It’s the Humiliation

The most salient thing about the story that got some attention last month about servers who were fired after they refused to go along with a regimen in which women (but not men) were subject to weigh-ins and making their weights public is that it’s entirely about humiliation. Although of course there are serious feminist issues with narrow conceptions of beauty, the excessive importance placed on conventional attractiveness, etc., one can argue that in our unjust society conventional beauty matters for jobs like this, and evidently there are greater injustices involved where aesthetic factors determine job decisions where they weren’t even arguably relevant. But this kind of harassment by employers is not about wanting to draw traffic or increase tips or whatever. You don’t need to weigh someone to see if they’re conventionally attractive or not. And, of course, being slender is generally a conventionally attractive trait for men too, but it’s hard to imagine male waiters being subjected to this kind of treatment. This is about female employees being dominated, and as such represents a very instructive example of sexual harassment and why it’s a serious problem.