Interesting interpretation of sexualized women in the context of Playboy in Carina Chocano's book Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages :
She was a fresh animal, well-washed with soap and water. She could not learn, grow, or change. She could not really exist in a temporal sense. All she could do was to try to preserve and display herself. Experience made her difficult. It got her banished to her witchy cottage in the forest. She had to remain a dumb bunny, an unconscious body, frozen in time and preserved in amber, for as long as she could in order to survive.
Later in the book, Chocano talks about where a girl fits in the world:
Girls exist only in relation to boys.” In other words, “the girl” was an intrusion, often unwelcome, in an all-male universe. She did not represent human consciousness but a psychosexual disturbance with a bow on top.
In the workplace, the narrative the inclusion and equity minded HR people want to establish is that if you are a woman and heaven forbid brown or black, then every unprofessional behavior that you encounter at work is on account of that minority status. If you want to discuss larger themes about women being invisible by default and generally set up with doing emotional labor to keep peace between disagreeable people who also don't know how to do their job, the HR person is no longer interested. The problem has to fit their checklist to rise to the level of discrimination and racism so suitable punishment can be doled out. That approach is like trying to cure terminal illness by daily pedicures so the person's feet are the best they can be.
Further in the book, these lines reminded me of my own childhood. I have heard exactly these words from women my mother's age. Many among them had the wherewithal to pursue a successful career but they decided to stay at home and focus on family because they were not geniuses:
A woman with aspirations had better make sure she was a genius, the Ladies’ Home Journal warned. “If she ended up doing something only ordinary, or ‘second-rate,’ she would be wasting the chance to raise a ‘first-rate’ child.”
Repeating this wisdom to themselves and others helped them make peace with their choice. There not a even a trace of genius among the husbands of these ladies but that did not prevent them from pursuing their "second-rate" careers and remain mostly absent from the work of raising a "first-rate" child. Somehow being a man allowed them the luxury of all-round mediocrity in life that was never afforded to their wives. The woman had to be "first-rate" at something or she was dispensable. Even as a child I found this operating model ludicrous.
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