"You're Too Fucking Hot! So You're Fired!"

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I am not inclined to feel sorry for beautiful women who bitch about how shitty their lives are. Whah! Whah! Whah! is my usual response. You're beautiful! You wake up every day and the countenance in your mirror is beautiful! You walk down the street being beautiful! How bad could your life be?

I have a very good friend, an undeniably beautiful woman, not one of those, "oh, she's kind of pretty," women, but one of those women who, when you are out in public with them, make you invisible. Who, if you are both in a conversation with some guy, and if you are the one saying all the funny and intelligent and insightful things, and her part of the conversation consists of standing there being beautiful and nodding, the guy reacts to the things YOU say as if those pearls of wisdom and humor and insight are coming out of HER mouth. It's like being Cyrano de Bergerac, only without the balcony and the dying at the end part.

I once said to this friend, "You know, I think it MUST be easier to go through life as a beautiful woman. It HAS to be," and she looked very solemn, and said to me, "Well, it's not everything you think it is."

(And that made me remember that my beautiful friend's childhood had been stolen from her -- no, in fact, it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden and the fucking Rape of Nanking all rolled into one, which in turn led her to make shitty relationship decisions with weak-ass men, and it turned into some tiny little rage issues, and maybe an inability to say, "no, I don't think I'll have that fourth-fifth-sixth cocktail," and a general reluctance to get through most days without some sort of pharmaceutical back brace, and I thought, "Okay, let me reconsider this generalization of mine.")

But in general, I don't really have issues with the beauty thing. I usually look at beautiful girls and say, "Wow, is that a beautiful girl." It's a fact of life that as long as we have eyes, we are going to respond to beautiful things. You can rail against it, wish it wasn't so, but fortunately or unfortunately, that's just the way it is. And I see nothing wrong with noting that someone is beautiful if, empirically, it's so.

Plus, I work in fashion, ferchrissakes, and the first thing on most job descriptions here is "Be Pretty." (Face it, we wouldn't sell a thing if our models looked like Trudy-next-door. Valentina Zelyaeva, however, moves product. Or aspirations. Or something.) I, of course, was forced to elbow my way in on, "Be fiercely competent, a huge ballbuster, a vicious negotiator, oh, and passably attractive."

Anyway, my point being today, that in reading about Debrahlee Lorenzana, who was apparently fired from Citibank for being too hot, I realize that I also have a big problem with beauty being held against someone. As if she can help it! Because she's good looking and stacked like a brick fucking shithouse, she's too distracting for them to work with? What is she supposed to do? Go into work wearing some schmatte to hide her body? Gain fifty pounds so they don't want her? What the fuck do you guys want from us?

You know what? I hope those fuckers from Citibank have to give her millions. MILLIONS. Maybe it'll teach a few bankers that despite the fact that they work in an industry where most post-adolescent frat boy behavior is merely winked at, sexual harassment will STILL get your sorry ass sued.