I despise the assumption that a beautiful woman is more likely to be a model, than a mathematician. As if to say, the less attractive you are, the larger your brain is. I despise that woman are satisfied with being beautiful as an occupation. As if to say, being beautiful will enable me to find someone who will have an occupation that can support me. I despise the men that marry those women because they are threatened by a counterpart or dare I say a woman more intelligent, more capable, and has a bigger bank account.
That was my rant, but I do recognize how tough it is for women to not be stereotyped or prejudged on appearance. It plays a key part in my continuous concern of what people think.
In Berger’s work Ways of Seeing, he brilliantly analyses how a woman continually has to watch herself. “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others and ultimately how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.” (Berger, 1972: 46)
I must quickly add that I feel I have discovered so much through reading the work of Berger. Unfortunately on topics unrelated, so I will have to put my distracted mind back on track.
“Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated… Every one of her actions – whatever its indirect purpose or motivation – is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated.” (Berger, 1972: 46)
So if I was going to an interview at an accounting firm I would go in a suit pants and jacket with a buttoned up shirt, I would keep an excellent posture and be assertive in both the way I presented myself and how I answered a question. I would not become over-confident or emotional. I would remain approachable and open-minded. All of this would be in the hope that I would appear capable of doing the job before my CV had been read. How I have acted in this interview will also indicate how I want future employees or colleagues to treat me. Something I would not do is wear my shirt buttoned down to reveal cleavage; it may appear that I would like to get ahead by using my assets opposed to the company's. And as tempting as it may be, especially since doing this body intervention, I would not wear striking red lipstick; I would not want women to think I am more concerned with vanity than equity and would not want men to think… “Those lips could give a cracking blowjob.”
The sad thing is, sometimes we do need to quite simply appear attractive or appealing. Wolf's study (as cited in Howson, 2004) states that “To do otherwise has the very real potential to restrict employment opportunities in a labour market that favours work for women on the basis of appearance.”
I am caught at a cross road. I do not think there is one solution or outcome to the debate of beauty or brains, and it is of course subjective to each individual woman’s perspective or opinion. Personally I want to have it all: beauty and brains, sometimes I would like to not be taken too seriously and other times I want to be taken very seriously, I want to wear red lipstick, and heels and a figure hugging dress because it is so wonderful to be a woman, but some mornings I want to set my make-up bag, bras, and hair dryer alight because it is just so much admin and then I wish I was a guy. Colossal contradiction-I think yes!
I have a daily battle between the person I am, and the person I want to be. I find myself every now and then wondering in the middle, but that is ok.
It would really irritate me if I worked in a firm and a women got a job and I could see she got it because she flaunted her looks. My mom is a doctor and has had people assume she is a doctor's secretary because she is a woman, and I think there are parallels between that example and how you feel.
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