Dress Codes for Women are a Joke

Ever since "business casual" became popular in the 1990s, work dress codes have essentially become male-only. Women's only restrictions could be summed as "no bare breasts, midriff, or groin."

Take Disney for example. For years Disney's dress code for its employees was described as "conservative," which in the gynocentric, feminized liberal media means "women are expected to dress like they are not at work, not a nightclub." A few days ago, Disney apparently decided that they were wrong to hold women to any standards in appearance:

Disney theme parks' dress coder relaxed
Female employees don't have to wear pantyhose with skirts anymore, unless the leg wear is part of a costume.
By Hugo Martín and Jason Garcia
June 16, 2010
Reporting from Los Angeles and Orlando, Fla. —

Chalk one up for women who work at Disney theme parks: They don't have to wear pantyhose anymore.

In the biggest change to the company's appearance code in a decade, the Walt Disney Co. has decided to let most female employees at Disney theme parks worldwide, including the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, forgo pantyhose when wearing skirts.

Although it may seem a trivial change in any other business, the relaxing of dress codes at Disneyland is a significant move considering that founder Walt Disney was adamant about making sure all employees maintained a well-groomed, all-American look.

"That clean-cut look never went out of style as far as Walt Disney was concerned," said David Koenig, the author of four books on Disneyland and a regular writer for http://www.mouseplanet.com, a website about the Disney parks.

Koenig recounts a time in the 1970s when some Disneyland managers brandished rulers to ensure that employees' sideburns and hair length met strict grooming standards.

But since then, the company has regularly revisited and relaxed its appearance and dress codes. The last major change to the policy came in 2000 when the company let male employees wear mustaches. Disney tweaked its guidelines again a few years later by allowing male employees to style their hair in cornrows.

Disney officials said the latest change, announced companywide May 28, was prompted by a routine review of company guidelines and a comparison with the dress codes of other Fortune 500 corporations.

"We continuously evaluate our appearances," Disneyland spokeswoman Betsy Sanchez said. "We are trying to stay relevant."

The decision to permit female employees to forgo pantyhose applies to most Disney employees, except where the leg wear is part of a particular costume, such as the outfit for characters such as Tinker Bell or Alice from Alice in Wonderland.

Among the 20,000 or so employees at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, the changes will apply mostly to staff who work in offices or behind the scenes at the park.

Among other changes to the code, women will for the first time be permitted to wear sleeveless tops — though in typically restrictive Disney fashion, only if the shoulder straps are at least 3 inches wide. Female employees also will be allowed to wear Capri pants and sling-back shoes that also have open toes.

Men, meanwhile, will now be allowed to wear untucked, casual shirts.

This "dress code" like most modern American dress codes for working women is a joke. Note that under Disney's new dress code women can wear sleeveless shirts, capris, skirts with bare legs, and sandals. They can basically wear whatever they want (except shorts, it would appear). That's not professional looking - that's casual. And keep in mind that this is the dress code at a "conservative" company. But of course, "conservative" means "what was liberal ten or fifteen years ago."

Men, in contrast, are now finally allowed to wear untucked shirts, although women were probably doing that at Disney for years before. But even with untucked (presumably collared) shirts, men will still be wearing slacks, socks, and dress shoes, which look a lot more professional than what the women will be wearing.

The headline writer made a big deal over the fact that women don't have to wear nylons anymore (Disney was probably one of the few places left to require women to wear them after bare legs became ubiquitous throughout the 2000s). Nylons make women look professional and polished, improving their image. Of course, American women stopped caring about their appearances long ago, except to make themselves look sluttier, so it's understandable why they are happy about not having to wear them anymore.

Don't mistake me for a prude. I have no problem with women wearing revealing clothing in general and I'm probably less prudish than most Americans in some ways. For example I wouldn't have a problem with women going topless on American beaches as many do in Europe. But I think that there is a time and place for such clothing. Work is not one of them. If men are capable of dressing professionally, then women should be to.

It really shouldn't be surprising that so many companies have nonexistent dress codes for women. HR departments are run by women, like the spokeswoman quoted, who are to busy "trying to stay relevant" with the latest Sex and the City styles than to hold women to any sort of professional appearance standards. That just wouldn't be fashionable. And corporate men are probably too afraid to hold women to any sort of appearance standards, for various reasons.

Professional jobs are becoming more and more feminized as America reverts to a 21st century female farming system matriarchy. Combine this with the fact that young American women have sluttiness ingrained into them from the time they are kids and it's easy to see why corporations don't (or are unable to) hold women to appearance and dress standards anymore.

