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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

That's the way the woman looks. There really isn't much to work with. But why does it matter so much to you, especially when you just admitted you have no complaints about her job performance?

Amanda Hess (original has links):

In the Washington Post, clothes make the woman

Last week, Women's Research and Education Institute senior scholar Bernice Sandler, dressed casually in jeans and a white shirt, wrote a letter to the Washington Post questioning the paper's recent focus on the attire of its female subjects. Sandler ticked off several recent Post stories that define women by the clothes they wear—then helpfully submitted the details of her own outfit to aid the Post in objectifying her. ("If anyone cares, this writer is wearing jeans and a white shirt," she wrote).

Below, five rules for women gleaned from the Post's gender-based sartorial obsession:

1. A woman's stylish geometric-patterend tunic is as important as her career: "Bani, 26, who works for a nonprofit organization and was dressed Thursday evening in a stylish geometric-patterned tunic, started the group two years ago using a Meetup Web page as an alternative to the stodgier, older mom groups across Loudoun County."

2. The ratio of a woman's arm-to-skirt length is the only notable detail about her: "Two years ago, students launched another men's group, the Capitol G's. Then there are the Saxatones and two other coed groups, The Phantoms, who have opened for the Black Eyed Peas, and Superfood. The sing mostly contemporary songs. A women's group, the GraceNotes, has been around for 30 years and is known for wearing short skirts that sometimes barely pass the fingertip test."

As GranceNotes member Laura Umbrecht wrote in a letter to the Post: "[Jenna] Johnson chose to relay to her readers this solitary detail about my all-female group at Georgetown University . . . Women's groups at Georgetown recognize the tendency for viewers to overly sexualize our appearance or to dwell on the gender composition of our group rather than our real contributions, whether we are singing a cappella or participating in any other extracurricular activity. The article trivialized our group by focusing on how we look rather than who we are and in doing so communicated the message that women's groups are hardly worth noting on their merits alone."

3. Womb before brain: "As moms and legal minds, first ladies Kendel Ehrlich and Katie O'Malley have much in common. Yet the campaign divide is wide."

4. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans and owning a purse is newsworthy enough to make it in the lede: "Kendel Ehrlich is perched high on a swivel chair in the dimly lit radio studio at WBAL, wearing Levis and a pink T-shirt that displays her husband's campaign logo. The black leather purse below her feet is plastered with a campaign bumper sticker." Then she said some stuff!

5. Even judge's robes are sensual, when removed by a woman: "A few miles away in downtown Baltimore the previous week, Katie O'Malley has slipped off her black judicial robe in the chambers of the Eastside District Court Building to headline a symposium on domestic violence."