The age of the prude is over Will Hooters end the culture war?

It was just last spring when a viral video of a bouncing, scantily clad Sydney Sweeney was heralded by the Right-wing internet as an early harbinger of the coming vibe shift. “Wokeness is dead,” declared commentator Richard Hanania, in an X post that racked up more than 62 million views.

This was, perhaps, a bit premature; wokeness certainly laboured along for a few months longer, wheezing and shuffling through Brat Summer, before finally collapsing into dust with the reelection of Donald J. Trump. But if that video of Sweeney’s breasts was the beginning of the end for the phenomenon known as woke, this week has been all about dancing on its grave — in a pair of electric orange hotpants.

I’m referring, of course, to Hooters, which is back in the news and, if not better, then certainly more British than ever. The raunchy restaurant chain has been in protracted decline in the US since 2018. It’s been plagued by labour lawsuits, discrimination complaints, and a general sense that its baldly woman-objectifying business model had no place in a post-MeToo world. But that was then. Now it’s a new year, with a new vibe, one powerful enough to reach all the way across the Atlantic — to Newcastle, where Hooters recently announced that it would open its third UK location. The new restaurant, with a capacity of 200, is set to employ at least 50 “Hooters Girls”, with some reportedly as young as 17.

The reaction to this news has been predictable, insofar as all the usual suspects are raising the usual objections to a restaurant where every dish comes with a side of female objectification. Hooters holds its all-female waitstaff to strict appearance standards, and while the infamous “nose test” (in which aspiring employees are told to stand against a wall to ensure that their breasts protrude further forward than their nose) isn’t a real thing, everything else — from hairstyle and makeup to manicure colours and bodyweight — is tightly regulated. A report on the Newcastle opening features the expected complaints from feminist academics and non-profiters against what one charity director called “a chain that treats women as objects to be served up alongside chicken wings and fries”.

And yet, the grumbling feels a bit obligatory, a little phoned-in, a bit stemming from a sense of duty rather than one of genuine outrage. One wonders if this battle over the breastaurant represents a final, futile skirmish in a fruitless war against human nature, one that even feminists understand they were always going to lose.

There’s something absurdly self-defeating in the notion that we shouldn’t celebrate the female form, when humans have been doing nothing but this since the first enterprising cave artist carved a figure with a great pair of bazongas into a limestone wall. A tour through human history reveals a continuous obsession with breasts, one that transcends time, geography, religion, and culture alike. There’s the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, sporting a pair of stupendous, pendulous big naturals; there’s the Hindu fertility goddess Parvati, with a perfect hourglass figure topped by perky B-cups. There’s Titian’s Venus of Urbino, clasping a small posy of roses the same delicate pink shade as her exposed nipples — or Jean Fouquet’s 15th-century Mary, offering a perfectly spherical alabaster breast to the baby Jesus. How dare we objectify these bodies?

I mean, how can we not, for God’s sake? Just look at them!

The conscription of the breast into the 21st-century culture wars could only have happened in a world where everything — from issues to institutions, aesthetics to ideas — was being obsessively politicised in ways that didn’t always make sense. In this paradigm, breasts were good for just two things: feeding babies, and titillating men. They were the stuff of Playboy spreads, Victoria’s Secret runway shows, and Baywatch babes running in slow motion on a beach; they were the vestiges of a culture that was analogue and heteronormative and unabashedly male-gazey. And while it would be an oversimplification to say that breasts themselves became wholly Right-coded, it’s also not a coincidence that the progressive movement, at this same moment, was increasingly focused on both queer sexuality and gender nonconformity in a way that made it impossible to embrace something so traditional, so conservative, as a pair of terrific tits. There was even a period, which lasted for a few brief and very weird years, in which progressives were more likely to celebrate a female chest bearing the twin scars of a gender-affirming mastectomy than one with its original anatomy intact.

In hindsight, this was untenable; it should surprise no one that it has come to an end. And if a few diehards still wearing “White Dudes for Kamala” t-shirts remain unconvinced as to the durability of both the human appreciation for breasts and the 2025 vibe shift, mainstream American media and culture appears to agree both that woke is dead and that boobs are back. The most recent demonstration of this came at the Super Bowl, whose significance as a sporting event pales in comparison to what it reveals about the culture. Before the game even began, commentators were abuzz over the removal of the words “End Racism” from the end zones, a relic of the 2020 reckoning kicked off by the death of George Floyd. (The new slogan, painted earlier that week, was the benign and notably apolitical “Unity Through Sport”.) But the real, best evidence came during a commercial break, when viewers were treated to an advertisement featuring a furiously catchy pop-song soundtrack and a 30-second smash cut montage of boobs. Lifted, separated, bouncing boobs; boobs of all shapes, shades, and sizes. There was a twist, of course — what seemed like a gratuitous cleavage-fest was actually just the attention-getting lead-in to a Novartis ad for breast cancer screenings — but this doesn’t mitigate the first half of the commercial so much as create a permission structure for it. Go ahead and leer, fellas — it’s for a good cause! 

In a culture where this commercial can air during the biggest, most-viewed sporting event of the year, complaints about objectification ring hollow. If a montage of bouncing boobs can be used to promote cancer awareness, you can hardly turn around and claim that using them to sell beer and wings is a bridge too far.

But maybe more to the point, those who do want to argue this will find their audience both smaller and substantially less engaged than they were during the peak years of cancel culture, or the pandemic-era reckoning during which we had nothing better to do than freak out about people sexually objectifying the green M&M.

Most folks on the Left, exhausted from a decade of performative resistance liberalism and perceiving (not incorrectly) that progressives’ shrillness was at least partly to blame for their staggering losses in the recent election, are disengaging from battles like this one — lest they alienate the last three heterosexual men who still identify as Democrats. Meanwhile the political Right, formerly the last bastion of the kind of conservatism that disliked raunchy ads or breasty restaurants on the grounds that they were too sexy, has been fully overtaken by a new breed of Republican whose idea of “family values” is a horny beer calendar featuring MAGA babes in bikinis. In just a few short decades, the modal American conservative has somehow transformed from a pearl-clutching moral majoritarian to a pro-natalist, pro-tech, America First social libertine. On both sides, the age of the prude is over.

Perhaps this is as it should be. Let the battlefields of the culture wars stand empty, and on them, let a thousand flowers bloom — while the exhausted warriors, Left and Right alike, broker a peace that begins by recognising all the things that unite rather than divide us. Things like family, and friends, and food, and art, and beauty of all kinds. Who knows: if we can agree on that, maybe we can agree on some other things, too?

And maybe the reemergence of Hooters is, perversely, exactly what we need to usher in this brave new world: a return to, if not tradition, then to the embodied and universal pleasures of gathering together, in person, to joke and chat and watch sports and drink beer — served to us by a barmaid with a really nice rack.

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Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.

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