I'm Caught In A Trap
So I had to come clean about what I do for a living. I'm embarrassed to admit it. I mean, not *what* I do for a living - I'm quite proud of *what* I do, even though most of my friends don't entirely understand it - "some kind of mathematician" or "something to do with computers" is how I try to explain exactly what an "MI Analyst" actually does. But rather, *who* I work for.
But I can't ignore it any more. It's poisoning every aspect of my life at the moment, it's raised my baseline sensitivity to sexism and the double standard to such a high degree. It took me a while to work out what it was - it's not as if the world has suddenly got more sexist in the past three months or so. But what's changed is me. Something has opened up mine eyes and made me notice it more.
I work for a cosmetic surgery clinic. One of the big ones, one of the country-wide ones with ads in tube stations and Botox shops springing up like mushrooms in cities across the country. To the people who know me on any serious level, this comes as quite a shock - as my brother put it, "that's like a vegetarian working in a slaughterhouse."
I make my money from an organisation that mutilates women for a living. ("Mutilation is a pretty harsh word," mused one of my fellow Craft Guerrilla DJs. "I'm not sure I'd use it for anything less than, like, female circumcision." What on earth do you think cosmetic surgery is? We inject poisonous toxins into women's faces. We cut into healthy women's bodies.) Every working day of my life, I am enabling and even promoting something I believe to be intrinsically morally wrong.
The inherent sexism and double standard of this industry is in my face every day of my life - is it any wonder that I'm noticing it in every other aspect of my life?
I was desperate when I took this job - I couldn't find a permanent job for over a year after my redundancy. And yet the supreme irony is that the nature of this company partially helped me get the job in the first place. 80% of the staff - up to 100% in some of the clinics - is female. They *wanted* a female - someone who could understand them and communicate with them - in the IT Department, the only department in the company that was completely male.
And so here's me - this female who has rejected and fought against the straitjacket of gender roles, in order to make my way in the highly technical and male dominated world of IT - inside the belly of the beast I resent.
There's no way to escape it. I can't even bury myself in my IT cave and pretend that the numbers are numbers alone. The images follow me, haunt me - inflated silicone tits in the boardroom, liposuctioned abdomens in the marketing department. Run away to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and there's a branded mug with an expressionless botoxed face advertising "INSPIRING CONFIDENCE IN YOU!"
"Shut up, shut up, shut up," I want to scream at the mug. You want confidence? Learn a foreign language, climb a mountain, go skydiving, join a choir, take a class a class in water colour painting or car mechanics - or anything, except mutilate yourself. What did I do to inspire confidence in myself? I took up DJing again. I *like* making people dance - or rather, nod their heads and knit a little faster, which is what they do at Craft Guerrilla nights when they like what I play. Yesterday afternoon, I watched a beautiful, grey-haired, older woman nodding along as she painted at a corner table. What an amazing image, she seemed so powerful and so wise and creative, such a free spirit - I looked at her and wanted to be her. ("Mad as a loon" one of the organisers told me. I smirked and thought "My kind of lady!")
What can I do? The economy is too uncertain, my financial situation too perilous for me to quit. But I'm aware it's bloody money paying my mortgage and buying the very CDs I'm DJing with.
My female friends try to tell me it's OK. After all, "it's their choice, what foolish women do with their money and their bodies." But is it? I turn back to my sacred texts, my Holy Bibles, Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth" and Ariel Levy's "Female Chauvinist Pigs." The vice, the trap that post-Sexual Revolution women are trapped in. You will be scrutinised and judged (in a perfectly legal way, according to the courts!) again and again, in every aspect of your lives - economic, cultural, sexual - on your appearance. Yet you will be dismissed as shallow, stupid, even the cause of your own oppression, if you care too much about it. Load the system against women in every way and yet blame them for the Catch 22 choices that they make.
I'm caught in a trap. I can't walk out. Because I love being financially independent and therefore liberated (by making money off an industry based on enslaving women to impossible and unattainable "Beauty" standards) too much, baby.
