My First Ethnography

I was asked by my professor to go out and do fieldwork examining our course theme, "the radical romance" and this is what I found:

On Saturday September 20, 2008 I chose to observe the night life at a popular restaurant in Laguna Beach called The White House. I accompanied dinner with my boyfriend and his parents around 8:00 p.m. and observed the behaviors of the people had attended dinner with as well as the people surrounding me at the restaurant/bar. The night started out fairly quiet but as time passed and 9:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. rolled around the bar became much more lively. One of my first observations was the attire of the female waitresses in the bar area of the restaurant in comparison the attire of the female waitresses in the restaurant area. The cocktail waitresses were dressed in all black extremely revealing clothing even our waitresses was very busty and had an extremely low cut top with micro-mini shorts and knee-high boots. The women in the restaurant area were dressed in black slacks with white button up dress shirts and aprons. I group of people that caught my eye were a couple of young girls maybe in their early twenties followed by about four men also in their early twenties. One was clearly with her boyfriend as she sat down at the bar and immediately put her hand on his lap as to mark her property and her girlfriend with accompanied by two men who were vying her attention the entire night. The couple sitting next to us looked as if they were on a first or second date. Their body language was very stiff and forced making it seem as though they were nervous and were not quite comfortable with each other yet. The restaurant was full of couples going out on their Saturday night but these are the three groups of people that caught my eye in relation to our “radical romance” theme.


The cocktail waitresses at The White House reminded me of the female entertainer we watched in the clip of The Pink Panther we examined in class. Both are positioned in sexy clothing conducive to the times and are there to cater to the customers. These women are reduced to nothing but objects. They are sexy vehicles to serve their audiences. Their seductive and sensual nature will hopefully turns the audience into a mass consumer either of more alcohol at the bar or more ticket sales at the box office. This can be defined by two words, “sex sells.” The group of young people that waltzed into the bar to start their nightlife defined typical societal norms of sex. The girls sat at the bar while the men inclined to buy them drinks stood behind them watching the Saturday night football game, the boyfriend stayed close to his girlfriend as the other two men in the group battled to get the attention of the single friend. The women in the group were helpless as they needed their men to buy them drinks and the men stepping up to financially support their alcoholic endeavors reinforces the societal notion that women are always to supposed to be taken care of by men and are only able to partake because of them men they are with, as Simone Dr Beauvior states, “Thus humanity is make and man defines women not in herself but as relative to him.” The couple we sat next to reminded me of the clip from Anchor Man. The whole time the man was trying the impress the female to win her heart. She was just laughing sometimes just for courtesy to the things he was saying about himself trying to make himself, I am sure, more than he was. Their interaction demonstrated society’s expectation that a man has to impress the women to lure her, it is not just enough to be himself; he has to go above and beyond. All of these relationships observed at The White House show that we as a society would like the stray away from the norms of society relationships but sometimes things are always just going to stay the same.