When Liberals Say They Support Freedom of Speech, They Are Lying

It's a common view that liberals support freedom of speech (or expression) more so than conservatives. The problem is, liberals care more about discrimination and egalitarianism more than they do freedom of speech, so if someone's speech offends a protected group - racial minorities, women, gays - then they do not support freedom of speech and the offending speech must be suppressed. (I realize that there are people with some left-wing views who are free speech purists, but these people are often left-libertarians rather than liberals.)

Here's yet another example. I found this via a link on Feministing, which led to a site named Sociological Images (as an aside, I took an intro to sociology class four years ago and it would have more accurately been termed "intro to socialism). In New Mogadishu Minneapolis, Minnesota, an ISP named USI Wireless put up billboards saying "Fast, cheap and satisfaction guaranteed." A woman named Stacey Burns of Minneapolis (who has an online trail as a feminist activist and Obama campaigner, and is married to this guy) saw one of them, took a picture, posted it on her Facebook. The caption she put is:

"USI Wireless is a pimp. This is how they're selling their wireless service in Minneapolis. Give them a call at 952.253.3262 (Option 1) or email: info@usiwireless.com. When I called, they assured me that they did some test marketing and everybody loved it, but the 100,000 American girls sexually trafficked in the US with an initial recruitment age of 11-14 might not guffaw quite as loudly as the focus group did."

So there you have it. If you put up a billboard that makes a joking reference to cheap hookers, you're a pimp and inconsiderate towards child sexual abuse victims!

Thanks to Burns, the billboards eventually gained the attention of City Council member Gary Schiff (e-mail), a women's studies major (no, I'm not joking), who was unsurprisingly offended and "then talked to city staff, who told him they had been talking to USI's founders for three days but had gotten nowhere. Schiff also called USI, but said his calls were never returned."

Another councilwoman, Elizabeth Glidden (e-mail), joined in: "My message to them was, 'I hope you're taking these down right now." As a result of the governmental pressure, Clear Channel (the billboard owners) and USI caved and removed the billboards.

Predictably, a few scattered "progressive" websites are heralding this as a victory. After all, if they find something offensive, it must be shut down. American Renaissance discovered this a few months ago and Pam Geller is learning this right now.

Can you imagine the reaction if conservative politicians leaned on advertisers to not put up billboards they considered to be blasphemous? It would be a national story in the liberal media, with commentators rushing to condemn the conservatives for their assault on freedom of speech. The conservative politicians would then apologize and withdraw their criticisms.

But when two liberal city government leaders pressure a private company to take down an ad they find offensive, it only garners a few local news articles and posts on liberal websites. This is how liberals work - they slowly take away our freedom and the media ignores it. When whites start getting arrested for "hate speech," the liberal media will probably ignore it, too.

The next time a Republican is in power, libertarians should remember stories like this before allying with liberals against conservatism statism. Despite what they claim, liberals do not support freedom of speech. They are its enemy.

Why I Am Not a Conservative

Libertarians in general are often confused with conservatives. With my particularly reactionary views on race and gender, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm mistaken for a conservative by some. I reject that label for several reasons, some of which I have listed below.

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1. Conservatism is an incoherent ideology.
Like liberalism, conservatism is characterized by cognitive dissonance. Conservatives claim to support limited government, but they also support wars, censorship, the police state, and anything else that increases the scope of the enforcement arm of the government. Also, when was the last time you heard a conservative politician other than Ron Paul seriously advocate abolishing most of the federal government, social services, and income taxes?

Conservatives claim to oppose big government and taxes, but the fact is, due to the giant military budget, it will be impossible to drastically cut the size of the federal government and federal taxes without cutting the military budget and using the military solely for national defense, rather than foreign adventures.

2. Conservatives worship the military.
According to conservatives, there is no institution more worthy of praise than the United States military. Personally, I don't see what's so praiseworthy about invading countries halfway across the world that pose no threat to us and killing thousands of their citizens. If the military was deployed along the Mexican border, I would support it, but the fact is the US military as it currently exists does not defend America, just the interests of certain Americans.

Also, far from being a conservative institution, the United States military is probably the most PC-infested organization in the United States.

3. Conservatives are Christians.
My religious views are somewhat complex and I will probably write a future post describing them in detail, but for now it suffices that I am not a Christian. I believe that Christianity is a detriment to America and all of white European civilization. It is a global religion, not an ethnic religion, and its adherents are generally at the forefront of the liberal agenda, usually unwittingly (i.e. the refugee importation movement).

4. Conservatives are statists.
The current conservative anti-government sentiment is fraudulent. From January 2001 to January 2009, conservatives did all they could to increase the size of the federal government, from No Child Left Behind and faith-based funding to the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act. Lew Rockwell aptly dubbed this "red-state fascism."

