Boners, Tossed Salad, and the Perils of Being ‘Too Hot’ In the Workplace
The Village Voice has an excessively long profile this week, “Is This Woman Too Hot to Be a Banker?”, about a woman fired from Citibank last year because her bosses told her they “couldn’t concentrate” around her—she was simply too hot. The woman, Debbie Lorenzana, is—as the Voice so eloquently puts it, alongside a ginormous photo of her (not the one pictured here)—“is J.Lo curves meets Jessica Simpson rack meets Audrey Hepburn elegance—a head-turning beauty.” Um, OK.
Anyway: this woman got fired from her banking job last summer because of “work performance” (or so Citibank claimed). But she’s suing the company, alleging that her bosses told her that “as a result of the shape of her figure, [her] clothes were purportedly ‘too distracting’ for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear.”
This is the way Debbie Lorenzana tells it: Her bosses told her they couldn’t concentrate on their work because her appearance was too distracting. They ordered her to stop wearing turtlenecks. She was also forbidden to wear pencil skirts, three-inch heels, or fitted business suits. Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mom, pointed out female colleagues whose clothing was far more revealing than hers: “They said their body shapes were different from mine, and I drew too much attention,” she says.
It’s not your typical sex-harassment lawsuit, for sure. But, as Lorenzana’s lawyer puts it, it all boils down to self-control. He told the Voice, “It’s like saying we can’t think anymore ‘cause our penises are standing up—and we cannot think about you except in a sexual manner—and we can’t look at you without wanting to have sexual intercourse with you. And it’s up to you, gorgeous woman, to lessen your appeal so that we can focus!”
We’d also make the point that even though it’s fact that unattractive people are discriminated against more frequently, being hot in the workplace—especially for women—can indeed be a double-edged sword: women lose by being either too attractive or not attractive enough. “It’s so tiring,” Lorenzana tells the Voice. “My entire life, I’ve been dealing with this. ‘Cause people say, ‘Oh, you got a job because you look that way.’ So you gotta work four times harder to prove you are capable. To prove you didn’t get this because of the way you look.” But then you get fired for it, apparently.
Which can leave managers, colleagues, and, apparently, even the Village Voice, confused. In between descriptions of the woman, a single mom, having to skip Christmas gifts, the Voice story is peppered with “More Images of Debbie Lorenzana here!” amid sexy photo after sexy photo (and one not-sexy photo, staged by her lawyer) of the woman. Perhaps our lovely former colleague put it best when he said:
she is HOT
and got … fired? … because of it
so … naturally, we’re outraged
but running pictures of her being all hot?
so confusing
so many messages all mixed up.
it’s like a tossed salad of outrage and boners!
And there you have it. Boners, tossed salad, and the perils of sexuality in the workplace.
