Delusions of Gender

by Cordelia Fine

  Another popular entertainment venue that creates ‘enormous challenges’ for professional saleswomen, Morgan and Martin found, is the strip club. Perhaps unsurprisingly, male colleagues and clients are reluctant to have a woman from the office at such venues, spoiling their fun by reminding them that women are more than simply bodies to be looked at. The saleswomen ‘described over and over again being told not to come, not being invited, and even being deceived as the men snuck out to a strip club.’ But these women were determined. Even though being there was often extremely awkward for them (‘they feel different, out of place, and embarrassed’), they went. They didn’t want to miss out on the valuable opportunity to socialise with important clients.11

  And then there are the lap-dancing clubs. A survey by the UK Fawcett Society, based on anonymous testimony from city workers, found that it is ‘increasingly normal’ for clients to be entertained at these kinds of venues.12 Expected, even. Regarding the issuing of a licence to a lap-dancing club in Coventry, England, a ‘leading businessman’ argued to the council that ‘[i]f Coventry has aspirations to be a major business area, then it has to have a quality adult entertainment area, and that would include a lap dancing club.’13 How on earth did men ever manage to get business done in the days before establishments where they can pay to have their penises massaged by the genitalia of a naked woman? ‘The City guys are a very large part of my market’, commented Peter Stringfellow, shortly after investment bank Morgan Stanley fired four U.S. employees for visiting a lap-dancing club while attending a work conference.14 The Web site for his eponymous ‘world famous nude dancing clubs’ has a Web page specifically devoted to corporate events, which describes the Stringfellows clubs as ‘perfect for your discreet corporate entertaining’. The copy excitedly asks, ‘OK so you’ve just done the big deal, or you’re about to do the deal but they need that extra little push. So tell me, where are you going to take them to clinch the deal???’ By way of answer, it displays a picture of ‘[y]our perfect private party table’. The said table differs from conventional ones in that a pole rises up from its centre. No doubt any female investment banker attending the deal-clinching moment would be thrilled by the convenience of being able to prepurchase, with her company credit card, Stringfellows Heavenly Money (depicting a nude woman clasping a pole) to tuck into the garter of the naked woman gyrating between the soup bowls.15 How ‘perfect’ to be able to dine with her colleagues, network with important clients, and all while enjoying the view of another woman’s genitals. Or perhaps she’ll have a headache and stay home. Stringfellows is by no means unusual in accommodating the corporate market. The recent Corporate Sexism report by the Fawcett Society found that 41 percent of the UK’s lap-dancing clubs specifically promote corporate entertainment on their Web sites, and 86 percent of the London clubs offer discreet receipts, which enable the cost of the evening’s activities to be claimed as a company expense.16

  It’s not hard to see that – whatever your moral take on strip joints and lap-dancing clubs – using them as corporate entertainment serves to exclude women. Said one saleswoman working in the industrial sector, ‘they will never have a woman work in that group because part of their entertainment is to take people to these topless bars.’17 With perhaps as many as 80 percent of male city finance workers visiting strip clubs for work,18 ‘women in the world of business … are confronting a new glass ceiling created by their male colleagues’ use of strip clubs’, points out political scientist Sheila Jeffreys.19 Or, as journalist Matthew Lynn put it:

  In effect, just as their fathers might have taken clients to one of the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall, so brokers today take their business associates to see lap dancers. The old gentlemen’s clubs banned women – some still do – whereas the lap-dancing establishments merely intimidate them.20

  And this brings us neatly to what is perhaps the most effective way to express hostility towards women in the workplace: sexual harassment. Michael Selmi also reviewed numerous sexual harassment class-actions (all but one of which settled), focusing on cases in the automotive and mining industries where women sought access to some of the best-paying jobs in the area. He describes ‘an all too familiar litany of harassment – groping, grabbing, stalking, pressure for sex, use of sexual language and pornography, men exposing themselves and masturbating on women’s clothes.’ Nice. The sheer crudity of the behaviour suggests that these kinds of harassing behaviours stemmed not from the erotic charge of having women around, but rather provided a way of ‘creating an environment that conveyed express hostility to women’ and ‘disciplining women who sought to infiltrate previously all-male workplaces.’21

