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Bazooms is the fastest-growing restaurant chain in the nation….

When I applied for a job at Bazooms in the winter of 1994, the first thing I was told was: The ‘Bazooms girl’ is what this restaurant revolves around; she is a food server, bartender, hostess, table busser, promo girl, and more. At the job interview I was shown a picture of a busty blonde in a tight top and short shorts leaning seductively over a plateful of buffalo wings and was asked if I would be comfortable wearing the Bazooms uniform. Then I was told that the managers try to make the job “fun,” by supplying the “girls” with “toys” like hula hoops to play with in between orders. Finally, I was asked to sign Bazooms’ official sexual harassment policy form, which explicitly states: “In a work atmosphere based upon sex appeal, joking and innuendo are commonplace.”

Sixty “lucky” women were chosen to be “Bazooms girls” out of about eight hundred applications. Most of the “new hires” were local college students, ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-eight years, and as I found out later, more than several were mothers. The hiring process was extremely competitive owing to the fact that Bazooms hired minors and inexperienced waitresses. Also, everyone had been told that working at Bazooms could be quite lucrative. The general “Bazooms girl type” seemed to be white, thin, with blonde or brown hair, although there were several black, Chicana, and Asian American women in the bunch.³ We all went through full-time training together (which included appearance training, menu workshops, song learning, alcohol and food service licensing, and reviewing the employee manual), and eventually were placed in a new location opened in Southern California.

Women work at Bazooms for a variety of reasons. No one in management ever asked me why I was applying, and I never told them, but the fact is that I applied for a position as a Bazooms girl because I wanted to know more about how the women who worked there experienced and responded to a highly sexualized workplace. I worked there for six months, during which I “became the phenomenon” (Mehan and Wood 1975).⁴

During my six months of participant observation and interviews with coworkers, I explained that I was interviewing people in my place of work as part of a class research project.⁵ I made no attempt to construct a random sample of Bazooms girls to interview; rather, I interviewed those whom I felt closest to, and worked regularly with, and who I thought would feel comfortable responding honestly to my questions. The waitresses I interviewed for the most part were very committed to their jobs. Some were upset with their conditions of employment, and their voices may stand out for the reader. But I should emphasize that others, whose voices may not attract notice, expressed general contentment with the job. In the pages that follow I will present their views and my observations about the ways in which power, gender, and sexuality are constructed and negotiated in the sexualized workplace of a Bazooms restaurant.