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 n networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination," writes Barbara Ehrenreich in Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, her fantastically funny and important new book about the corporate world. An immersion journalist, Ehrenreich went undercover to land a job in public relations; in the process, she subjected herself to endless job coaching, resume shaping and image consultations. Ultimately, she never found actual employment, but she did take away a wealth of information about how American business culture has torn the social contract, and how playing it safe is no longer safe at all.Ehrenreich's acclaimed 2002 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America showed how impossible it is for anyone to live on minimum wage. In taking on the corporate world, she expected to have a slightly easier time of things. Instead, she discovered a pseudoscientific, personality-quashing culture where all human interaction takes the form of "networking." In the book, she calls this world "calculated, narrative-free, sensuality-suppressing" and develops a pathological hatred for her career coach, Kimberly. "Not even prostitutes are expected to perform passionately time after time," writes Ehrenreich, dismayed by the corporate world's perkiness mandate, "and of course their encounters seldom end in rejection." Hooksexup spoke with Ehrenreich by phone while she was visiting her daughter in Washington, D.C. — Ada Calhoun Did your publisher tell you about Hooksexup?
Well, there's not too much sex in Bait and Switch. [laughs] No, but you did make some comparisons between the corporate world and prostitution that I found very funny. [laughs] Too bad it didn't have some sex in it. Even without a lot of sex, it's a wonderful book. A lot of our readers are in their twenties; many of them feel pressured to find "secure jobs" in the business world. But in Bait and Switch, you discover that "safety" no longer exists in the corporate world. Is that safe to say? It's safe to say there's no safety, right. I speak at college campuses, and I'm always meeting college students who say things like, "I love journalism, but I've got to be practical and go into PR and work for a corporation." One guy told me — and this was very sad — "I love psychology, but I've got to think about my future, so I'm going to go into marketing," which uses psychology, as he admitted, just to manipulate people. [laughs] And I thought, Oh no! So, what I found out is that they're being lured into something that's not going to provide security. There's also a belief that being young and hot will help you in the work world. But you say young women who are too busty or too sexy are marginalized.
[laughs] Well, being young is a big advantage. There's a huge amount of age discrimination in the corporate world. It's been documented by many people. I ran into it right away, when a career coach told me that my resume could give no clue as to my real age. I could not list any experience that went back more than ten years. So it's not just a prejudice against middle-aged and older people. It's a real devaluation of experience. The reason companies often prefer the twenty-three-year-old is that they can pay them a lot less and work them really hard. And they're less likely to have children. You compare a mother re-entering the workforce to a beggar. Yeah. Now this was a shock to me, and I guess it reveals my naivete, but I initially thought I could explain a gap on my resume — it was due to staying home. Which it is. And I presented this situation to a rather canny guy from an outplacement firm, and he said, "Well, you better have a pretty good story to explain that!" In the book, you wonder if you should start your compelling story, "I met this guy, see, and, uh . . . " [laughs] Like, am I the only one who ever had a contraceptive failure? Or had a child? I worry about all those young women we read about today who have high-powered, professional educations, and think they can take five, six years off when their children are small, then leap back in. I don't think the corporate world is down with that plan. Right. It has been interesting to see all those stories about women graduating from Harvard and assuming it's fine to go on the so-called mommy track. They seem a little over-optimistic about the way the world is now. Yup. It's very fierce, and any kind of gap in your resume — even for the best of reasons, like raising children or taking care of a sick parent — is held against you. People also like to think that sexual harassment is a thing of the past. But in your experience, it seemed like women were taken less seriously. Yeah, well, that's not the same as sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is a specific kind of thing, and it is against the law. But in my undercover white-collar-job search, I couldn't figure out how to dress. I read the Dress for Success books. I had a makeover. I paid for cosmetics, clothing, body-language lessons. I realized it's a lot harder for a woman to fit in than it is for a man. Men have their uniform. They can still make mistakes, but they do have a uniform. For women, well, on one hand, you don't want to be too feminine — books tell you that shoulder-length hair is bad — and you certainly don't want to be too sexy. Now, I didn't think I was going to have a problem in that regard, but I did learn that nobody will take you seriously if you're too curvy. Which is hardly your own fault. At the same time, you can't be too masculine. Right. At one point, I thought maybe I should just be more masculine in my appearance. I went to this makeover guy wearing a tailored shirt with what I thought was a neat-looking blazer. But this turned out to be too "angular," meaning, basically, too masculine. So I'd gone too far in the other direction. It's very hard for women to figure this out. I think you mentioned that because you were over thirty, you were confined to earth tones. Well, I sort of got that impression. [laughs]. But black is bad, I think, at any age. Right, which is terrifying to those of us in New York. I'm not from New York, but I always wear black because when I spill food, the stains don't show up. [laughs] If I had followed this guy's advice, I would have been confined to nudity. I was shocked to read how seriously personality tests are taken now. You compare the approach to Christian Science and EST. Do you think it's because Americans don't know anything about science, so they're easily suckered into that kind of thinking? Well, two things here. One is the tests themselves, which have been completely discredited. I mean, they're foolish. They have no predictive value. With the Myers-Briggs test — which so many corporations and career coaches love to give — people test out as one personality on Thursday, another one on Tuesday. I could not figure out how to answer any of the questions. So I sort of did it randomly, but I finally figured out that they don't want to know your unique personality. They want to know what's wrong with it, because they only want one kind of personality. Which is? They want everybody to be cheerful, upbeat, obedient, positive, perky, smiling. If you take the test and come out as an introvert, you'll be told to work on that [laughs]. The other issue is this idea that if you think positively, all good things will come to you. If you're beaming out your desires to the universe, and if you're really positive and focused in the way you beam them out, you'll get back whatever you want. Want to be a millionaire? The money will come. This is an idea that goes back to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. You also found it in EST in the 1970s — the idea that we control the universe with our thoughts. Today, there are medications for people who believe that, you know. [laughs] It's true. It's crazy. But in the context of job searching, it becomes a blame-the-victim thing. Because it means that if you lost your job, and you're still searching six or nine months later, you must be beaming out the wrong messages to the universe. It's your attitude. It's not the economy, it's not the corporate policy, it's all in you. Yes, and that keeps people from questioning the way things are constructed. You talk a lot about the aversion to freedom that you witnessed. At one point, you observe people actually hiring bosses to monitor their job search. You show, rather terrifyingly, that people want so badly not to reflect for a second. Is the corporate culture priming us for fascism? Well, you're putting it very strongly, but I think there's a lot of truth in that. Whether you're in the blue-collar world or the corporate world, you are expected to conform. In the blue-collar world, maybe this doesn't mean conformity in the details of how you dress — you may have a uniform, and you probably don't have to smile as much — but you have no rights, you have no freedom at work. In the white-collar world, you have to conform in how you look, how you act, how you present yourself. Your whole persona has to fit in. And I do think that takes a toll on people. It's got to take a toll on creativity, for one thing. How can you have a creative, innovative company when you're requiring that nobody thinks differently from anybody else? As far as methodology, how did this research affect your life? You had to be away from your family and home. Was it stressful? Yes, I would say it was stressful. Sometimes it's lonely, you know, going to strange cities and going through the looking glass into a strange world without people to go back to at night and laugh or cry about it with. But it's also kind of an adventure, because you get into situations and you find out things that you couldn't have found out through more conventional forms of journalism. And I do encourage young journalists to think about this. There was a lot of immersion journalism in the early twentieth century, but it's not done so often now. When you put yourself physically into a situation, you discover a lot of new and surprising things. Finally, one question that's a little bit off-topic. So many books have been published lately that claim pornography is ruining society. You've written in the past about sex work and feminism. Do you have any thoughts about this apparent anti-porn feminist revival? I haven't read that one, what is it called, "The Pornification of...something..." Pornified is one. Uh huh. Well, you know, this was a big fight within the feminist movement in the '80s. I was always more on the side of free expression. I was very worried that the crackdown on pornography would come back to bite us. One small example which shocked me: a couple of years ago, AOL listed a bunch of words that you could not use on AOL. They would remove anything that contained one of these words. One of them was "breast." So the breast cancer chat groups and support groups were suddenly eliminated! [laughs] You know, in the women's movement, we had to fight to be able to talk openly about things like breasts, menstruation, sex and sexuality. Initially, people often said that was indecent. Now, you know, I'm not a porn consumer myself, but I would be very worried if the books I could read or the movies I could see were being limited by somebody's idea of what was indecent. So there is this other side to feminism [laughs]. Sometimes we get tarred, you know, as being very puritanical. But I don't think that's exactly the truth. n°
©2005 hooksexup.com.
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