Read The Beauty Myth for Free Online

employment.
    Margarita St. Cross was a Playboy Club waitress fired “because she had lost her Bunny Image.” The club’s employment standards ranked waitresses on the following scale:
A flawless beauty (face, figure, and grooming)
An exceptionally beautiful girl
Marginal (is aging or has developed a correctable appearance problem)
Has lost Bunny Image (either through aging or an uncorrectable appearance problem)
    St. Cross’s male counterparts who did the same work in the same place were “not subjected to appraisals of any kind.”
    Margarita St. Cross asked the board to decide that she was still beautiful enough to keep her job, having reached, she said, a “physiological transition from that youthful fresh, pretty look to the womanly look, mature.” Hefner’s spokesmen told the board that she was not. The board reached its decision through taking Hefner’s word over St. Cross’s—by assuming that the employer is by definition more credible about a woman’s beauty than is the woman herself: that that evaluation was “well within the competence” of the Playboy Club to decide.
    They did not give weight to St. Cross’s expertise about what constitutes “Bunny Image.” In ordinary employment disputes, the employer tries to prove that the employee deserved to be fired, while the employee tries to prove that he or she deserves to keep the job. When “beauty” is the BFOQ, though, a woman cansay she’s doing her job, her employer can say she isn’t, and, with this ruling, the employer automatically wins.
    The Appeals Board identified in its ruling a concept that it called “standards of near perfection.” In a court of law, to talk about something imaginary as if it is real
makes it real.
Since 1971, the law has recognized that a standard of perfection against which a woman’s body is to be judged may exist in the workplace, and that if she falls short of it, she may be fired. A “standard of perfection” for the male body has never been legally determined in the same way. While defined as materially existing, the female standard itself has never been defined. This case lay the foundations of the legal maze into which the PBQ would evolve: A woman can be fired for not looking right, but looking right remains open to interpretation.
    Gloria Steinem has said, “All women are Bunnies.” The St. Cross case was to resonate as an allegory of the future: Though “beauty” is arguably necessary for a Bunny to do a good job, that
concept
of female employment was adapted generally as the archetype for all women on the job. The truth of Steinem’s comment deepened throughout the next two decades, wherever women tried to get and hold on to paid work.
    In 1971 a prototype of
Ms.
magazine appeared. In 1972 the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was passed in the United States; Title IX outlawed sex discrimination in education. By 1972, 20 percent of management positions in America were held by women. In 1975, Catherine McDermott had to sue the Xerox Corporation because they withdrew a job offer on the grounds of her weight. The seventies saw women streaming into the professions in a way that could no longer be dismissed as intermittent or casual or secondary to their primary role as wives and mothers. In 1978 in the United States, one sixth of the master of business administration candidates and one fourth of graduating accountants were women. National Airlines fired stewardess Ingrid Fee because she was “too fat”—four pounds over the line. In 1977 Rosalynn Carter and two former first ladies spoke at the Houston convention of NOW. In 1979 the National Women’s Business Enterprise Policy was created to support women’s businesses; that very year a federal judge ruled that employers had the right to set appearance standards. By the new decade, United Statesgovernment policy decreed that the working woman must be taken seriously, and the law decreed that her appearance must be taken seriously. The political