Re the articles below, is “Ladies Night” both blatantly sexist, and tantamount to discriminating aganst men by allowing women vastly reduced drink prices, essentially (from the bar owner’s persepective) subsidized by the men’s attendance, who are coming because of the women’s attandance. Apparently Pennsylvania and Iowa have already terminated the practice of using “Ladies’ Night” as discriminatory.
Should women feel used and dirty in being able to drink cheap, by having their sexuality pimped as a loss leader enticement to promote the attendance of men?
Yeeeesh, I certainly hope not. Our fraternity uses/used our sorority connections to draw crowds all the time. We even date auctioned, which would be a more technically correct version of your post title, though all proceeds went to charity (I believe the date auctions went to AIDS Ride California, our party proceeds went to a children’s pediatric fund, as that was Theta Xi’s official national foundation).
I look at it this way - the chicks get cheap drinks, guys get to be around the chicks. Win-win, baby, and if someone hooks up, all the better! I know at least one couple that met this way.
Of course, the bars I’m used to are all college bars, so you had a generally good chance of finding a “high quality” catch there. I think I would be slightly hesitant to go showing myself off in a general run of the mill sleazy bar.
It is definitely discrimination on the basis of sex - but does that make it wrong? I don’t think so. Personally, I don’t think anyone should feel anything about it, except maybe “Sweet!! Cheap drinks!” or possibly “Damn lucky women.” But that’s just me.
The question is whether they should or not. That’s why it’s in GD and the sentence has question mark on the end of it. That the discounted drink prices for women are being used to attract men is not in dispute, the issue is whether this is a blatantly sexist and exploitative practice that women “should” be ashamed or participating in, or not.
It should be illegal, as should the practice of charging women more for a cut-n-style at the hairdressers than men with equally long hair get charged, and the practice of offering other than comparable wages or putting employees on different career tracks (admin asst versus managerial) given identical qualifications, and the practice of awarding child custody preferentially to the Mom, and the draft, and so on.
If the egregious ones were not in existence, and ladies’ night at the bar were the only practice in which gender discrim existed, and it were confined to one night per week as it commonly is, umm, no, I wouldn’t get ruffled about it.
But when you’re trying to get rid of some unfairnesses, it’s just ever so much easier if you aren’t cherry-picking your issues while allowing exceptions that opponents can point to and say “But how about this? Hey, what we’re doing is no worse than this!”
Well that’s the problem. It’s easy to cherry pick stupid shit and pretend like it’s actually doing something to solve a real issue.
Is there anything wrong with descriminatory pricing? I think most people would be outraged if there was a “black tax” or “whities night” at local restaurants.
On the other hand, there is also the very real issue of “low ratio” at bars. Men in general have a greater tendency to not only drink more and more often than women, they tend to do so in packs. This has the enevitable effect of turning most bars into what is technically termed a “sausage fest”. In a college with a 50-50% ration of men to women, once you account for “unhookupables”, people who just don’t go out and girls who go out and are just not interested, a typical bar or party can reach a ration of 10 to 20 to 1 dudes to hookupable chicks.
Bars have tried for years to counter this rising sea of tostasterone - lines, cover charges, ladies nights, baring groups of dudes at the door. Nothing seems to be able to stop this fundamental law of nature that any ecosystem offering cheap drinks and the promise of ladies in attendence will quickly overpopulate with cock and then empty out once “sausage fest” has been declared.
So as you can see, the problem is a little deeper than simply equality of pricing.
Aren’t the supposed beneficiaries the loser men who want to have more single women to rejected by? I mean, isn’t the point of “ladies’” nights to try to bring more single women into the bars?
I always thought of ladies’ night as loserbait. Am I wrong?
In any case, it’s ladies, not women, who are invited for free. That’s the discrepancy that should be addressed first. I’d like to hear Miss Manners’ take on the situation: should a lady accept a free drink from a winking loser, and if she does, what are her obligations?
At first when I heard about this on the news, I was like, “Good. Ladies’ Night is sexist and bad.”
But then a guy in an interview said, “What’s next? No more senior citizen’s discount?” It occurred to me that we put up with all kinds of discrimination on a regular basis. Why pick on just Ladies’ Night?
But then again, there’s a car wash near me that gives discounts to women every Tuesday. That seems blatantly unfair to me.
There is a automotive shop near me where every Tuesday is “Ladies Day”. Bring your car in for a tune-up or oil change and get a free manicure while you wait. I was picking up my car from having it worked on this Tuesday and no one offered me a manicure. Sexist bastards.
I saw an ad once for a bar that was offering ladies night-style benefits to anyone wearing a skirt. Kilts counted. That always seemed like a neat idea to me.
And all the single women frequenting these bars are winners because…why is that again? Because their shit is so together?
The truth of the matter is that it is very difficult to find a relationship-worthy person in a bar because it is a Catch-22. Any ho who would get smashed and hook up with a guy she just met in a bar is not the kind of girl you would want to date. And any dude who is studly enough that you would get with him over all the other losers in the bar is studly enough to not give a shit about getting back to you after you sleep with him. That’s why so many singles go through and endless “Sex in the CIty” style cycle of bad dates and drama-filled bad relationships.
