Thursday, June 10, 2010

Fun With Feministing: Lookism Edition

Yesterday, over at Feministing, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, their token nonwhite, is upset because American Apparel requires you to e-mail them a picture of yourself if you want to work there.
Just When You Thought American Apparel Couldn't Fail Any Harder... They manage to.To work at American Apparel you must email a full body shot to some mysterious email address after which you are approved or rejected. Failure.

Via Gawker.

Clearly, that standard leaves a lot of wiggle room. Now, a source tells us that American Apparel has a new hiring policy. For the past several months, they say, job applicants at AA have had their photos taken--photos which are then sent to the email address work@americanapparel.net, where they are "approved" by a nameless person for hiring. The applicant's resumé is a distant second when it comes to hiring decisions, our source says.

Our source also tells us that a new policy now says that in order for current AA employees to be approved for a promotion or raise, they must also have their photos approved. As they put it, "Your looks determine your position and pay rate, not how effective you are at your job."

Douchey D Charney even had the audacity to say last time he was questioned on judging employees by looks that his employees must, "have good fashion sense...But this does not necessarily mean they have to be physically attractive." What do you have to say for yourself this time? And I have been to American Apparel. If what their employees are wearing is a "good sense of style," then I color me anti-fashion.

Not satisfied with fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, agism, cisgenderism, and ablism, leftists are now fighting against lookism - the practice on judging people based on their physical appearance. I've always wondered, if it's wrong for men to judge women based on their looks, is it wrong for women to judge men based on their alphaness?

However, it's perfectly understandable why Samhita is fighting lookism:

For comparison, here's what she looked like four or five years ago:

Talk about letting yourself go. I guess she decided to fight the lookist patriarchy by making herself ugly, Andrea Dworkin style.

1 comment:

  1. When we are no longer free to associate with, or hire or fire whoever we want, all sorts of absurd contradictions and hypocrisies arise, like this. A modeling company can discriminate based on looks, but not a clothing store? Why not? And then it's up to a group of govt officials to determine if looks are an important aspect of the job.

    A business is an extension of a person's private property, and therefore entirely reserved to his domain of operation. If he wants to hire only 1-legged ginger dwarf albinos, that's his right. If he wants to hire only pretty white people, same. Abolishing the right to discriminate incontrovertibly made whites slaves to whatever minorities wish to use the race card against us. And it's all because of the jew lawyers and congressmen who were behind the revolutionary 1965 civil rights laws and immigration laws.

    Going from forcing people apart (segregation) to forcing them together are not opposites, they're an indication that a revolution took place, with one govt overthrowing the other. The consistency is not letting people decide for themselves if they want to interact with other races. Segregationists said you CANNOT, while the new jewish rulers said you MUST. The ideal would be, if you want to you can, but if you don't that's ok too.

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