Most people get here in fairly obvious ways. But occasionally, the search terms that get here are pretty unusual:

• anthropologist cultural historian social dancing these days isolate individual trance-like self-absorption (This is a reference to one of the quotes that show up randomly on my pages)
• to dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world (another quote)
• digital computer turntable
• wiggle toes (I have August 6 listed as “Wiggle Your Toes Day”)
• dress codes are bad
• webring hairy women
• dancing nerds
• square dance burnout
• petticoat nostalgia
• klezmer contra
• mac os x mbox to mysql (This sounds like a search I made back when I was trying to figure out how to do an archive of the sd-callers list. I finally gave up on doing a database, and went with indexed html files.)
• square dance personality types

Speaking of dress codes, I came across a goth site advocating dress codes in goth bars so that the author wouldn’t have to look at brightly-colored Gap clothes or (horrors!) Bermuda shorts and Birkenstocks: Dress Codes Please!!!. The comments are also interesting. Seems like dress codes are controversial these days no matter what the culture.

I’ve often wondered how dress codes stand up to sex discrimination arguments (not enough to do legal research on it, but enough to be curious). Here’s some analysis

The law of dress codes

There has been a long-standing anomaly in Title VII case law that permits employers to maintain sex-specific dress and grooming codes. Employers can, for example, require that men wear short hair, while allowing women to grow theirs long. They can also require men to wear business suits and ties, while requiring women to wear dresses.

Decisions upholding these kinds of rules are anomalous because they seemingly permit precisely what Title VII clearly forbids: treating employees differently on the basis of sex. Not surprisingly, the reasoning of these decisions is unconvincing.

To justify the dress and grooming codes at issue, courts have at times resorted to platitudes about employers having the prerogative to run their business the way they see fit. But, of course, there are lots of ways employers might see fit to run their business that we do not allow.

For example, we do not allow employers to hire only white employees, nor to fire older workers and replace them with younger ones. Yet dress code cases, in effect, allow employers to insist on Archie Bunker’s world, where “girls were girls, and men were men.”

Dress codes: Not gender-neutral

Other courts have attempted to claim that dress and grooming codes are not really discriminatory but are actually gender-neutral, because they require men and women alike to adhere to generally accepted community standards. That these standards are different for men and women, and themselves the product of sex stereotypes, is conveniently ignored.

After all, it is not as if, for example, men traditionally happen to wear beige, while women happen to wear navy. Rather, high heels, long hair, and dresses connote particular “female” traits — suggesting the wearer is pretty, sexy, demure, fashionable, or what have you. Conversely, short hair and business suits connote the “male” traits of being no-nonsense, all-business and in control.

Moreover, the extra time needed to take care of long hair, and the impediments to movement that high heels and dresses can impose, suggest that they embody not just a style, but a concept of how women should spend their days, and how they should move and behave.

The sheer time investment in dressing “like a woman” can be daunting. Just ask any businesswoman running, in high heels, to make her plane after blow drying her hair and putting on makeup for an hour. Or better, ask her male colleague, already calmly seated on the plane and reading the newspaper.