Dear Little Miss Stay-at-home,

I am a young career woman looking for a leg up into my industry of choice, media relations. I have had many jobs in the past, not because I have trouble keeping them, but because most of them were seasonal positions. I feel that my job search has been difficult, I have been at it for almost eight months now. I achieved honours in my degree, won awards, and participated in many community volunteer initiatives in my life. Sometimes I wonder if my resume is even being looked at by the people doing the hiring. I’ve had interviews, but they were vague and half-interested. I never get call backs, and when I call them, they seem to not recognize my name. I have been dreaming about having a career that I can stick to my whole life. Am I doing something wrong, or is this industry just that competitive?

Yours truly,

Career Woman Wanting a Sniff

Dear Career Woman Wanting a  Sniff,

You see, my years of experience being an early twenties stay at home leisure specialist, I have learned one thing, the biggest paradox in life is the phrase ‘career woman’. You see, women have this problem nowadays where we expect our transition into the ‘working mans’ world to be as if four thousand years of sexist thinking  will just evaporate. Ideally yes, but ideally, I would not have to heat up the dinners I defrost for my fiance for when he gets home, it will just come out of the wall in some sort of chute, or slot perhaps. Alas, this is yet not the case, so I have to work around it.

One thing you can try is to wear sexually appealing outfits. You see, we may be technically considered equal in the working world right now, but even this comes with sexist strings. In order to be ‘deemed profitable’ you must make yourself look like an ornament, or something that you would find in a calender or a fashion boutique. Musicians, office workers, real estate agents, waitresses all have to do this, even though their actual area of specialization lies far outside the ‘beauty’ industry. Seems unfair, but when you dissect it, it makes a lot of business sense. Here, I’ll explain.

Men are inherently competitive. Women too, but since men predominately control anything to do with with money, we will be focusing on them. In order to maintain their heated pecking order, they have to exaggerate some favorable aspects in order to become ‘alpha’ male, or wing-man to ‘alpha’ male. These include height, bicep size, hypothetical penis size (real alpha males would never look at another mans penis, this is why it is hypothetical), truck size, salary size , physical strength, access to a firearm, and to a lesser extent, their sense of humour (if it is good enough to forgo failings in these other categories). This is what makes a man worthwhile.

So here is the problem when woman such as us moved into the working world, we knocked out all of the weaker members of their sex through our general competence skills. Since the men who were displaced might have been better suited for traditional women fields, but this was strictly out of their pecking order, they all decided to unite against woman to protect the integrity of their entire operation. Thus, it created the unwritten rule that women will have to work harder for something men themselves are barely qualified for.

However, there is a loophole. One of our greatest exaggerations, what traditionally makes women ‘women’, is the ability to look very, very good. Men cannot do that without losing their bid for alpha male, but they really, really like it; one, because it gets them all excited, two, because they secretly wish they could do some of the things that we do, and three, because it represents a set of skills completely foreign to them. Beauty is something we have on men that they do not, it is our competitive edge.

So, by feminizing yourself, you can out-compete your colleagues as the intimidation that they feel towards an attractive woman dramatically outweigh their critical thinking skills. They say “See? This creature here is presenting something I am not a specialist in, and it’s really, really good. I wish I could do that to my face and go out in public. Hmmm…” Many times, you will find the female higher ups in an organization are highly attractive women. It is why a teenage music star with a small amount of clothes on has more clout then women who work their whole lives and actually made a difference.

So, try this approach, fashion and sex appeal are not just for fun, its for business too. One warning though, if you do yourself up the right way, and then it the person hiring happens to be a woman, then you will be extremely out of luck, because there is nothing a woman hates more then another attractive woman, for obvious reasons.

11/11/2012