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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 feltforced 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 expenseagainst 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