  Nor are the environments of male-dominated white-collar professions necessarily ones that make women feel that they are welcomed as professionals worthy of equal respect. The securities industry lawsuits often included allegations of ‘pervasive sexual harassment’ (as well as the allegations of mistreatment of women in promotion, training, mentoring, and the assignment of lucrative accounts). While Selmi acknowledges that it’s tricky to draw conclusions from cases that have settled, which was the situation for all of the securities lawsuits he discusses, he argues that ‘it is equally clear that the allegations all appear to have been substantiated at least to some significant degree.’22

  The Athena Factor report found that 56 percent of women in corporate science jobs, and 69 percent of women in engineering, had experienced sexual harassment. ‘Locker-room language and sexually explicit taunts are standard and hard to take.’23 And almost all of the ninety-nine female medical residents at Southern University interviewed by sociologist Susan Hinze reported experiencing ‘sexual harassment that makes the workplace intimidating, hostile, or offensive’.24 Surgery, the most prestigious branch of medicine, offered by far the most hostile environment to women. Yet the recurring theme in Hinze’s follow-up interviews with the residents was not anger, or even victimhood, but whether women were being overly sensitive to sexist and demeaning treatment. For example, a woman who was repeatedly patted on the behind by an anaesthesiology-attending physician wondered whether the discomfort this caused her was a sign she was being too sensitive. She deliberated whether, if she mentioned it, her colleagues would say, ‘whooa, she’s a real bitch, she’s sure uptight, she’s sure sensitive …’ Another resident was furious when a male faculty member, seeing her shivering, said ‘Oh, I wish I could just take you on my lap like I would my little girl, and hold you tight and warm you up.’ As she angrily pointed out to the interviewer, ‘I’m not here to remind him of his daughter. I’ve gotten this far in life and I remind him of his little daughter?’ But other people reassured her that there was nothing objectionable about his comment. And female medical students offended by one surgeon’s habit of referring to them as ‘little girl’ were denounced as ‘hypersensitive’ by a male peer who suggested that women’s ‘nerve endings’ are ‘absolutely naked’ and thus primed to take offence.25

  But contrary to this opinion, the female residents actually seemed to be working very hard to, as Hinze suggests, ‘downplay the incidents and view them as a “normal” part of a bruising training experience’ (which indeed it is for men and women alike), and to either ignore it (‘I’m in surgery; I can’t sweat the small stuff’) or see the need for change in themselves rather than in those who harassed them. As one resident warned, ‘if you blow up every little comment that somebody makes to you … you’re too sensitive.’ One surgery resident described the experience of discovering in the restrooms an explicit cartoon of herself, bent over, and her mentor engaged in sexual intercourse. Another resident had added an arrow and the comment that he wished he could be in the latter’s position. The woman recalled to Hinze:

  I thought, this just really sums up … my position in the department of [name removed] surgery, something I’ve worked for for a lot of years, not my whole life, but a lot of years, and they reduce all my hard work and all my sacrifice and my brains and my technical abilities and everyth
ing that I’ve done to this, you know, like this is how they perceive, you know, me. [R becomes visibly upset, begins crying]

  She filed no complaint but looked to herself to adapt to the hostile environment (‘I might as well just get over it’) without any expectation that she should not have to deal with this kind of treatment at work (‘that’s how men are’).26

  This example underscores one benefit to women of ignoring, shrugging off or refusing to identify hostile discrimination. Frankly, it is not kind to the self-esteem of women to be reminded by sexual harassment that ‘they are not equal to men in the workplace, that they are, still, after all their gains, just women’.27 But also, of course, publicly naming discrimination of any kind is neither easy nor guaranteed to bring about positive change nor something anyone does lightly when career, reputation and (if lawyers get involved) savings are at stake. Even responding to a single instance of sexual harassment is harder than one might think. Imagine if, at an interview for a research assistant job, the male interviewer asked you (a woman) questions like Do people find you desirable? and Do you think it’s important for women to wear bras to work? How would you respond? Would you refuse to answer? Get up and leave? Report the interviewer? These are all actions far easier to implement in theory than in practice. When women were put in this extraordinary situation for real, not one of the twenty-five women in the study responded in these ways. Mostly, they just smiled politely, and answered the questions.28

