Dressed to Distract

A few days ago, I happened to come across the following article written by Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist who won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1999. This article explains how a person's appearance can be making a difference to his or her life.

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It's hard to feel sorry for a woman who frets about being too beautiful.

Ordinarily in life, extraordinary good looks are an advantage for men and women – and even babies. Not only do babies gaze more longer at more comely adult faces, research tells us, but  parents may gaze longer at more comely babies.

So it was unusal when a knockout in New York, Ms Debrahlee Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mother, filed a suit against Citigroup, claiming that she was fired in August from the Citibank branch at the Chrysler Centre for looking too sexy.

“Plaintiff was advised that as a result of the shape of her figure,” her lawsuit reads, “such clothes were purportedly 'too distracting' for her male colleagues and supervisor to bear”.

The media have had a field day. Last week's Village Voice cover profile of Ms Lorenzana – who grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to New York when she was 21 – raved about the bank officer's charms: “At five-foot-six and 125 pounds, (167cm and 57kg) with soft eyes and flawless bronze skin, she is J Locurves meets Jessica Simpson rack meets Audrey Hepburn elegance.”

Television and tabloids ran pictures, taken by photographer who works with her lawyer, showing Ms Lorenzana in the pencil skirts, turtlenecks, tailored jackets and stilettos that she says made her bosses at the bank concentrate on the wrong kind of figures.

“She has to manage her wardrobe so these men can manage their libidos?” said her lawyer Jack Tuckner, adding that her bosses acted as immaturely as the boys on Wayne's World.

As she prepared to appear on the Monday morning shows, Mr Lorenzana recalled that her supervisors obsessed over what she was wearing “saying things are too tight, you cannot wear turtlenecks. Well, guess what? When you say my pants are too tight when they are not, then you must have been staring at me.

“The reality is, I'm a size 32 DD. I'm very skinny, and then I have curves. So, of course, on my body, the turtleneck is going to make it more noticeable. But I'm not showing cleavage. We wear jackets.”

She said a co-worker who shopped with her and bought the same styles and designer brands never got I trouble, and neither did some tellers who wore low-cut tops, snug pants and hot boots.

“I said: You are discriminating against me because of my body type,” she said with a slight accent and breathy voice. “This is genetic. What am I supposed to do?”

Citigroup didn't return calls for commment on Friday. MS Lorenzana's lawsuit says that her bosses told her that her bosses told her that her female colleagues could wear what they liked because their “general unattractiveness rendered moot their sartorial choices”.

Her well-tailored clothes, on the other hand, emphasised what her lawyer calls her “hour-glass figure”.

An Opposite Reaction

This case has caused such fascination because usually it's the other way around.

Attractive professors get better evaluations from their students, according to one study. A 2005 analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis confirmed what seems apparent, from presidential races to executive boardrooms: Good-looking people and tall people get a “beauty premium” an – extra 5 percent an hour – while there is a “plainness penalty” of 9 percent in wages.

A study that looked at men's height as teenagers and their salaries later found they made US$789 more a year for every extra inch of height. Meanwhile, obese women tend to get substantially lower wages than women of average weight.

Although people laugh at the idea of a babe in the office being as maddening as Tantalus' out-of-reach fruit, women do get penalised this way sometimes.

A male friend once told me he was looking for an unattractive personal assistant so he wouldn't be tempted. And when I was hiring a Grace Kelly blonde as a researcher a few years ago, a male colleague asked me not to because it would be "too distracting" to him; two girlfriends cautioned me not to because it would be depressing - and therefore, distracting - for me to work with someone so good looking. (It wasn't.)

"Sometimes, honestly, I wish I didn't look the way I did," Ms Lorenzana says, "because people judge you right away. Other women have their guards up, they automatically categorise you as being conceited. I have to work three times as hard to prove that I earned this through my hard work.

"My life has been hard my entire life. People have this misconception that, 'Oh, you do well in your life because of your looks.' No, I am harassed." 

New York Times

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Book by Maureen Dowd

Also find titles about appearance

     

Some Add-Ons for Non-verbal Communications

In the previous post, we mentioned about there are many parts of your body that add to the non-verbal message. This type of non-verbal communication is called kinesic code. It is made up of emblems, illustrators, regulators, affect displays and adapters. These behaviours are each communicated in different behaviours and movements of your body.

Posture

The first important aspect of kinesics is posture. Standing or sitting in a relaxed professional manner is a positive posture non-verbal. Also, being comfortably upright, squarely facing an audience, and evenly distributing your weight are all aspects of posture that communicate professionalism, confidence, attention to detail and organization.

