The Times reports on an interesting psychology experiment about breasts and work whose results seem to confirm received wisdom: that men focus on women’s sexual characteristics, not their abilities. Well, duh.
But that’s not the conclusion the writer draws – no, she implies that lack of career success is our fault for not having perfect tits.
Participants were shown one of four videotapes featuring the same actress giving a speech on careers.
Men and women were asked to rank her performance based on positive and negative characteristics. In fact the only difference between each film was the size of the presenter’s bra, representing an A, B, C or D cup.
While no bias was found among the female viewers, the men ranked the actress significantly higher on all levels when her breasts were represented as “just right”, that is, medium sized. Men evaluated the same woman less positively when she projected too much or too little mammary mass.
It is not clear whether men are aware of this bias. Other studies suggest that men prefer no particular breast size, but are primarily attracted to proportionality in women, with a specific hip to bust to waist ratio.
Women, on the other hand, tend to overestimate the size of breasts that men prefer, ranking the size they believe men desire as higher than the one that men choose.
[…]
Another interesting highlight of the Central Florida study was the actress’s own reaction to her growing bosom. As she moved up the alphabet in terms of cup size, she felt more self-conscious about her breasts and more worried about her performance.
I most certainly don’t agree with the tack the Times writer, Elizabeth Squires, takes on the study: that this means women should learn to hide their breasts if they want to get on.
Nobody wants to talk about breast etiquette at work, but everyone has an opinion. Some workers find breast displays so unsettling that one female boss was warned that her cleavage could constitute sexual harassment of her male colleagues.
The Florida research shows that in order to rise up the career ladder it is probably best not to draw attention to your chest.
Now as a matter of everyday etiquette in a globalised world where you can’t take anyone’s cultural norms for granted, then not sticking your tits in someone’s face, or your asscrack or your thong, or your stinking male atmpits, seems only sensible and courteous.
But this article’s subtext – be modest, camouflage yourself. pretend you’re not female – applies only to women and not only that women whose present breast size is over or under the optimum. Forget success, freaks of nature, or get a burka. But if you have perfect, pert, medium sized breasts, then it’s wahay! and up the career ladder for you.
Not a word in the article about why it is that men are socialised to treat simple secondary sexual charactistics as more indicative of character, intellect and competence than actual character, intellect or competence, oh no – once again, it’s all women’s own fault, for not being perfect. Again.
Which is odd, coming from a woman with a breast-positive book to promote.
Did she really not see what that experiment was also saying, or is it possible, giving her the benefit of the doubt, that her words were truncated by an overzealous editor and there’s a missing paragraph? If it’s the former, I don’t hold out much hope for the book.
