der Blaustrumpf

I found this article over at the Brazen Careerist blog by Penelope Trunk:

My study of the six-figure pom-pom girl

Most of my girlfriends who make more than $100K a year were cheerleaders in school. We are from all over the United States. We are from all different types of companies. Only a few of us can do the splits. Yet we all bounced in short skirts and cheered for boys.

I chalked this up to coincidence until I conducted further studies…

…Cheerleader conclusion
After analyzing these two in-depth studies, I have concluded that while a position on the dean’s list does not necessarily signal a good business career ahead, a position on the cheerleading squad does.

A girl who joins the cheerleading squad is a performer, a leader, and has a nose for where the power is. In high school, money is not the issue — boys are. And girls on the cheerleading squad get more of this currency than girls on the dean’s list.

Shudder shudder. Needless to say, I was no cheerleader, nor ColorGuard/flag girl, nor anything else requiring spandex unitards and a shitload of blue eyeshadow. Maybe this explains my latter-day lack of success, not only at work, but with boys who dislike smart girls. (I attract two types: the guys who do like smart girls, and the guys who are too dumb to know that I’m smarter than them.)

Do I sound bitter? Ok, ok. I don’t think Trunk’s conclusion is off the mark, or even unpredictable. Pleasing men equals success in a sexist society? Who’d have thought?!

I wonder what predicts for success in men. Height, maybe? Blondness? (For an informal look at this, read Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.)

Well, I am trying to make up for it now by wearing makeup (cough) and perfume to work. And nothing else!

I really don’t mean to sound so surprised. This is the basis of my fascination with the reality show appropriately titled The Real Housewives of Orange County. It’s mostly populated by a bunch of successful blond fortysomethings who have been bleached, botoxed, and implanted within an inch of their lives. “Housewives” is actually a misnomer, because several of the women make lots of money from their jobs in real estate as well as being cushioned by affluent spouses and fiances. One’s a former Playmate, for Christ’s sake. If they don’t illustrate the above principle, and entertainingly, I don’t know what would.

An aside: one of my favorite episodes is when Jo the Puerto Rican (therefore not blond, but no doubt fulfilling a slightly different fetish) tells her fiance in a huff that she can’t just stay home and be a housewife all day, because she “went to UC Irvine” where she was “surrounded by people being intellectual” or something to that effect. That shit is priceless.

In sum: if you need to feel superior to rich people, this is your show. Because apparently they’re just going to lord it over you in your career.