The Beauty Myth (5 page)

What must this creature, the serious professional woman, look like?

Television journalism vividly proposed its answer. The avuncular male anchor was joined by a much younger female newscaster with a professional prettiness level.

That double image—the older man, lined and distinguished, seated beside a nubile, heavily made-up female junior—became the paradigm for the relationship between men and women in the workplace. Its allegorical force was and is pervasive: The qualification of professional prettiness, intended at first to sweeten the unpleasant fact of a woman assuming public authority, took on a life of its own, until professional beauties were hired to be made over into TV journalists. By the 1980s, the agents who headhunted anchors kept their test tapes under categories such as “Male Anchors: 40 to 50,” with no corresponding category for women, and ranked women anchors’ physical appearance above their delivery skills or their experience.

The message of the news team, not hard to read, is that a powerful man is an individual, whether that individuality is expressed in asymmetrical features, lines, gray hair, hairpieces, baldness, bulbousness, tubbiness, facial tics, or a wattled neck; and that his maturity is part of his power. If a single standard were applied equally to men as to women in TV journalism, most of the men would be unemployed. But the women beside them need youth and beauty to enter the same soundstage. Youth and beauty, covered in solid makeup, present the anchorwoman as generic—an “anchorclone,” in the industry’s slang. What is generic is replaceable. With youth and beauty, then, the working woman is visible, but insecure, made to feel her qualities are not unique. But, without them, she is invisible—she falls, literally, “out of the picture.”

The situation of women in television simultaneously symbolizes and reinforces the professional beauty qualification in
general: Seniority does not mean prestige but erasure—of TV anchors over forty, 97 percent, claims anchorwoman Christine Craft, are male and “the other 3% are fortyish women who don’t look their age.” Older anchorwomen go through “a real nightmare,” she wrote, because soon they won’t be “pretty enough to do the news anymore.” Or if an anchorwoman is “beautiful,” she is “constantly harassed as the kind of person who had gotten her job solely because of her looks.”

The message was finalized: The most emblematic working women in the West could be visible if they were “beautiful,” even if they were bad at their work; they could be good at their work and “beautiful” and therefore visible, but get no credit for merit; or they could be good and “unbeautiful” and therefore invisible, so their merit did them no good. In the last resort, they could be as good and as beautiful as you please—for too long; upon which, aging, they disappeared. This situation now extends throughout the workforce.

That double standard of appearance for men and women communicated itself every morning and every night to the nations of working women, whenever they tried to plug in to the events of “their” world. Their window on historical developments was framed by their own dilemma. To find out what is going on in the world always involves the reminder to women that
this
is going on in the world.

In 1983, working women received a decisive ruling on how firmly the PBQ was established, and how far it could legally go. The thirty-six-year-old Craft filed suit against her ex-employers, Metromedia Inc., at Kansas City on the charge of sex discrimination. She had been dismissed on the grounds that, as Christine Craft quotes her employer, she was “too old, too unattractive, and not deferential to men.”

Her dismissal followed months of PBQ demands made on her time and on her purse in breach of her contract, and offensive to her sense of self. She was subjected to fittings and makeovers by the hour and presented with a day-by-day chart of clothing that she would not have chosen herself and for which she was then asked to pay. None of her male colleagues had to do those things. Testimony from other anchorwomen showed that they had felt
forced to quit due to Metromedia’s “fanatical obsession” with their appearance.

Other women were assigned to cover the trial. Craft was humiliated by her colleagues on camera. One suggested she was a lesbian; Diane Sawyer (who, six years later, when she won a six-figure salary, would have her appearance evaluated on
Time
’s cover with the headline
IS SHE WORTH IT?
) asked Craft on a national news broadcast if she really was “‘unique among women’ in [her] lack of appearance skills.” Her employers had counted on going unchallenged because of the reaction such discrimination commonly instills in the victim of it: a shame that guarantees silence. But “Metromedia,” she wrote defiantly, “was wrong if they thought a woman would never admit to having been told she was ugly.”