  Things have improved since Professor Sedgwick’s prophecy. In 1869, the dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania proudly brought her students to the Saturday teaching clinics in general surgery at the Pennsylvania Hospital. She had, for years, been seeking permission for her female students to be able to attend and benefit from observing the great clinicians at work. At last, the managers had agreed. But the young women did not receive a hospitable welcome. As reported in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin:

  The students of the male colleges, knowing that the ladies would be present, turned out several hundred strong, with the design of expressing their disapproval of the action of the managers of the hospital particularly, and of the admission of women to the medical profession generally.

  Ranging themselves in line, these gallant gentlemen assailed the young ladies, as they passed out, with insolent and offensive language, and then followed them into the street, where the whole gang, with the fluency of long practice, joined in insulting them.…

  During the last hour missiles of paper, tinfoil, tobacco-quids, etc., were thrown upon the ladies, while some of these men defiled the dresses of the ladies near them with tobacco juice.29

  Needless to say, the working environment for women is far better now than it was a hundred years ago. Equal opportunity law obviates any need for special pleading for women to receive the same educational opportunities as men, and female professionals and workers are commonplace, rather than controversial. And yet, compared with having ones backside repeatedly fondled by a surgeon, feeling obliged to network clients at a strip club, or having one’s clothes masturbated upon, a bit of tinfoil in the hair and tobacco juice on the dress seems almost gentlemanly by comparison. As Michael Selmi notes, the many examples of overt discrimination against women in the workplace might be dismissed as ‘isolated incidents’. Yet he argues that it would be ‘a mistake to dismiss … as aberrational in nature’ these examples of ‘overt acts of hostility and exclusion based on stereotypes regarding women’s proper roles or abilities in the workplace.’30 Of course, not all mistreatment or harassment is directed at women in traditionally male occupations, or at women, and not all women are harassed. (One expert estimates that perhaps 35 to 50 percent of women have been sexually harassed at some point in their working lives.)31 But the hostilities, sexism and demeaning indignities faced by some women in the modern workplace suggest that old ideas about the appropriate sphere of women continue to linger in many minds – a theme that continues in the next chapter, when we return home from work.

  S. and I have decided to get married next year when we get through medicine … I told him I didn’t know a thing about housekeeping, and he said why should I? That he could see no more reason for a woman’s liking cooking and dishwashing than for a man’s liking them. That since our education has been precisely similar … there would be no justice at all in my having to do all the ‘dirty work’.… So we have decided that one week I shall take over all the duties connected with the running of our house and the next week he will … I was so happy I couldn’t speak … We are going to divide up the care of the children exactly as we divide the housework.

  —Dr. Mabel Ulrich, Johns Hopkins graduate (1933)

  This hopeful arrangement was declared a ‘no go’ after just a few months, as Regina Morantz-Sanchez reports in Sympathy and Science. ‘We have given up the 50-50 housekeeping plan. We tried for a month, but by the end of one week I knew S. is a fearful mess as a housekeeper.… Could never remember the laundry.… But then of course he is busy and I am not.’1

  Dr. Ulrich was, in the first half of the twentieth century, running up against the implacable psychological force of the middle-class marital contract. According to this traditional and highly familiar arrangement, the husband is the breadwinner and works outside the home to provide financial resources for the family. In return, his wife is responsible for both the emotional and household labour created by the family: keeping everyone happy, the house clean, meals cooked, clothes laundered, and children reared; either by her own hand or by proxy. Because this becomes the woman’s job once married, employers were perfectly entitled to fire or refuse to employ married women – a situation that remained perfectly legal in the United States until 1964.

  Both the breadwinner and the caregiver roles are, of course, necessary. Without the breadwinner there is no money for food. But without the caregiver, the food is not cooked; there is no clean plate on which to place it; and the children are living naked, filthy, and wild in the garden, communicating by way of a primitive system of grunts. The ‘separate spheres’ of men and women – his public, hers private – were seen as complementary and equal, but in an Animal Farm-ish some-spheres-are-more-equal-than-others sort of way. When I say ‘head of the household’, you immediately know to which spouse I refer (and it’s not ‘Mrs. John Smith’). That his was the final word was enshrined in law until surprisingly recently. Not until 1974 did US legislation require that married women be able to apply for credit in their own names. And it was only in 1994 that it became possible in the eyes of the law for a British husband to rape his wife. I mention these points not to lower the mood, but simply to highlight the asymmetry of power and status in the traditional marriage contract.

