The Beauty Myth (6 page)

So if you refuse to wear a sexually exploitive costume to work
in Great Britain, you can lose your job. But in
Snowball
v.
Gardner Merchant, Ltd
., and
Wileman
v.
Minilec Engineering, Ltd
., a woman’s 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 dressed
up 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, “perceive themselves and other women to be confronting constantly the dualistic experience of being ‘feminine’ and ‘businesslike’ at the same time, while they do not perceive men experiencing the same contradiction.” “Businesslike yet feminine” is a favorite description of clothing sold in mail-order catalogs aimed at working women, and this elusive dualism is what triggered the strong response in the United States to a series of ads for a lingerie manufacturer that showed businesswear blowing open to reveal a lace-clad nakedness. But the words “businesslike” and “feminine,” as we saw, are each used to manipulate the other as well as the woman caught in the middle.
“Women,” concludes Sheppard, “perceive themselves as being constantly vulnerable to unpredictable violations of the balance. . . . The area of appearance seems to be one where women feel they can most easily exert some control over how they will be responded to.” But “they also perceive themselves as generally needing to take responsibility for having triggered such violations.”

Women blame themselves for triggering “violations.” What violations are these? A
Redbook
survey found that 88 percent of their respondents had experienced sexual harassment on the job. In the United Kingdom, 86 percent of managers and 66 percent of employees had encountered it. The British civil service found that 70 percent of its respondents had experienced it. Seventeen percent of Swedish women union members had been harassed, a figure which suggests 300,000 Swedish women harassed nationwide. Women who have been harassed, it is found, feel guilty because they fear that they “possibly provoked the comments by dressing inappropriately.” Other research shows that victims of sexual harassment are rarely in a position to tell the harasser to stop.

So women dress to be businesslike yet feminine—walk the moving line, and inevitably fail: From two thirds to almost nine tenths of them experience harassment that they blame on themselves and their poor control of their appearance. Can women say, by way of their appearance at work, what they mean? No. According to
The Sexuality of Organization,
five studies have found that “a woman’s . . . behaviour is noticed and labelled sexual even if it is not intended as such.” Women’s friendly actions are often interpreted as sexual, especially when the “nonverbal cues are ambiguous or women wear revealing clothing.” As we saw, women’s and men’s definitions of “revealing” differ. Women’s feelings of loss of control, as they try to “speak through their clothes,” make sense.

The PBQ and the legal verdict that a woman’s clothing invites sexual harassment both depend on women not wearing uniforms in the same workplaces where men do wear them. In 1977, when women were still new in the professions, John Molloy wrote a best-seller,
The Woman’s Dress for Success Book
. Molloy had done thorough research and found that without recognizable
professional wear, women had trouble eliciting respect and authority. A year after his test group adopted a “uniform,” the general attitude of the women’s bosses toward them had “improved dramatically,” and twice as many women were recommended for promotion. In the control group there was no change. Molloy tested the “uniform” extensively, and found that a skirted suit was “the success suit”; he recommended categorically that professional women adopt it. “Without a uniform,” he said, “there is no equality of image.” Evidently committed to women’s advances, Molloy urged women to wear the uniform in solidarity with one another; he quotes a pledge signed by corporate women that states: “I am doing this so that women may have as effective a work uniform as men and therefore be better able to compete on an equal footing.”

Molloy warned what might happen if women were to adopt professional dress: “The entire fashion industry is going to be alarmed at the prospect. . . . They will see it as a threat to their domination over women. And they will be right. If women adopt the uniform, and if they ignore the absurd, profit-motivated pronouncements of the fashion industry when they select [it], they will no longer be malleable.” He went on to predict the strategies to which the industry might resort to undermine the adoption of a professional uniform for women.

Eventually,
The New York Times Magazine
ran a piece declaring that Molloy’s strategy was passé, and that women were so confident now that they could abandon the suit and express their “femininity” once more. Many media for which the fashion industry provided a sizable portion of their ad budget quickly followed suit. Beauty, thinness, couture, and taste had to constitute a woman’s authority now that the professional uniform could not do it for her. Sadly for her, though, the evidence, according to Molloy, is that dressing for business success and dressing to be sexually appealing are practically mutually exclusive because a woman’s perceived sexuality can “blot out” all other characteristics. Professional women today are expected to emulate fashion models. But in Molloy’s study of one hundred male and female professionals, ninety-four chose the professionally dressed woman over the fashion model as exemplifying professional competence.

