Or so says New York banker Debrahlee Lorenzana in
this Village Voice pieceabout the lawsuit she filed when she lost her job in August last year after her bosses at Citibank repeatedly told her she was too voluptuous, too curvaceous, too distracting, too attractive — too hot:
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. As Lorenzana's lawsuit puts it, her bosses told her that "as a result of the shape of her figure, such clothes were purportedly 'too distracting' for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear."
Gee, where have we heard this argument — the one that places men's reactions to women's looks squarely on women's shoulders — before? In rape cases, the military, and pretty much anywhere men don't want women to be.
