a “neighborhood restaurant” wearing a size too small dolphin shorts and a shirt showing off his midriff and chest.7 But for a woman this is “beach wear,” revealing her truly feminine characteristics.
Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos (1987:9) argue that the “sexual division of labor is grounded in stereotypes of innate sex differences in traits and abilities, and maintained by gender-role socialization and various social control mechanisms.”… The director of training at Bazooms advised new hires to look like you are going on a date. You were chosen because you all are pretty. But I say makeup makes everyone look better. Push-up bras make everyone look better. And we all want to look our best. These “feminine ideals” not only define “the perfect” Bazooms girl, but are used by management to constantly reify femininity in the workplace through the dissemination of “rules” and the use of discipline to uphold these rules. In this way, through interaction, not only power relations but gender roles are constantly being defined and redefined in the workplace.
Emotional Labor
The gendered workplace demands more than manipulation of behavior and appearance. Arlie Hochschild’s (1979) ethnography of flight attendants introduces another type of labor that is common in female-dominated occupations, which she dubs “emotional labor.” Emotional labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain an outward countenance that produces the desired state of mind in others (Hochschild 1983:7). Thus, emotion workers must always “display” an image that is determined by management, and “over time ‘display’ comes to assume a certain relation to feeling” (p. 90). Hochschild found that emotion workers, over time, may become estranged from their true feelings, which are ignored, disguised, or created in order to achieve a desired image.8
Hochschild’s notion of “display” and manipulation of feeling can be found at Bazooms, especially among the female employees. According to management, the Bazooms girl, when on the floor, is expected to “perform as if [she] is on stage.” This means embodying a specific image, sustaining an outward countenance, and behaving in specific ways. One manager with whom I spoke put it this way:
Well, after working eight years I can pretty much tell who will be perfect for the job and who won’t. [By looking at them?] Well, by talking with them and seeing what type of personality they have. You know, they must be performers as Bazooms girls. Nobody can be bubbly that long, but when you’re working you put on an act.
As Greta Paules (1991:160) put it, “By furnishing the waitress with a script, a costume, and a backdrop of a servant, the restaurant is encouraging her to become absorbed in her role—to engage in deep acting.” …
The corporate image that Bazooms projects of happy, sexy, eager-to-serve workers is what sells. What became clear to me on one of my first days on the job was that emotional labor is demanded not only by management, but by customers as well. For instance, one afternoon I approached a table full of marines without a smile or a “Can I help you?” look on my face. Their first words to me were, “You look pissed.” I felt I had to make excuses for what I realized was poor emotion management on my part.
Deference is a large portion of emotion work, according to Hochschild. “Ritualized deference is always involved when one is in a subordinate position” (Reskin and Roos 1987:8). Clearly, in the service industry, employees (the majority women) are expected to have been trained in “niceness” from an early age (girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice). So “working as women” (or girls) naturally assumes that “a friendly and courteous manner” will be incorporated into the job. During training at Bazooms, new hires were instructed to “kill them [rude customers] with kindness and class.” In other words, suppress any desire to yell or lecture rude customers, and instead, defer to the old maxim “the customer always is right,” and treat them only with kindness. In this case, emotion work entails being at the service of others to the point of devaluing oneself and one’s own emotions. Because of their subordination and vulnerable positioning, women become easy targets of verbal abuse, and of others’ (managers’, customers’, even colleagues’) displaced feelings. When kindness is not effective enough in handling rude customers, Bazooms asks their waitresses to defer to the management. “Problems” are then handled by the men, who must also manage their emotions, but they are more allowed to wield anger, since they have been socialized to express “negative” emotions from an early age (Hochschild 1983:163)….
The Sexualized Workplace
It is beyond my—my mental capacity to understand how anyone could walk into a [Bazooms] restaurant and apply for a job and look at the sign and look at the—the concept and look at the uniform and not understand that female sex appeal is an essential ingredient in the concept.
—Mr. Mcneil, Manager Of Bazooms, Minnesota
At the turn of the century Emma Goldman suggested, “Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work but rather as a sex…. She must assert herself as a personality, not as a sex commodity” (1910:7,12). Close to a century later, Catherine MacKinnon (1980) related a similar point in her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women: “Most women perform the jobs they do because of their gender, with the element of sexuality pervasively explicit” (p. 60). According to Goldman, MacKinnon, and other feminist theorists, women not only work “as women” but as sexualized women.
Bazooms makes no secret about sexuality as a part of its key to success. The employee manual states in its sexual harassment policy that employees should be aware that they are employed in an establishment “based upon female sex appeal.” As Mr. McNeil pointed out, everything right down to the waitresses’ uniforms and the name of the restaurant connotes sex appeal. The slang term bazooms is usually used in the context of male desire and breast fetishism; it is a term that treats one part of the female body as an object of sexual desire. Tanya, director of training for Bazooms, answered a new hire’s question about the term bazooms in this way:
So what if [Bazooms] means “tits.” That doesn’t offend me. It’s all in fun … just six guys in Florida trying to be goofy. They used to want us to hide the fact that it means breasts. But now we figure, Why be ashamed of it? You girls should never be ashamed of where you work. And if anyone asks you what it means, you just say, “Whatever you want it to mean.”
Why is female sex appeal such a great marketing success? Probably because it appeals to male fantasy. Customers (roughly eighty-five percent male at my workplace) buy into the commodified Bazooms girl, which they hear about everywhere. Since “no publicity is bad publicity” to Bazooms, Bazooms girls have been highlighted in popular magazines such as Playboy. In a leading national business magazine, Bazooms is described as a place with “food, folks, and fun, and a little bit of sex appeal.” In fact, according to this magazine, the idea for Bazooms came from a Florida football player/contractor in 1983 who wanted “a mildly profitable excuse for swilling beer and ogling blondes.” Thus, Bazooms is premised on women’s bodies and their presence in male fantasies ….
Comments that customers made to me reflect the “titillating” nature of Bazooms, and the expectations they have about what the waitresses symbolize. One man said he didn’t want to embarrass himself, but he thought that I was “too wholesome” to work at Bazooms. Answering my question about why he didn’t think I fit in, he whispered to me, “You are not slutty enough.” Another male customer called me over to remark, “I’ve been watching you all night and I think you have to be the most innocent-looking girl here. This means that you must have a wild side and I like that.” Both of these comments encapsulate this male fantasy of the virgin/whore. I was obviously too much “virgin” for both of them, but the second man made up for this by fantasizing that I had a “wild
