate, if being referred to as a delicate flower can cause you to walk out on your job and never return, might we in fact be acting a bit too, well, delicate? 

This is not to say that very real forms of chauvinistic behavior, gender-based oppression and violence towards women do not exist. These societal ills are far too common, especially in the restaurant industry. I am not arguing the existence of the patriarchy or attempting to quantify female oppression. 

I am however asking, is it possible that an ideology that sees the game as rigged against you, that views life’s hardships and suffering as the result of institutional inequities based solely on your sex, that tells you your identity is undervalued and your failures the result of oppression — an ideology that has the stated goal of producing strong women — might in fact be coddling its adherents and producing the opposite?    

This all came to mind recently because of another scandal unfolding within the company. We have had to let one of our managers go. She is a young woman, a recent graduate of the elite Culinary Institute of America, and frequently wears shirts emblazoned with the words ‘Feminist’ or ‘The Future is Female.’ And frankly, she is terrible at her job. On multiple occasions she has left thousands of dollars unaccounted for. She has been directly responsible for hundreds of dollars of wasted product. She has alienated customers and staff. She is glued to her phone and plays Pokemon Go and surfs Instagram while the restaurant descends into the chaos of a Friday night or a busy brunch service.

But in her own mind she is bulletproof. She sees (and loudly proclaims to all who will hear) any criticism of her performance as proof that the restaurant industry is a boys club. If staff complains about her, it is because they can’t stand the fact that a young woman is in charge. If ownership is unhappy with her, it is a reflection of the patriarchy. She derides white male privilege while resting on the laurels that her parents paid for at $50,000 a semester at CIA. Her ideological identity has become a shield, a defense mechanism to keep her from looking in the mirror and asking what she could change about herself, how she could progress and get better. It seems self improvement requires one to admit they could use some improvement, and I wonder if this particular form of modern feminism gets in the way of that admittance. 

Let’s just imagine the psychology of it. If you are a young woman in the workforce and you succeed, you must have worked ten times harder than every man around you. If you fail, it is because of no shortcomings of your own, it is merely the inevitable result of patriarchy and oppression. 

Now through this same ideological lens, if you are a young man in the workforce and you succeed, it is through no merits of your own, it is merely the result of privilege. You’re just cashing the check you were written at birth. But if you fail, well then you are an unspeakable failure, you couldn’t even take advantage of the privilege you were handed. You were born on third and tripped over your shoelaces on the way home. 

If and when I fail, (and believe me, I have done a great deal of failing) I have been conditioned in a sense to take an inventory of my faults. This is often quite painful. I have had to look at my complicity in failure, my mediocrity and self-sabotage, my tendency to self-aggrandize. I have had to own up to my failures because I have been constantly reminded, and rightly so, that I am in a position of privilege. I think I am the better for it. 

But in the case of our young manager, I fear she will do no such inventory. She will use this episode as proof of her ideological certainties and will tell all who will listen that our company hates women. 

Perhaps it is time to admit that we are all privileged. We were born into a society that places no restrictions on the ideologies we choose to employ. We can debate and discuss ways to change our culture without fear of censorship or imprisonment. Yes, there is much to improve, but employing a binary ideology that sees one group as privileged and one as oppressed may get in the way of real improvement. There must be more room for nuance, for non-binary thinking. Perhaps that’s it -- to employ a phrase from the woke among us -- The Future is Non-Binary, non-identitarian, a place where we all own our failures, our privileges, and where the measure of a person is not their gender, race, or religion but to what extent they are working for the future of the species.