Conservatives only whine about big government when they are not controlling the government. If John McCain had been elected and expanded the welfare state, there would be no Tea Party protests.

5. Conservatives are corporate sycophants.
This applies to many libertarians, too. While liberal attacks on the free market should be opposed, supporting corporations does not defend the free market. Corporations are a product of the state and many of them, such as the military-industrial complex, subsist entirely on taxpayer dollars, while others are privileged by the state, such as media industries with their Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

6. Cultural and social conservatism are abject failures.
The 2000s were a decade dominated by conservatives. And what happened? Our society moved closer to Idiocracy, our culture became trashier, rap music became accepted by whites, women became sluttier, and our values further declined. The Clintonian 90s were more socially and culturally conservative than the Bush 2000s were.

7. Conservatives are blind on racial issues.
Mainstream conservatives are as liberal on race as any Democrat. They may oppose affirmative action, although many don't, but none will defend freedom of association, nor will any acknowledge human biodiversity and racial differences in IQ.

8. Conservatives worship democracy.
Democracy will probably end up destroying conservatism; as the percentage of nonwhites increases in the United States, the likelihood of the Republicans winning the presidency will decrease (John McCain would have won if 2008 America's demographics were the same as those of 1976 America). Yet, conservatives are so fond of this ideology that will destroy them that they seek to export it.

9. Conservatives don't have better moral values than liberals.
Conservatives, particularly those of the religious variety, fashion themselves as having better moral values than liberals. Indeed, this was one of the main themes of the 2004 election. The fact is, outside of the Left Coast, liberals and conservatives have about the same moral values.

Neocons, in my opinion, have worse moral values than liberals. At least liberals acknowledge that lying to start a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people is wrong.

10. Conservative women are no less slutty than liberal women.
This seems like a minor issue, but I've long been irked by the fact that conservatives blame women's sluttiness on liberalism. The fact is, conservative women are no less slutty than liberal ones, especially young conservative women. Plenty of conservative girls go off to college to become binge-drinking dorm rats and if you take a look at pictures from CPAC, College Republican events, conservative internships, etc., you'll find that just like liberal and apolitical women, young conservative women are incapable of dressing professionally.

Sarah Palin's family is a good example. They are often described as a conservative family, yet her daughter spawned a bastard child. Sarah doesn't exactly dress very conservatively either - last year, as the Huffington Post reported, she wore a short skirt, bare legged, with sandals to a Memorial Day commemoration.

11. Conservative men are usually white knights.
While conservatives acknowledge the damage that feminism has wrought on American society, whenever they discuss one of the consequences of feminism, they inevitably find some way to blame it on men. Just like feminists, they believe that women hold no responsibility for their actions, but that men are to blame for every problem women self-inflict. Many also believe that women are naturally morally superior to men.

For example, when they write about campus hook-up culture, instead of blaming it on college girls being sluts, conservatives blame it on predatory men and claim that it harms young women ("women need relationships," etc.). Same with abortion. Instead of blaming women who have abortions, they blame the abortionists - men like George Tiller.

Conservatives also decry the fact that men have responded to female empowerment by becoming decidedly less chivalrous and often question the manhood of men who are reluctant to risk their lives for ungrateful, empowered women. Christian conservatives especially are critical of the lack of gallantry found in the modern American man (there's even an organization of suicidal men and brainwashed boys dedicated to restoring this - the Christian Boys' & Men's Titanic Society). I remember back in 2007, Christian conservatives were astounded that the men at Virginia Tech on April 16 did not throw themselves at Cho Seung Hui to protect the women in their classes.

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Note that most of the items on this list do not apply to paleoconservatives, but paleocons have been excommunicated from the official conservative movement. When the word "conservative" is used, people don't think of Pat Buchanan, Alternative Right, and The Political Cesspool, they think of Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, and talk radio.

Repost: Anti-Unionism

I'm too tired to write much tonight, so I've decided to repost something that I posted several months ago when I first started the blog (and had fewer readers).

Most libertarians and conservatives, with the exception some paleocons and left-libertarians, are staunch opponents of trade unions. Warner Todd Huston, a rather eccentric "conservative" (and from his picture, evidently a donut-eating contest winner) has said "unions are inherently unAmerican", a belief not uncommon on the mainstream right. Libertarian/anarcho-capitalist Lew Rockwell even titled a UAW-related blogpost "Another Criminal Strike". Indeed, the LewRockwell.com writers in general frequently refer to unions as criminal gangs.

