The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf Read Free Book Online Page B

perceived sexuality was ruled relevant in minimizing the harm done to her by sexual harassment. In the latter case, Miss Wileman was awarded the derisory sum of fifty pounds (seventy-five dollars) for four and a half years’ harassment on the grounds that her feelings couldn’t have been much injured since she wore “scanty and provocative clothing” to work: “If a girl on the shop floor goes around wearing provocative clothes and flaunting herself, it is not unlikely,” the tribunal ruled, that she will get harassed. The tribunal accepted men’s testimony that defined Miss Wileman’s clothes as sexually inciting. Miss Wileman’s plaintive echoing of Mechelle Vinson’s lawyer when she protested that her clothes were definitely
not
“scanty and provocative” was ignored in the ruling.
    With these rulings in place, social permission was granted for the trickle-down effect of the PBQ. It spread to receptionists and art gallery and auction house workers; women in advertising, merchandising, design, and real estate; the recording and film industries; to women in journalism and publishing.
    Then to the service industries: prestige waitresses, bartenders, hostesses, catering staff. These are the beauty-intensive jobs that provide a base for the ambitions of the rural, local, and regional beauties who flow into the nation’s urban centers and whose sights are set on “making it” in the display professions—ideally to become one of the 450 full-time American fashion models who constitute the elite corps deployed in a way that keeps 150 million American women in line. (The model fantasy is probably the most widespread contemporary dream shared by young women from all backgrounds.)
    Then the PBQ was applied to any job that brings women in contact with the public. A woman manager I know of in one of the British John Lewis Partnership stores, who gave her job “my all,” was called in by her supervisor to hear that he was very happy with her work, but that “she needed some improvement from the neck up.” He wanted her to wear what she called “a mask” of makeup, and to bleach and tease her hair. “It made me feel,” she said to a friend, “like all the work I did didn’t matter as much as what I’d look like standing around on the floor dressedup like a bimbo. It made me feel that there was no point in my doing my job well.” The men, she added, had to do nothing comparable.
    Then it was applied to any job in which a woman faces one other man: A fifty-four-year-old American woman, quoted in
The Sexuality of Organization
, said her boss replaced her one day without warning. “He had told her that he ‘wanted to look at a younger woman’ so his ‘spirits could be lifted.’ She said that ‘her age . . . had never bothered her before he mentioned it to her.’” Now the PBQ has spread to any job in which a woman does not work in complete isolation.
    Unfortunately for them, working women do not have access to legal advice when they get dressed in the morning. But they intuit that this maze exists. Is it any surprise that, two decades into the legal evolution of the professional beauty qualification, working women are tense to the point of insanity about their appearance? Their neuroses don’t arise out of the unbalanced female mind, but are sane reactions to a deliberately manipulated catch-22 in the workplace. Legally, women
don’t
have a thing to wear.
    Sociologists have described the effect on women of what such laws legalize. Sociologist Deborah L. Sheppard, in
The Sexuality of Organization
, describes her discovery that “the informal rules and guidelines about the appropriateness of appearance keep shifting, which helps explain the continuous appearance of books and magazines which tell women how to look and behave at work.” Organizational sociologists haven’t addressed the notion that they keep shifting
because they’re set up to keep shifting
. “Women,” Sheppard continues,