Another Restaurant Makes Horrible Domestic Violence Joke

Hey, you know what I just love? Businesses telling jokes that trivialize the suffering of thousands of victims of domestic violence. Wait, no, what’s the opposite of love? Yeah, that. I opposite of love that.

Today we’ve got yet another example of a restaurant making the same goddamn stupid domestic violence joke, this time at Scruffy Duffies in Plano, Texas. The chalkboard, as most in a similar vein have done, read “I like my beer like I like my violence — Domestic.” What’s mind-blowing about this particular instance is the response the patron who noticed it, Courtney Williams, received. First, she asked one manager to please erase the chalkboard — to which the manager basically just bailed and straight-up ignored her. Then, when she finally got a hold of a second manager, this happened:

He asked my name, I told him. He introduced himself and shook my hand. He then proceeded to tell me the sign was a joke, and that it rotates different things all the time. When I told him it was in extremely poor taste and that I’d appreciate it being taken down, he told me to calm down, and that if I hadn’t been so “aggressive” the conversation would go better.

Wow. Just…wow. I probably don’t even need to unpack all of that for you guys, but for anyone who missed it: a) you don’t respond to that shit with “it’s just a joke,” b) calling a woman “aggressive” in that particular instance is kind of the most blatant dog whistle possible for the misogynistic idea of women as necessarily meek and submissive creatures, and c) even if you’re the kind of brociopath (thank you, Twitter) who won’t accept either of those explanations, you should damn well be aware that restaurant management should never, ever talk to any customer like that, for any reason. Holy fuckballs. The manager has since been fired, but as BurntOrangeReport accurately points out in that link, a company that would encourage a culture where a manager feels completely comfortable just writing something like that is a company that probably has some bigger issues than just one guy.

This most recent sign comes in the wake of similar signs at locations in Austin (the ur-example, near as anyone can tell), Philadelphia, Houston, and Montreal (where the situation also included a rape joke, because of course it did). In the case of the Austin and Philadelphia restaurants, the employee responsible was also fired. Given that, the mind-blowing thing isn’t just that a bunch of people would make the same hackneyed, unfunny joke, but that they have to know at this point that they’re likely to get fired for it — or at least that the restaurant will be subject to a shitstorm.

Are they just deliberately trolling at this point? Are they trying to piss people off because they think that it’s the people who get offended by this who are going to look bad? Because, uh…no. That’s not how this works, guys.