Women’s equality and the male ego
These days we’d like to bash bankers for just about anything but in this case Citigroup appear to have stepped straight into our “please enter and go straight to Hell” elevator shaft with their incredibly sexist treatment of a female colleague who simply was “too hot to handle” in a business environment.
As a model I worked with photographers who had massive pecs and bulging biceps which would look more at home in the sporting arena than behind a camera but I do not ever recall someone telling them they were “too athletic for the model photo shoot business”. I mention this because it can become incredibly easy to couch in intellectual terms double standards and sexism.
We seem to live in an incredibly two-faced world which imposes political correctness in the workplace (no calendars, no swimsuit pin-ups, no overt sexual harassment) and then, in male-dominated environments, allows witch-hunts to begin all over again.
Those of you who follow my writing here and my posts on Facebook or Twitter know that apart from coffee I am also addicted to reason. If something flies in the face of logic then it has no place in our life and to stand for it is to start putting together the building blocks of a mad hatter’s world. Of course no one is totally innocent. We, as women, use our looks and dress our bodies in ways which we know will provoke the male mind. In this we are both instinctive and calculating and as much in the grip of evolutionary behavior as those photographers with their bulging biceps and sleeveless Ts, who were silently signaling their masculinity, were.
Should any of us be castigated for that? In a world built on reason, beauty and sex appeal are elements to be enjoyed rather than banned. Without them we’ll end up in a machine like society reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This does not mean the door is wide open for a free for all show on computer and laptop screens of genitalia either. Fun is fun but harassment is total abuse of power.
Finance, of course, for all its modernity in terms of equipment, runs on drives which are themselves primitive. Harnessing those drives and learning to behave like civilized beings is the hallmark of a truly advanced society where each person is judged not upon their sex or the accident of their condition but their true worth. That world is still some distance away but it is so worth striving for.
