The Tilted Kilt has grown out of our society’s persistent lack of genuine respect for women, its failure to appreciate real (but much more costly) intimacy, and its lack of concern for the well being of others. … Being employed at this kind of restaurant is a subtle form of prostitution…
Peddling Sex in the Valley Mall
A new Tilted Kilt restaurant opened yesterday in the Valley Mall despite repeated appeals to Mall Management and to Kilt representatives to either drop its plans or provide its female waitresses with more appropriate uniforms that are consistent with Valley standards of decency.
The Mall’s poor judgment in allowing the Kilt to open at all is amplified by its decision to give the Kilt a prominent location just inside a busy Mall entrance that is directly across from a bookstore frequented by families, along with an additional outdoor patio space where Mall goers will be unwillingly exposed to provocatively dressed women.
Finally, the Kilt’s craven but ultimately failed attempt to associate itself with pro-family charities like the Boys and Girls Club exposes its perverse strategy of trying to “buy” community acceptance for an otherwise unacceptable venture – a blatant display of putting “Profit over Principle” and using children as human shields to do so.
Call to Action
For all these reasons, and more, we join Rita Dunaway in hoping that the Tilted Kilt fails, as she wrote on the editorial page of today’s Daily News-Record. (See text below.) To that end, there are several steps we can take.
First, we can take our business elsewhere as long as the Kilt is there. Second, we can respectfully contact the Mall’s Senior Manager with our objections and ask that he pass them on to his corporate headquarters. You can reach him at Daniel.Martin@macerich.com or at (540) 433-1797.
Finally, we can add our voices to Rita’s by submitting letters to the DN-R that make clear why we object to the Kilt and its presence in the Mall. (Just click on letters@dnronline.com.) We can also take advantage of this opportunity to recognize and patronize the many other local restaurants that, unlike the Kilt, maintain high standards of honor and decency.
The Tilted Kilt by Rita Dunaway
I had never heard of The Tilted Kilt until I was copied on an email message being circulated by some concerned area residents. They were organizing a meeting with the managers of The Valley Mall to express concerns about the mall’s plans to install the restaurant in the space formerly occupied by Ruby Tuesday.
Thirty seconds at The Tilted Kilt’s website convinced me that these concerned citizens were right: This place is bad news for our community.
The site’s primary homepage photo reveals the business’ marketing strategy and much more —a trio of attractive, college-aged girls clad in too-small bikini tops and short skirts beckons the poor cads of America who are hungry to gratify their basest inclinations. For the right price, men can trot on down to The Tilted Kilt to fill both their bellies and their eyes.
But the website is more than tasteless advertising, inviting male consumers to go further in indulging their “hunger.” A tab on the website homepage lets viewers “meet” the “Featured Kilt Girl,” a bombshell pictured on a beach in a barely-there bikini, whose goal is “to graduate from college” and whose favorite restaurant meal is “The Devil’s Last Supper, because it’s so yummy!”
This establishment, whose website proudly proclaims that it originated in “Sin City,” seeks to metastasize in our community a cancer that has grown out of significant voids in the broader culture. It has grown out of our society’s persistent lack of genuine respect for women, its failure to appreciate real (but much more costly) intimacy, and its lack of concern for the well being of others.
By ensuring The Tilted Kilt’s ultimate failure in Harrisonburg, we can show the nation that as a community, we recognize our own shortcomings in these regards, and that we seek to overcome them rather than feed them.
Yes, I hope The Tilted Kilt fails. I hope it fails because our community refuses to patronize a business that preys on young girls in need of cash, capitalizes on male temptations, and lowers our standards for public decency.
I hope The Tilted Kilt fails because the young, attractive girls in our city recognize that being employed at this kind of restaurant is a subtle form of prostitution; that they will refuse to set themselves up to become the objects of strangers’ sexual fantasies. I hope that they will assign too high a value to their bodies to accept the proposal that visual access be traded in a marketplace exchange.
I hope that they will think beyond the paycheck they can earn and the superficial admiration they can garner to consider the effect of their actions on others. I hope they will refuse to demean themselves and the rest of us by perpetuating the toxic notion that beautiful women are commodities.
I hope The Tilted Kilt fails because the men of Harrisonburg care for and respect the women in their lives. Any man who thinks that his wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter or female friend is unaffected by watching him stare appreciatively at a half-naked woman needs to do a reality check.
Wives and girlfriends feel hurt, betrayed, and disrespected by this behavior. Sisters, daughters and friends are left with haunting questions: Is that what my husband/future husband wants? Can I be desirable if I don’t look like that? Must I expose myself to get the attention I crave? I hope the women of our city will refuse to passively accept the utter disrespect of men who would take them to such an establishment.
I hope The Tilted Kilt fails because the men in our city care about raising sons who are not slaves to their physical desires; sons who respect and honor women as people rather than bodies.
Ultimately, I hope that our city can prove itself to be one that honors the true, the good, and the beautiful. And despite what some may think, there is simply nothing “beautiful” about profiteers in “Sin City” paying a vulnerable young girl to expose her body while she waits on sex-hungry men.
Rita Dunaway, is Vice-President of Public Policy for the Virginia Christian Alliance and blogs on Fundamental Things