The 1980s decried Molloy’s movement on the grounds that it
forced women to dress like men—though the proposed image, with its high-heeled pumps, stockings, palette of colors, makeup, and jewelry, was masculine only insofar as it established for women something recognizable as professional dress. But the fashion industry trammeled the experiment in creating businesswear for women, and they lost the instant professional status and moderate sexual camouflage that the male uniform provides. The shift in fashion ensured that the fashion industry would not suffer, while it also ensured that women would have simultaneously to work harder to be “beautiful” and work harder to be taken seriously.

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it. A woman employer may find a well-cut European herringbone twill, wantonly draped over a tautly muscled masculine flank, madly provocative, especially since it suggests male power and status, which our culture eroticizes. But the law is unlikely to see good Savile Row tailoring her way if she tells its possessor he must service her sexually or lose his job.

If, at work, women were under no more pressure to be decorative than are their well-groomed male peers in lawyer’s pinstripe or banker’s gabardine, the pleasure of the workplace might narrow; but so would a well-tilled field of discrimination. Since women’s appearance is used to justify their sexual harassment as well as their dismissal, the statements made by women’s clothing are continually, willfully misread. Since women’s working clothes—high heels, stockings, makeup, jewelry, not to mention hair, breasts, legs, and hips—have already been appropriated as pornographic accessories, a judge can look at any younger woman and believe he is seeing a harassable trollop, just as he can look at any older woman and believe he is seeing a dismissable hag.

Emulating the male uniform
is
tough on women. Their urge to make traditionally masculine space less gray, sexless, and witless is an appealing wish. But their contribution did not relax the rules. Men failed to respond with whimsy, costume, or color of their own. The consequence of men wearing uniforms where women do not has simply meant that women take on the
full
penalties as well as the pleasures of physical charm in the
workplace, and can legally be punished or promoted, insulted or even raped accordingly.

Women dare not yet relinquish the “advantage” this inequality in dress bestows. People put on uniforms voluntarily only when they have faith in the fair rewards of the system. They will understandably be unwilling to give up the protection of their “beauty” until they can be sure the reward system is in good working order; the professions will be unwilling to give up the controlling function of the professional beauty qualification until they are certain that women are so demoralized by it that they will pose no real threat to the way things are done. It’s an uneasy truce, each side playing for time; however, when playing for time under the beauty myth, women lose.

What about the common perception that women use their “beauty” to get ahead? In fact, sociologist Barbara A. Gutek shows that there is little evidence that women even occasionally use their sexuality to get some organizational reward. It is men, she found, who use their sexuality to get ahead: “A sizeable minority of men,” she found, “say they dress in a seductive manner at work,” versus 1 woman in 800 who said she had used sexuality for advancement. In another study, 35 percent of men versus only 15 percent of women say that they use their appearance for rewards in the workplace.

Complicity in display does exist, of course. Does that mean the women are to blame for it? I have heard Ivy League administrators, judges discussing women attorneys, scholarship panelists, and other men employed to believe in and enforce concepts of fairness speak complacently about the uses of “feminine wiles”—a euphemism for beauty deployed to the woman’s advantage. Powerful men characterize them with grudging admiration, as if “beauty’s” power were an irresistible force that stunned and immobilized distinguished men, to turn them into putty in the charmer’s hand. This attitude makes sure that women will have to keep using the things they sometimes use to try to get the things they seldom get.

The conventions of this gallantry are veils over the inscription in stone: It is the powerful who dictate the terms; adults, play-wrestling a child, enjoy letting the child feel it has won.

This point, where beauty forms the bridge between women
and institutions, is what women are taught to seize upon, and is then used as proof that women themselves are finally to blame. But to make herself grasp at this straw, a woman has to suppress what she knows: that the powerful ask for women to display themselves in this way. When power toys with beauty, the request for display behavior has been choreographed before the woman has had the chance to enter the room where she will be evaluated.

This request for display behavior is unspoken. It is subtle enough so that the woman cannot point to it, credibly, as an example of harassment (to be credible about being harassed, in any case, a woman must look harassable, which destroys her credibility). It usually leaves the toyed-with “beauty” no choice, short of a withdrawal so obvious as to give certain offense, but to play along. She may have to will her body to relax and not stiffen at an untoward compliment, or simply have to sit up straighter, letting her body be seen more clearly, or brush the hair from her eyes in a way that she knows flatters her face. Whatever it is she has to do, she knows it without being told, from the expression and body language of the powerful man in whose eyes her future lies.