Semi recently. I’ve got a group of college friends who hang out on discord most nights to game and chat. Most of the time it’s shooting the shit, but we occasionally mix in life talk. We all have some bundle of mental health issues, so stuff related to that comes up a lot. One of my friends has been trying to find a romantic partner and we’ve been giving our fairly limited advice to him on his search.

It’s kind of a shame that we’re not geographically close enough to see each other in person to be more directly supportive, but it is what it is and we’ve had a few visits over the years. ATM I’m with 2 of them on a trip and we got to spend a lot of time chatting.

It’s a restaurant where all the servers are women dressed as maids (or whatever the theme is) and act all cutesy. I went to one once just to see what it was like on a trip to Japan and it was an extraordinarily awkward experience.

Is Hooters just an American maid cafe?

Yeah, but why did it turn out differently like that? Europe surely had its own class of capitalists and other entrenched interests. They could have pushed for similar suppression measures.

Maybe it had something to do with the difference in fallout from WWII? Idk. I’m not super well read on this subject in particular, so I don’t know enough to do anything but speculate.

Like most of these kinds of problems, the answer can be boiled down to a simple commonality: The people who stand to lose the most from things changing for the better are the same people who have the most power to influence the outcomes. The only thing that can counter that is a strong labor movement.

Now, there is a more complicated question to be asked about why US labor movements have been less successful than their European counterparts, but that I don’t have an easy answer for.