TWEET! tweet! tweet…

Our Twitter Picture

Feminist Philosophers are now on Twitter.  Check it out. 

Twitter and the  linking plugin, tweetfeed, are imperfect.  We’re suppose to have an update on Twitter every hour.   Instread, yesterday a partial update took about 20 hours.  Still, twitter and we are working the issues.

FeministPhils (our user name) appears to have some followers in the porno industry.  I think we’ll just leave that for now, but if you have other suggestions, please let us know.  One can block people from being users.

(I hope none of you is shocked or dismayed.  Jender did approve it, so now any fault is jointly owned, I again hope.)

“Lady tennis players”

And here’s my other norms-of-appearance related gripe:

Hurrah – Wimbledon time! One of the few times of the year that women can be found on the sports pages, (almost) rivalling coverage of sportsmen. (Note that recently women cricketers in the UK also received some headlines. Hurrah again!).

But – boo! – once again, ridiculous attention is being paid to the appearance of the women on court.
And we get silly silly claims such as:

“lady tennis players” should not grunt because “it makes them unsexy, and sex appeal is the main selling point of women’s tennis”.  (Former tennis player Michael Stich)

Or maybe the tennis has something to do with it? Yawn….

A&F: Classic [i.e. non-disabled] American Style

First in a series of posts on ‘norms-of-appearance related grievances’:

The Guardian reports on this ongoing tribunal, in which a student with a prosthetic arm is suing Abercrombie & Fitch (the clothes retailers) for disability discrimination.

the firm agreed she could wear a white cardigan to cover the link between her prosthesis and her upper arm. But shortly afterwards, she was told she could not work on the shop floor unless she took off the cardigan as she was breaking the firm’s “look policy”. She told the tribunal that someone in the A&F head office suggested she stay in the stockroom “until the winter uniform arrives”.The “look policy” stipulates that all employees “represent Abercrombie & Fitch with natural, classic American style consistent with the company’s brand” and “look great while exhibiting individuality”. Workers must wear a “clean, natural, classic hairstyle” and have nails which extend “no more than a quarter inch beyond the tip of the finger”.

Dean said today in her evidence: “A female A&F manager used the ‘look policy’ and the wearing of the cardigan as an excuse to hide me away in the stockroom.

We’ve worried before about look policies – that they could be used to discriminate against people with disabilities is a further deeply probelmatic aspect of them.