Welcome to the Tuesday edition of your open thread. It’s another beautiful day in Delaware. Share your happy thoughts on today’s open thread.
In many ways, the story of her life has been about getting attention from men—both the wanted and the unwanted kind. But when she got fired last summer from her job as a banker at a Citibank branch in Midtown—her bosses cited her work performance—she got even hotter. She sued Citigroup, claiming that she was fired solely because her bosses thought she was too hot.
This is the way Debbie Lorenzana tells it: Her bosses told her they couldn’t concentrate on their work because her appearance was too distracting. They ordered her to stop wearing turtlenecks. She was also forbidden to wear pencil skirts, three-inch heels, or fitted business suits. Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mom, pointed out female colleagues whose clothing was far more revealing than hers: “They said their body shapes were different from mine, and I drew too much attention,” she says.
As Lorenzana’s lawsuit puts it, her bosses told her that “as a result of the shape of her figure, such clothes were purportedly ‘too distracting’ for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear.”
Wait…wut? So, when a man goes to his boss and says he’s distracted by his good-looking colleague the boss punishes the woman? It’s pretty telling that there was a list of perfectly acceptable clothing that was forbidden – turtlenecks? pencil skirts? fitted business suits? This sounds a lot like the Taliban – a man’s lack of self-control is actually the fault of the woman, so she should be punished. There’s so many different ways that our patriarchal society tells us that a woman’s body is public property. This is just one of them.
Sign at a BP gas station:
