Reflection Week Six
I found the readings this week to be eye opening. When we hear the term “sexualized work environments” we assume a profession in which sexual labor is the primary generalization. After reading Philaretou and Young, I now have a better grasp in what is a sexualized work environment. It made me think about a restaurant in Huntington, Roosters. At this restaurant, they only hire females to work on the wait staff and the men are placed in kitchen duty. The waitresses commonly wear a tight neon colored top, short shorts, hair fixed, and makeup done. One thing I began thinking about: if the wait staff works under a business ran by the patriarchy, are the women in this sexualized work environment presenting themselves
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Though men are entering into what was a predominately female occupation, they are measuring their patient interaction off of a feminine standard/scale? We can find the same standard in waiting professions. It is pointed out that many associate waiting with the majority in this field being female, and male wait staff are looked at differently and placed on the same feminine scale. One thing I want to critique though, with the new age of different sexual cultures unveiling, we must understand that these specific ideations no longer describe us in these occupational settings. First, we must do away with phrases such as: male nurse, female waiter, etc. We must do away with these because labeling the gender to the occupation, automatically will set us up for workplace sexualization. Let us as a society just call the employee a nurse, a teller, receptionist, etc. Lastly, I will stress this again, we are looking directly into heteronormative standards. We need to establish new studies on gender sexualization in the workplace with the working LGBT community as well as the trans and cisgender