The phrase is probably as old as the hills. 'You're too pretty to be a -insert profession some people deem too serious for an attractive woman-'. The first time I heard it was when a Hollywood wannabe said it to Carrie Bradshaw when she was trying to get into a movie première without a press pass. 'You're too pretty to be a writer. You should be an actress'. The irony that Bradshaw is a fictional character being portrayed by actress Sarah Jessica Parker escapes no one, but that is not the point here.
The point is that it has become too common to talk about a woman's worth in her profession in direct relation to her physical attributes. Recently, seventeen year old volleyball player Sabina Altynbekova was branded 'too good looking' to play sports. Apparently, her attractiveness is so intense that is leading her sea of fans to start disrupting games. Some publications have gone as far as to say that she runs the danger of being dropped from the team precisely because she has become such an Internet sensation.
But Altynbekova is not the first, and will most likely not be the last, woman whose qualifications are questioned because of her beauty. Just last month, GQ's Tom Carson managed to expertly flatter and offend actress Olivia Wilde in one fell swoop by declaring her too hot to play a believable writer.
'With that tush, who'd need to be literate? Who'd want to?'
He wrote, seemingly unbothered by how demeaning his words were.
But it does not end here. Women in politics are just as big of a target as Hollywood celebrities. They find themselves perpetually plagued by their looks, be it because they are beautiful or because they are not. Either way, a single comment about a female politician's looks can be extremely harmful for their careers, according to new research conducted by the Women's Media Center.
Despite the unfairness of it all, if you think about it, it makes sense. When the media stop asking female politicians the hard questions and, instead, focus on commenting their attire, their hairstyle or their lipstick shade, you can tell the discourse has moved away from what she can do for the country to what she can do for her own appearance. Voters are not interested in knowing which designer is dressing Hilary Clinton or Luciana Berger. When it comes down to the actual voting, they should be more aware of their strategies and policies, rather than their shoes and nail polish.
One thing we are told we can be proud of is that nowadays we have more women in parliament than we have ever had. Apparently:
'Nearly a quarter of MPs in the House of Commons today are women, and female members of the House of Lords make up about a fifth of the total membership. However, just one hundred years ago there were no female politicians in the Houses of Parliament at all.'
Are we supposed to be happy about the fact that we are even allowed to be in parliament at all? Women are still grossly underrepresented in the UK, much like in most countries in the world. 'Nearly a quarter' is not nearly enough, and distracting voters from taking female politicians more seriously by commenting on their looks is hindering our hard-earned progress in politics and in society in general.