Her account proves how this discrimination seeps in where others cannot reach, poisoning the private well from which self-esteem is drawn: “Though I may have dismissed intellectually the statement that I was too unattractive, nonetheless in the core of my psyche I felt that something about my face was difficult, if not monstrous, to behold. It’s hard to be even mildly flirtatious when you’re troubled by such a crippling point of view.” An employer can’t prove an employee incompetent simply by announcing that she is. But because “beauty” lives so deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem, and since it has been usefully defined as something that is continually bestowed from the outside and can always be taken away, to tell a woman she is ugly can make her feel ugly, act ugly, and, as far as her experience is concerned,
be
ugly, in the place where feeling beautiful keeps her whole.

No woman is so beautiful—by definition—that she can be confident of surviving a new judicial process that submits the victim to an ordeal familiar to women from other trials: looking her up and down to see how what happened to her is her own fault. Since there is nothing “objective” about beauty, the power elite can, whenever necessary, form a consensus to strip “beauty” away. To do that to a woman publicly from a witness stand is to invite all eyes to confirm her ugliness, which then becomes the reality that all can see. This process of legal coercion ensures that a degrading public spectacle can be enacted at her expense
against any woman in any profession if she charges discrimination by beauty.

The moral of the Christine Craft trial was that she lost: Though two juries found for her, a male judge overturned their rulings. She seems to have been blacklisted in her profession as a result of her legal fight. Has her example affected other women in her profession? “There are thousands of Christine Crafts,” one woman reporter told me. “We keep silent. Who can survive a blacklist?”

Defenders of Judge Stevens’s ruling justified it on the grounds that it was not sex discrimination but market logic. If an anchorperson doesn’t bring in the audiences, he or she has not done a good job. The nugget hidden here as it was applied to women—bring in audiences, sales, clients, or students
with her
“
beauty
”—has become the legacy of the Craft case for working women everywhere.

The outcome of the trial was one of those markers in the 1980s that a woman may have witnessed, and felt as a tightening around the neck, and knew she had to keep still about. When she read the summation, she knew that she had to distance herself from her knowledge of how much she was Christine Craft. She might have reacted by starting a new diet, or buying expensive new clothes, or scheduling an eyelift. Consciously or not, though, she probably reacted; the profession of “image consultant” grew eightfold over the decade. Women and work and “beauty” outside the sex professions fused on the day Craft lost her case, and a wider cycle of diseases was initiated. It will not, the woman might have told herself, happen to me.

It could and did continue to happen to working women as the law bolstered employers with a series of Byzantine rulings that ensured that the PBQ grew ever more resilient as a tool of discrimination. The law developed a tangle of inconsistencies in which women were paralyzed: While one ruling,
Miller
v.
Bank of America
, confused sexual attraction with sexual harassment and held
that the law has no part to play in employment disputes that centered on it (“attractiveness,” the court decided, being a “natural sex phenomenon” which “plays at least a subtle part in most personnel decisions,” and, as such, the court shouldn’t delve into “such matters”), the court in another case,
Barnes
v.
Costle
, concluded that if a woman’s unique physical characteristics—red hair, say, or large breasts—were the reasons given by her employer for sexual harassment, then her personal appearance was the issue and not her gender, in which case she could not expect protection under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. With these rulings a woman’s beauty became at once her job and her fault.

United States law developed to protect the interests of the power structure by setting up a legal maze in which the beauty myth blocks each path so that no woman can “look right” and win. St. Cross lost her job because she was too “old” and too “ugly”; Craft lost hers because she was too “old,” too “ugly,” “unfeminine,” and didn’t dress right. This means, a woman might think, that the law will treat her fairly in employment disputes if only she does her part, looks pretty, and dresses femininely.

She would be dangerously wrong, though. Let’s look at an American working woman standing in front of her wardrobe, and imagine the disembodied voice of legal counsel advising her on each choice as she takes it out on its hanger.

“Feminine, then,” she asks, “in reaction to the Craft decision?”

“You’d be asking for it. In 1986, Mechelle Vinson filed a sex discrimination case in the District of Columbia against her employer, the Meritor Savings Bank, on the grounds that her boss had sexually harassed her, subjecting her to fondling, exposure, and rape. Vinson was young and ‘beautiful’ and carefully dressed. The district court ruled that her appearance counted against her: Testimony about her ‘provocative’ dress could be heard to decide whether her harassment was ‘welcome.’”