  Contemporary women seem to be barely more successful than Mabel Ulrich in persuading their partners to step into the traditionally female private sphere. My husband and I can both enthusiastically attest to the difficulties inherent in attempting an egalitarian marriage – particularly when children are involved. You have heard, no doubt, the saying that the personal is the political. Based on his own experiences within a marriage in which we struggle against convention to split things equally, my husband has developed his own, expanded version of this motto. As he would state it, ‘The school drop-off is the political, the staying home when the kids are sick is the political, the writing of the shopping list is the political, the buying of the birthday presents is the political, the arranging of the baby-sitter is the political, the packing of the lunch boxes is the political, the thinking about what to have for supper is the political, the remembering of the need to cut the children’s toenails is the political, the asking of the location of the butter dish is the political …’ You get the idea. Some day, I must ask him what it’s like to be married to someone who, eyes narrowed in thought, peers at him over the tops of sociology articles with titles like Who Gets the Best Deal from Marriage: Women or Men? We’ve had our disagreements, of course. When, for example, are a few dirty cups a symbol
of the exertion of male privilege, and when are they merely unwashed dishes? But however predisposed the research for this book has made me to see inequality where perhaps there is only a cluttered sink, my beleaguered husband can at least take comfort in knowing that, thanks to that very same research, I know just what a rare jewel he is.

  In families with children in which both spouses work fulltime, women do about twice as much child care and housework as men – the notorious ‘second shift’ described by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her classic book of that name.2 You might think that, even if this isn’t quite fair, it’s nonetheless rational. When one person earns more than the other then he (most likely) enjoys greater bargaining power at the trade union negotiations that, for some, become their marriage. Certainly, in line with this unromantic logic, as a woman’s financial contribution approaches that of her husband’s, her housework decreases. It doesn’t actually become equitable, you understand. Just less unequal. But only up to the point at which her earnings equal his. After that – when she starts to earn more than him – something very curious starts to happen. The more she earns, the more housework she does.3 In what sociologist Sampson Lee Blair has described as the ‘sadly comic data’ from his research, ‘where she has a job and he doesn’t … even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.’4

  What on earth could be behind this extraordinary injustice in which she returns home from a hard day at work to run the vacuum cleaner under his well-rested legs? A few popular writers have made some creative suggestions. John Gray, author of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus books, has recently made a valiant stab at arguing that performing routine housework chores is actually selectively beneficial to women, including – if not especially – those with demanding jobs. His idea (which to my knowledge has not been empirically tested) is that because the modern working woman has removed herself from her traditional home sphere with its babies, children and friends on whom to call with a pot roast, she has dangerously low levels of oxytocin coursing through her blood. (Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone associated with social bonding and social interactions.) Thankfully, however, ‘nurturing oxytocin-producing domestic routine duties like laundry, shopping, cooking, and cleaning’ are available in plentiful supply. Phew! Such chores, however, have a very ill effect on men. For them, the priority is ‘testosterone-producing’ tasks – for without the stimulating rush of that sex hormone, men become little better than limp rags (and not even ones that then wipe themselves along the countertops). Thus, ‘putting things back together after a flood or disaster’ is testosterone-producing, but ‘[t]o expect him to join in and share each day in her daily routines as a helper would eventually exhaust him.’ It’s hard not to be a little cynical when Gray argues that it is in deference to his male neuroendocrinological status that when he helps with the dishes it should fall to ‘others [to] bring plates over, put things away, and clean tabletops’. As he explains, ‘[h]aving to ask your partner each time whether this food should be kept, and remembering where she wants things to be put away, can be a bit exhausting for a man’.5 One can only hope that Mrs. Gray finds it gratifyingly oxytocin producing to have to remind her husband where the plates are kept.