But I can't ignore it any more. It's poisoning every aspect of my life at the moment, it's raised my baseline sensitivity to sexism and the double standard to such a high degree. It took me a while to work out what it was - it's not as if the world has suddenly got more sexist in the past three months or so. But what's changed is me. Something has opened up mine eyes and made me notice it more.
I work for a cosmetic surgery clinic. One of the big ones, one of the country-wide ones with ads in tube stations and Botox shops springing up like mushrooms in cities across the country. To the people who know me on any serious level, this comes as quite a shock - as my brother put it, "that's like a vegetarian working in a slaughterhouse."
I make my money from an organisation that mutilates women for a living. ("Mutilation is a pretty harsh word," mused one of my fellow Craft Guerrilla DJs. "I'm not sure I'd use it for anything less than, like, female circumcision." What on earth do you think cosmetic surgery is? We inject poisonous toxins into women's faces. We cut into healthy women's bodies.) Every working day of my life, I am enabling and even promoting something I believe to be intrinsically morally wrong.
The inherent sexism and double standard of this industry is in my face every day of my life - is it any wonder that I'm noticing it in every other aspect of my life?
I was desperate when I took this job - I couldn't find a permanent job for over a year after my redundancy. And yet the supreme irony is that the nature of this company partially helped me get the job in the first place. 80% of the staff - up to 100% in some of the clinics - is female. They *wanted* a female - someone who could understand them and communicate with them - in the IT Department, the only department in the company that was completely male.
And so here's me - this female who has rejected and fought against the straitjacket of gender roles, in order to make my way in the highly technical and male dominated world of IT - inside the belly of the beast I resent.
There's no way to escape it. I can't even bury myself in my IT cave and pretend that the numbers are numbers alone. The images follow me, haunt me - inflated silicone tits in the boardroom, liposuctioned abdomens in the marketing department. Run away to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and there's a branded mug with an expressionless botoxed face advertising "INSPIRING CONFIDENCE IN YOU!"
"Shut up, shut up, shut up," I want to scream at the mug. You want confidence? Learn a foreign language, climb a mountain, go skydiving, join a choir, take a class a class in water colour painting or car mechanics - or anything, except mutilate yourself. What did I do to inspire confidence in myself? I took up DJing again. I *like* making people dance - or rather, nod their heads and knit a little faster, which is what they do at Craft Guerrilla nights when they like what I play. Yesterday afternoon, I watched a beautiful, grey-haired, older woman nodding along as she painted at a corner table. What an amazing image, she seemed so powerful and so wise and creative, such a free spirit - I looked at her and wanted to be her. ("Mad as a loon" one of the organisers told me. I smirked and thought "My kind of lady!")
What can I do? The economy is too uncertain, my financial situation too perilous for me to quit. But I'm aware it's bloody money paying my mortgage and buying the very CDs I'm DJing with.
My female friends try to tell me it's OK. After all, "it's their choice, what foolish women do with their money and their bodies." But is it? I turn back to my sacred texts, my Holy Bibles, Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth" and Ariel Levy's "Female Chauvinist Pigs." The vice, the trap that post-Sexual Revolution women are trapped in. You will be scrutinised and judged (in a perfectly legal way, according to the courts!) again and again, in every aspect of your lives - economic, cultural, sexual - on your appearance. Yet you will be dismissed as shallow, stupid, even the cause of your own oppression, if you care too much about it. Load the system against women in every way and yet blame them for the Catch 22 choices that they make.
I'm caught in a trap. I can't walk out. Because I love being financially independent and therefore liberated (by making money off an industry based on enslaving women to impossible and unattainable "Beauty" standards) too much, baby.
posted by Masonic Boom | 11:59 am
1 Comments:
Eesh, that's rough. I'm in a similar situation - lovely money, repellent company purpose, though not so exploitative of individual insecurities - and coping with it by telling myself what I'm doing is research. And it's true, I'm learning new and disturbing things all the time. But it sounds as though you already know all you have to about what your company does.
Do you? Is there the scope to learn anything about your industry that would help you work against some of the more repellent ideas behind it more effectively in the future?
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