Should "Hotness" be a Protected Class? Absolutely
June 3, 2010
Looking hot and sexy is no crime. But it seems true for a Queens woman who alleges her hotness cost her her job at financial giant Citibank.
Debrahlee Lorenzana, a former Citibank employee, alleges she was fired from a Manhattan bank for being too good-looking. Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mom, alleges that she was terminated for being too gorgeous and that her ex bosses thought her curvy body shape was a distraction to her co-workers and supervisors- so much so that it cost her her $70,000 a year job at Citibank.
"In their exact words? Too distracting," ABC quoted Lorenzana as saying.
Lorenzana says the Citibank officials tolerated less conservative clothing on other Citibank female employees, but found her too steamy because she had a much more attractive body figure. She claims that numerous times her boss at a Citibank Branch in the Chrysler Building kept insisting she wear more conservative dress to work. “We don’t want you to wear turtlenecks; we don’t want you to wear pencil skirts; we don’t want you to wear fitted suits or even heels,” she told CBS. Apparently, they secretly hoped she’d wear nothing at all.
Lorenzana says the Citibank officials tolerated less conservative clothing on other Citibank female employees, but found her too steamy because she had a much more attractive body figure. “What they said to me is (other women’s) body types and my body type were different and because of my body type I drew too much attention,” Lorenzana said.
As for her fashion choices, the Latina lovely says she never flashed too much skin and dressed professionally, not provocatively, according to New York Daily News. "I can't help it that I have curves," she told the Daily News. "And I'm not going to go eat and gain 50 or 100 pounds because my job wants me to be the same size as everyone else. Everything I wore was professional, things everybody wears in corporate America," Lorenzana told The Post. "The way they looked at what I wore was very disappointing."
The lawsuit
The 5'6" and 125 pounds Lorenzana is now suing the bank, with lawyers filing papers claiming she was fired “as a result of the shape of her figure. In blatantly discriminatory fashion, plaintiff was advised that as a result of the shape of her figure, such clothes were purportedly 'too distracting' for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear."
The firing of Lorenzana by the citibank shows the double standard of the West. This has been the crux of arguments by the religious minorities living in the west. Now the truth comes out in the case of Lorenza. Why not allow her to show off her revealing bosom if she wanted to. why restrict her on dresses. Why not she be provocative.
ReplyDeleteA Muslim woman who wants to cover more will ask similar questions. Why not I cover as much as I wish to. why can not I be less provocative and less sexy? If the western countries are true to what they say about the fundamental rights, why interfere with the fundamental rights of Lorenza.In the same breathe why interfere with the fundamental rights of the Muslim women. It is sheer hypocrisy, bias, pretentious culture and open double standard. Even in the liberal West, it is an offence for women to go half naked. There are restrictions on dress even in Europe, is the contention of Muslims. The difference is only in degree when it comes to modesty.
Absolute freedom is non-existent in any culture. Being social animals, men and women have animal magnetism and sex appeal. One can never deny the fact that when a young man looking at a woman revealing a major part of her firm, round, shapely and bulging breasts gets sexually excited and would have train of quite often lewd thoughts in his mind. Hence religious laws on dress code. The West judges one set of rules as barbaric simply because OF ALIEN CULTURE BASE and another set as liberation