“Did she dress provocatively?”

“As her counsel put it in exasperation, ‘Mechelle Vinson wore
clothes
.’ Her beauty in her clothes was admitted as evidence to prove that she welcomed rape from her employer.”

“Well, feminine, but not too feminine, then.”

“Careful: In
Hopkins
v.
Price-Waterhouse
, Ms. Hopkins was denied a partnership because she needed to learn to ‘walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely,’ and ‘wear makeup.’”

“Maybe she didn’t deserve a partnership?”

“She brought in the most business of any employee.”

“Hmm. Well, maybe a little more feminine.”

“Not so fast. Policewoman Nancy Fahdl was fired because she looked ‘too much like a lady.’”

“All right, less feminine. I’ve wiped off my blusher.”

“You can lose your job if you don’t wear makeup. See
Tamini
v.
Howard Johnson Company, Inc
.”

“How about this, then, sort of . . . womanly?”

“Sorry. You can lose your job if you dress like a woman. In
Andre
v.
Bendix Corporation,
it was ruled ‘inappropriate for a supervisor’ of women to dress like ‘a woman.’”

“What am I supposed to do? Wear a sack?”

“Well, the women in
Buren
v.
City of East Chicago
had to ‘dress to cover themselves from neck to toe’ because the men at work were ‘kind of nasty.’”

“Won’t a dress code get me out of this?”

“Don’t bet on it. In
Diaz
v.
Coleman
, a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly sexually harassed his female employees because they complied with it.”

It would be funny if it weren’t true. And when we see that British law has evolved a legal no-win situation very close to this one, a pattern begins to emerge.

We can save the British woman the baffling guided tour through her wardrobe: It’s the same situation, if not worse. The GOQ is defined as permitting “sex discrimination” when the job requires, among other things, “physical form or authenticity—for example, a model or an actor.” But since 1977,
M. Schmidt
v.
Austicks Bookshops, Ltd
. has been broadly interpreted to make it legal for her to be hired or fired generally on the basis of physical appearance. Miss Schmidt lost her job and the case because she wore trousers to her work in a bookstore. The Employment Appeal Tribunal dismissed her case, which was based on the fact that the dress code was more restrictive for women than men, by
ruling not only that an employer is “entitled to a large measure of discretion in controlling the image of his establishment,” but also that the whole issue is insignificant: They ruled that telling a woman how to dress was no more than trivial. In
Jeremiah
v.
Ministry of Defense
, employers tried to avoid hiring women for higher-paid work on the grounds that it was dirty and would ruin their looks. Lord Denning in his ruling mused: “A woman’s hair is her crowning glory . . . She does not like it disturbed, especially when she has just had a ‘hair-do.’” The employers’ counsel suggested that compelling women to ruin their hairdos at a higher rate of pay would lead to industrial unrest.

Dan Air was challenged in 1987 for hiring only pretty young women as air crews; they defended their discrimination on the basis of customer preference for pretty young women. (Two years later, the publisher of
USA Today
, in an editorial using the same logic, would call for a return to the days when stewardesses were hired pretty and young and fired upon maturing.)

In
Maureen Murphy and Eileen Davidson
v.
Stakis Leisure, Ltd
., we can see the wave of the future. Waitresses objected to a change in “image” that put them in a “more revealing” uniform and forced them to wear makeup and nail polish. One waitress described the costumes as “straight out of
The Story of O
,” consisting of a miniskirt and a plunging cleavage over an external corset or basque so tight that the women bled from it under their arms. One of the litigating women was pregnant when she was forced to wear it. Management admitted that the change was imposed on the women as a sexual draw for male customers. Waiters had no such requirements made of them. (Incidentally, the waitresses’ obligation to appear in a state of undress in front of the opposite sex violates
Sisley
v.
Britannia Security Systems
, which ruled that the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act could be used to “preserve decency or privacy” from the opposite sex while “being in a state of undress.”) The women’s counsel got nowhere pointing out that makeup, revealing costumes, and nail polish sexualize the dress code in a way that
cannot
be parallel for men. This case too was dismissed as
de minimis
—too trivial to consider. The women lost the case but kept their jobs—for six weeks. They have both been fired; they have filed a complaint charging unfair dismissal.