employee rejects the company’s expectation; another turns it to her own ends….
Negotiation of Sexuality and Sexual Harassment
There are times when the Bazooms game goes too far. What may be fun and games to one woman may be sexual harassment to another. Responses to crudeness or to offensive comments or actions by customers take many different forms at Bazooms. Katy says that when customers deal “sexually” with her: I just get so embarrassed and walk away. But if they said something that offended me, I’d just go to the managers. I wouldn’t even hesitate. Trina concurs, saying: We don’t have to put up with jack. I won’t take [offensive remarks]. It’s not worth my pride. I give customers the gnarliest looks. Kristy’s response to offensive remarks is different: I usually just laugh and walk away. As illustrated in these differing instances, women are responding in varied ways to the sexualized nature of the job, and to offensiveness from customers….
Harassment is taken for granted as part of the job at Bazooms. By defining abuse as part of the job, waitresses can continue to work without necessarily internalizing or accepting the daily hassles and degradations as aspects of their self-definitions or sense of self-worth (LaPointe 1992:391). In other words, if women enter into a waitressing job expecting crude remarks, degrading uniforms, and unnecessary management-based power plays, they may prepare themselves for the worst by setting personal boundaries, with conditions attached.
The waitress (Christine) who had her “butt grabbed” made a decision to deal with the harassment in a way that she thought would bring a higher tip. And it did. Another waitress, Twayla, made a decision to react quite differently in a similar circumstance: I turned right around and told him, “You will not do these things to me.” These two women weighed personal priorities and dealt with similar sexual behavior in different ways. Christine decided to allow a man to cross a particular boundary—but for a price, turning the incident to her advantage. Twayla made clear her boundary would not be crossed….
For others, self-esteem is more undermined than affirmed by the sexualization of the workplace, and the tips are not worth the price. Bazooms is kind of degrading sometimes, says Trina. [Customers] refer to us as if we are stupid. It’s hard to explain, the way they talk … they are talking down to us. Of course, contempt sometimes goes the other way. Trina goes on to add that the waitresses don’t respect the customers either: I think the waitresses kind of look down on the men. Because all of them—it’s like they are dirty old men.
Conclusion
Bazooms is a good deal more than a “family” restaurant or a place where men can “swill beer and ogle blondes.” It is a theater in which dramas of power, gender, and sexuality are played out. Within this drama, women play an explicitly subordinate role. As MacKinnon, LaPointe, Reskin and Roos, and Hochschild point out, their behaviors are severely constrained by the realities of employment in the service sector. Women are hired to put on a specific performance, and at Bazooms they are constrained by the formal script that Bazooms encourages its employees to follow. Furthermore, women are limited greatly by the assumptions men make about the appropriate and desirable place for women, especially in a sexually charged atmosphere. In the Bazooms environment, it is easy to classify these women as objects.
Yet, women are also actively shaping their own experiences at Bazooms. The constraints on their actions are severe, but within them women struggle to retain their self-esteem, exercise power, and affirm the identities they value….
Bazooms girls are not helpless performers. They are women struggling to find ways to alter their roles, rewrite the script, and refashion the nature of the drama…. Women sometimes also turn the play to their own advantage, finding opportunities to increase tips, support their kids, and even find some affirmation of self-worth.
In sum, the waitress is not a passive casualty of the hardships of her work. Within the structure of the job, she has developed an arsenal of often subtle but undeniably effective tactics to moderate the exploitive elements of her occupation and secure attention to her own needs (Paules 1991:171). Few people passively watch their lives go by. The notion of agency suggests that workers in all fields, regardless of their formal options, actively take at least some control of their own destinies. In the voices of Trina, Katy, Christine, and others we can hear women responding to their circumstances and asserting themselves as agents within the Bazooms drama.
Notes
1. For reasons of confidentiality, all names used in this paper have been changed. Identifying traits (of this establishment) have been removed and identifying references are not included. This [research] was cleared through the University of California Human Subjects Committee as a student project.
2. Bazooms’ management likes to characterize their establishment as catering to families, probably in order to counter the sexy, bachelor-pad reputation that the local media assign to the establishment.
3. Interestingly, only about half of the chosen group would be considered “busty” by society’s standards.
4. This falls under the category of opportunistic research or “auto-ethnography,” in which the researcher becomes a participant in the setting so as not to alter the flow of interaction unnaturally, as well as to immerse oneself and grasp the depth of the subjectively lived experience (Denzin and Lincoln 1994).
5. I am aware that covert research has come under significant attack from social scientists. The issue seems to be that of disguise: misrepresentation of self in order to enter a new or forbidden domain, and deliberate misrepresentation of the character of research one is engaged in (Denzin and Lincoln 1994). These issues do not apply to my project, since I did not disguise myself in any way in order to get “in” at Bazooms. The management did not ask why I was applying and I therefore did not volunteer the information. Furthermore, I was up front with my subjects about “doing a school project,” upon interviewing them. Finally, with names and identities changed throughout, I cannot see this report inflicting harm in any way. All quotes (from waitresses) are based upon recorded interviews.
6. LaPointe argues that requiring employees to wear degrading uniforms emphasizes their “low status” and distinguishes them from their superiors.
7. Recent news coverage did report that, based upon a four-year investigation, Bazooms is being charged $22 million by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for sex discrimination in hiring. Yet, amid recent controversy over the EEOC’s decision, Bazooms Company took out full-page ads in major national newspapers to insist that men do not belong as servers at Bazooms. Each ad featured a picture of a brawny man ludicrously dressed in a Bazooms girl uniform.
8. It must be mentioned that, like women, males are also often required to do “emotional labor” in the workplace. Nonetheless, as Hochschild points out, females hold the majority of responsibility for emotion work. According to Hochschild: With the growth of large organizations calling for skills in personal relations, the womanly art of status enhancement and the emotion work that it requires has been made more public, more systematized, more standardized. It is performed by mostly middle-class women in largely public-contact jobs. Jobs involving emotional labor comprise over a third of all jobs. But they form only a quarter of all jobs that men do, and over half of all the jobs that women do (1983:171).
9. It is important to add that some of the waitresses believe “management is just doing their job,” and don’t complain.
References
Denzin, N. K. and Y. S. Lincoln. 1994. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Goldman,