As a libertarian, I oppose the privileges granted to unions by the federal government, but nor do I like the privileges granted to corporations and groups of corporations by all levels of government, including eminent domain takings, tax increment financing, subsidies, and insane copyright laws such as the DMCA (which in no way "promote(s) the Progress of Science and useful Arts", but that's a topic for another day). Corporations themselves are government creations and receive special protections and privileges from governments. Now, I realize that libertarians criticize corporate welfare and Big Business, but it is ludicrous that conservatives and Chamber of Commerce libertarians will call Big Labor criminals and anti-American while at the same time verbally fellating Big Business, which can be pretty criminal and anti-American itself (i.e. hiring illegal immigrants).

Sure, the SEIU is probably close to being a criminal organization, but I doubt anyone could honestly call the bricklayers union a group of thugs. In some trades, joining the union means higher wages and better benefit, so it makes sense for the workers to join unions, just as it makes sense for different corporations of certain fields to form trade associations to protect their interests and for white-collar workers to join professional organizations (for example, the IEEE).

The union most frequently targeted by conservatives is the National Education Assocation (NEA). The conservative hatred of the NEA is comparable to the liberal hatred of Wal-Mart. Yes, the NEA is dominated by liberals and feminists, but whenever a conservative bashes the NEA, inevitably they bring up its policies that affect "urban students." These commentators correctly note the fact that urban schools, well, suck.

However, the fact that urban schools suck has nothing to do with the NEA. Suburban students are taught by NEA members and they have decent test scores. The fact is, urban schools suck because they are predominantly black and Hispanic, while suburban schools are attended by whites and Asians. Blacks have a mean IQ of 85, Hispanics 89, Whites 103, and Asians 106. Lower IQ students will simply do worse in school than higher IQ students. Neither the liberal solution, spending more gigadollars on urban schools, nor the conservative solution, abolishing the NEA (and giving the black kids vouchers), will solve this.

Yes, this post was supposed to be about anti-unionism, but I wanted to point out how far conservatives will go just to prove that they are not racist to liberals who will hate them anyways and blacks who will never vote for them.

Originally posted here on February 10.

Anti-Unionism

Most libertarians and conservatives, with the exception some paleocons and left-libertarians, are staunch opponents of trade unions. Warner Todd Huston, a rather eccentric "conservative" (and from his picture, evidently a donut-eating contest winner) has said "unions are inherently unAmerican", a belief not uncommon on the mainstream right. Libertarian/anarcho-capitalist Lew Rockwell even titled a UAW-related blogpost "Another Criminal Strike". Indeed, the LewRockwell.com writers in general frequently refer to unions as criminal gangs.

As a libertarian, I oppose the privileges granted to unions by the federal government, but nor do I like the privileges granted to corporations and groups of corporations by all levels of government, including eminent domain takings, tax increment financing, subsidies, and insane copyright laws such as the DMCA (which in no way "promote(s) the Progress of Science and useful Arts", but that's a topic for another day). Corporations themselves are government creations and receive special protections and privileges from governments. Now, I realize that libertarians criticize corporate welfare and Big Business, but it is ludicrous that conservatives and Chamber of Commerce libertarians will call Big Labor criminals and anti-American while at the same time verbally fellating Big Business, which can be pretty criminal and anti-American itself (i.e. hiring illegal immigrants).

Sure, the SEIU is probably close to being a criminal organization, but I doubt anyone could honestly call the bricklayers union a group of thugs. In some trades, joining the union means higher wages and better benefit, so it makes sense for the workers to join unions, just as it makes sense for different corporations of certain fields to form trade associations to protect their interests and for white-collar workers to join professional organizations (for example, the IEEE).

The union most frequently targeted by conservatives is the National Education Assocation (NEA). The conservative hatred of the NEA is comparable to the liberal hatred of Wal-Mart. Yes, the NEA is dominated by liberals and feminists, but whenever a conservative bashes the NEA, inevitably they bring up its policies that affect "urban students." These commentators correctly note the fact that urban schools, well, suck.

However, the fact that urban schools suck has nothing to do with the NEA. Suburban students are taught by NEA members and they have decent test scores. The fact is, urban schools suck because they are predominantly black and Hispanic, while suburban schools are attended by whites and Asians. Blacks have a mean IQ of 85, Hispanics 89, Whites 103, and Asians 106. Lower IQ students will simply do worse in school than higher IQ students. Neither the liberal solution, spending more gigadollars on urban schools, nor the conservative solution, abolishing the NEA (and giving the black kids vouchers), will solve this.

Yes, this post was supposed to be about anti-unionism, but I wanted to point out how far conservatives will go just to prove that they are not racist to liberals who will hate them anyways and blacks who will never vote for them.