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@cliffshawjr/TikTok

‘You thought you were that important that I just wanted to record you?’: Customer puts Hooters waitress on blast after she thought he was recording her, sparking debate

'You really didn’t have to degrade her like that.'

 

Tricia Crimmins

IRL

Posted on Feb 22, 2022   Updated on Feb 22, 2022, 10:34 am CST

A TikToker began recording himself on his front-facing camera while at Hooters when a waitress asked him to stop recording her, not knowing that the camera wasn’t facing her.

“You thought you were that important that I just wanted to record you?” TikToker Cliff Shaw Jr. (@cliffshawjr) tells the waitress after she asks him to not record her. “No, you’re sweet though.”

He also says he wasn’t “trying to get fame” off her and that she’s “still cool.”

In the video’s caption, Shaw Jr. wrote that Hooters doesn’t “hire women for their intellect.”

The video has been viewed over 3 million times. While some commenters thought the video was funny, others thought Shaw Jr. was being too mean to the waitress.

https://www.tiktok.com/@cliffshawjr/video/7062515718104861998

“Don’t tell her she’s not important,” @megangoodi commented. “You really didn’t have to degrade her like that.”

“I’m a hooters girl and we do constantly have to deal with ppl recording,” @nenaa_va wrote. “That was uncalled for.”

“Think from her perspective for a moment. How many creeps out there have done this to her to make her react that way?” @jarrvy commented.

“How typical of a man to try and ‘humble’ a woman not knowing the creeps she deals with on the daily,” @savanahsnider wrote.

In a 2015 study on waitresses that work at Hooters and other similar restaurants from the Conversation, women reported sexual harassment from customers in the form of “having pictures taken of their body parts without consent.”

One commenter even tagged Drew Afualo, a TikToker known for roasting videos of men being misogynistic, in the comments of Shaw Jr.’s video.

Shaw Jr. posted a follow-up video of him and the waitress chatting “since everyone thought I was so mean to her.” He also says that the waitress should have “stayed in her place” and minded her own business in another follow-up TikTok.

In response to a comment on his original video asking him why he was recording himself while at Hooters, Shaw said he doesn’t need anyone’s permission to record himself. “At this point you sound like a slave owner,” he wrote in the caption of the video.

And with regard to Afualo being tagged in the comments of his video, Shaw Jr. says that commenters are “weak as hell” for needing “somebody else” to stand up for them.

“I’m not arguing with no more women who got the damsel in distress complex,” Shaw Jr. says in a TikTok. “Y’all so weak.”

The Daily Dot has reached out to Shaw Jr. and Hooters via email.


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*First Published: Feb 22, 2022, 10:28 am CST