the expectations of working women.
Employers admit that “one way of weeding out women applicants for a job is to readvertise it at a higher salary.” “When it comes to defining our worth financially,” one study concludes, “we have severe doubts about ourselves.” In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women’s skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.
The professional insecurity this situation generates cuts across the biological caste system that the PBQ sets up: It is found in “beautiful” women, since often no amount of professional success can convince them that they themselves, and not their “beauty,” have earned them their positions; and it’s found in “ugly” women, who learn to devalue themselves.
Pinups in the workplace are metaphors for the larger issue of how Iron Maiden imagery is used to keep women down on the job. At the Shoemaker Mine in the United States, when women coal miners joined the work force, graffiti appeared that targeted for ridicule individual women’s breasts and genitals; a woman with small breasts, for instance, was called “inverted nipples.” Faced with such scrutiny, reports legal scholar Rosemarie Tong, “the female miners found it increasingly difficult to maintain their self-respect, and their personal and professional lives began to deteriorate.” Nevertheless, a ruling by an American court,
Rabidue
v.
Osceola Refining Co
. (1986), upheld the right of male workers to display pornography in the workplace, no matter how offensive to women workers, on the grounds that the landscape is steeped in this sort of imagery anyway.
In Great Britain, the National Council for Civil Liberties recognizes that pinups constitute sexual harassment, as they “directly undermine an individual woman’s view of herself and her ability to do her job.” When unions formed discussion groups about the subject of pinups, forty-seven of the fifty-four groups ranked pinups as examples of sexual harassment that disturbed women. The Society of Civil and Public Servants ranks sexually evaluating looks, as well as pinups, as sexual harassment. Women interviewed said that when pinups are on the walls, they feel that “direct comparisons are being made.” Pinups are used directly to undermine women: In
Strathclyde Regional Council
v.
Porcelli
, Mrs. Porcelli testified that her harassers often “commented on my physical appearance in comparison with that of the nude female depicted.” But neither the American nor the British judicial system shows insight into the fact that this kind of harassment is intended to make women in the workplace feel physically worthless, especially in comparison with the men. It is
intended
to reinstate the inequalities that women’s entry into that workplace took away. In fostering in women the feeling of ugliness—or, if their “beauty” is the target, of exposure and foolishness—it should not have to
lead
to another injury, as the law now defines it, in order to be understood as discriminatory; it
is
already an injury.
The PBQ keeps women materially and psychologically poor
. It drains money from the very women who would pose the greatest threat were they to learn the sense of entitlement bestowed by economic security: Through the PBQ, even richer women are kept away from the masculine experience of wealth. Its double standard actually makes such women poorer than their male peers, by cutting a greater swathe in the income of a female executive than in that of a male, and that is part of its purpose. “Women are punished for their looks, whereas men can go far in just a grey flannel suit,” complains, ironically, a former beauty editor of
Vogue
,
Employers admit that “one way of weeding out women applicants for a job is to readvertise it at a higher salary.” “When it comes to defining our worth financially,” one study concludes, “we have severe doubts about ourselves.” In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women’s skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.
The professional insecurity this situation generates cuts across the biological caste system that the PBQ sets up: It is found in “beautiful” women, since often no amount of professional success can convince them that they themselves, and not their “beauty,” have earned them their positions; and it’s found in “ugly” women, who learn to devalue themselves.
Pinups in the workplace are metaphors for the larger issue of how Iron Maiden imagery is used to keep women down on the job. At the Shoemaker Mine in the United States, when women coal miners joined the work force, graffiti appeared that targeted for ridicule individual women’s breasts and genitals; a woman with small breasts, for instance, was called “inverted nipples.” Faced with such scrutiny, reports legal scholar Rosemarie Tong, “the female miners found it increasingly difficult to maintain their self-respect, and their personal and professional lives began to deteriorate.” Nevertheless, a ruling by an American court,
Rabidue
v.
Osceola Refining Co
. (1986), upheld the right of male workers to display pornography in the workplace, no matter how offensive to women workers, on the grounds that the landscape is steeped in this sort of imagery anyway.
In Great Britain, the National Council for Civil Liberties recognizes that pinups constitute sexual harassment, as they “directly undermine an individual woman’s view of herself and her ability to do her job.” When unions formed discussion groups about the subject of pinups, forty-seven of the fifty-four groups ranked pinups as examples of sexual harassment that disturbed women. The Society of Civil and Public Servants ranks sexually evaluating looks, as well as pinups, as sexual harassment. Women interviewed said that when pinups are on the walls, they feel that “direct comparisons are being made.” Pinups are used directly to undermine women: In
Strathclyde Regional Council
v.
Porcelli
, Mrs. Porcelli testified that her harassers often “commented on my physical appearance in comparison with that of the nude female depicted.” But neither the American nor the British judicial system shows insight into the fact that this kind of harassment is intended to make women in the workplace feel physically worthless, especially in comparison with the men. It is
intended
to reinstate the inequalities that women’s entry into that workplace took away. In fostering in women the feeling of ugliness—or, if their “beauty” is the target, of exposure and foolishness—it should not have to
lead
to another injury, as the law now defines it, in order to be understood as discriminatory; it
is
already an injury.
The PBQ keeps women materially and psychologically poor
. It drains money from the very women who would pose the greatest threat were they to learn the sense of entitlement bestowed by economic security: Through the PBQ, even richer women are kept away from the masculine experience of wealth. Its double standard actually makes such women poorer than their male peers, by cutting a greater swathe in the income of a female executive than in that of a male, and that is part of its purpose. “Women are punished for their looks, whereas men can go far in just a grey flannel suit,” complains, ironically, a former beauty editor of
Vogue
,
Similar Books