In any event, I can’t remember the last time I heard the term “ladies night”. As you say, ladies night probably conjures up too many images of big-haired 40 something divorcies ashing their cigarette into their white zinfindel while some leisure-suited nebbish chats them up with hackneyed pick-up lines. The more gender neutral “happy hour” is now a place where young professionals in suits and blue Brooks Brothers shirts can hit on preppy summer interns with their old frat buddies after work until they marry their sweetheart from Dartmouth.
In the eighties, a bunch of chicago bars did the same thing; specified skirts or high heels rather than gender. So me and a couple friends used to show up in drag. Hoot.
I believe the point is not merely to get the ladies in the door in higher numbers, but to get the beer-goggles on more women more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
Just like the T-shirt says: “Beer: Helping ugly people get laid since 1869”.
MEN are the beneficiaries of this little ploy. Not women. MEN. Buy the lady a drink? Hell, buy her two! You don’t even need the mickey now, just keep the Fuzzy Navel’s flowing, dude.
I think this an unreasonably cruel way to thin the crowd.
I suppose on inspection,(a group inspection, at that!), some of them are turned away at the velvet rope pursuant to criteria which I am too modest to discuss at length…
the resulting trauma could stay with a guy for a long time…
Would it make things better or worse if there was a “Men’s Night” too?
Japanese movie theaters often run both a “Ladies’ Day” and a “Men’s Day” once a week on different days. I’m not sure what the theater’s angle on this is, but it allows both women and men a weekly shot at discounted movie tickets. That seems fair enough to me.
Men will show up for “Ladies’ Night” at a bar because there’s gonna be chicks there, but I doubt a lot of women would go to “Men’s Night”. However, I’m sure plenty of men would jump at the chance to get cheap drinks. If the bar made “Men’s Night” a night that was typically kind of slow anyway then they might manage to boost their profits a bit, or at least maintain their usual profits while making things a bit more equal.
Now, I wouldn’t feel much better about, say, seperate drinking fountains if the “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs were swapped every morning, but in the case of reduced price drinks the group that’s not benefiting isn’t actually having to put up with substandard goods or services. They’re just not getting anything more than the usual. If they had the same chance to get the same benefit on another day, would it be okay?
Ladies’ night is definitely a good thing for most men, most of the time, and the intent is to include rather than exclude. But some men apparently do feel it’s a bad thing for them, since there was a lawsuit over it, and I have to agree with them too: if I go to a bar, and I have to pay more for drinks than someone else just because I was born male, and I don’t feel that the presence of women there justifies the discrimination, then I’m getting screwed.
Still, I want to say ladies’ night is mostly harmless and should be legal, but how do you draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable discrimination? You can’t say discrimination is legal if it’s done with the right intent, because that’s ripe for abuse.
The principle behind allowing ladies’ night seems to be that most of the people who are discriminated against don’t mind it. Does that excuse all forms of discrimination, or is gender discrimination special in that sense? If the bar’s clientele is mostly guys who like Asian women, would it be OK to have an Asian Night promotion?
As for whether women should feel bad for taking advantage of it… I guess that depends on whether anyone else resents them for it. By showing up and helping to make the promotion successful (thus helping it continue in the future), they’re responsible in some small way for screwing over the guys who are grumbling in the corner and filing lawsuits because they had to pay more for drinks.
Frankly, I’d sooner get rid of senior discounts than ladies’ night, because it’s the kind of discrimination that only benefits one group. Young people don’t go to Denny’s at 5:30 in the morning hoping to meet senior citizens who are there for the early bird dicsount.
You obviously don’t live in a college town Here in Tally, home of FSU, we have even have wet t-shirt nights when chicks with wet t-shirts get in free, lingerie nights, pajama nights, it’s amazing.
Strip pinata games, fetish nights with discounts to cross dressers and dom-subs, even a piercing show at the end of the night.
Getting cheaper drinks is just the tip of the iceberg
At any rate, sure it’s discriminatory. Yes, the women who go tend to fill the bar as cheap prostitutes, and yeah, guys go to get laid. But the question is, are we just jumping the short hurdles here? I mean, it’s nice to know that at this point in society this is where we fight discrimination. Oh wait…
I find it interesting that a girl who would hook up with a guy for a one night stand is an “ho” unworthy of being dated, while it is assumed that the guys all want to do that and someone who succeeds is a dude who is “studly.”
And people are concerned because a Ladies’ Night is sexist?
The Gospel according to Miss Manners is that no purchase, no matter how magnificent, obligates a female recipient (or a male, for that matter) to put out. The fact that it may be given in the hopes that gratitude will inspire the recipient to sudden passion does not entitle the giver to have those hopes gratified (although they might - you never know). This includes the purchase of drinks, dinner, or an emerald bracelet, for that matter.
We even date auctioned, which would be a more technically correct version of your post title, though all proceeds went to charity (I believe the date auctions went to AIDS Ride California, our party proceeds went to a children’s pediatric fund, as that was Theta Xi’s official national foundation).