Gesture

Non-verbal communicated by moving the trunk of your body are called body gestures. Several different body gesture strategies are to move to change mood or pace, draw attention, or reinforce and idea. Some examples are stepping aside for a transition or stepping forward to emphasize a point.

Hand gestures are what are most often identified as non-verbal communication. One reason is because they are so obvious to a receiver and seen to be partly conscious. It is important to let your gestures flow naturally as if in conversation with a close friend. You may also use gestures to specifically describe shape and size, emphasize a point, enumerate a list, or picking out a specific item.

Haptics

In conjunction with hand gestures is touching or a more scientific term known as haptics. This is a very powerful communicator especially for establishing a link to a receiver or conveying emotion. However, touching is dangerous because it invades a persons intimate space and may be perceived as unwanted or breaking norms. It is important to pay attention to the other person’s non-verbal cues before deciding to initiate a touch.

Facial Expression

Another area of physical non-verbal communication is facial expression. Facial expression is partly innate and also partly learned. Because of the number of muscles and features, such as mouth, nose, lips, cheeks, in your face, it is extremely expressive. A face can ask questions, show doubt, surprise, sadness, happiness and a wealth of other messages.

Proxemics

Proxemics is the amount of space around or between us and others. How closely people position themselves to a person during a discussion communicates what type of relationship exists between the two people. This space and meaning differs from culture to culture but in American culture the following standards exist.

• 0-18 inches is intimate space reserved for family and close friends

• 18 inches to 4 feet is personal space used in most interpersonal interactions

• 4-12 feet is social-consultative space used in more formal interactions

Appearance

Appearance is a relatively important factor involved with nonverbal communication. In today’s society, the purpose of clothing has changed from fulfilling a need to expressing oneself. Teens use fashion to determine cliques such as prep, jock, punk, or gangster. Clothing communication is continued later in life by identifying someone in a suit as a businessperson, someone wearing a black robe as a judge, doctors wearing lab coats and stethoscopes or various other positions wearing required uniforms of dress. Adornments are another form of appearance. Wearing expensive jewelery communicates one message while wearing ceremonial ornaments communicates a completely different message. Appearance also takes into account personal grooming such as cleanliness, doing one’s hair, nail trimming or wearing make-up. Overall appearance is the non-verbal that people are most aware of and manipulate the most. Appearance communicates how we feel and how we want to be viewed.

Eye Gaze

Many sayings hold that the eye is the window to the mind. This is very true to illustrating the power of eye contact in non-verbal communication. Eye contact can maintain, yield, deny and request communication between people. People who use eye contact are viewed as confident, credible and having nothing to hide.

Some important do’s and do not’s of eye contact are:

• If you have trouble staring someone in the eye, simply focus at something on their face

• When speaking to a group look at everyone

• Look at people who are key decision makers or hold power

• Look at reactive listeners

• Don’t look at the floor, scripts or anything that causes you to tilt your head away form the receiver

• Don’t look at bad listeners that may distract you

Hope you guys picked up a bit more about non-verbal communications. Want to know more about them , you can actually read more on some references such as the followings.

      

Non-verbal Communications

Non-verbal communication is generally the act of giving or exchanging information without using any spoken word. In general, non-verbal communication most often occurs through our sensory systems - sight, sound, smell, touch or taste. This form of communication is more to be presented as part of our behaviour than any other form of communications, sometimes even most of us fail to realise that a great portion of our daily communication is delivered through these non-verbal signals.

Since these signals are often so subtle that we are not consciously aware of them, research has discovered several different ways to classify the types of non-verbal communication and this has also inflicted some confusions among the readers from the information obtained from various different sources. From my point of view, the classifications of non-verbal communication should be based on the process of communication in any form presented by oneself, other than the use of word or language.

The followings are brief explanations of the common types of non-verbal communication that we can identify from our daily life.

• Facial Expression

Facial expressions are one of the most important attributes and the most direct way of non-verbal communication. A smile or a frown on the face can directly 'tell' our counterpart how we feel at a certain moment. Unlike other non-verbal signals, the facial expressions for happiness, sadness, fear and anger are universal, say an Asian and a Caucasian share a similar facial expression for happiness. Therefore, they prove to be very advantageous when it comes to language barriers.

• Gesture

Gesture is deliberate motion of the limbs or body made as an expression of thought or emphasis to improve on communications with or without words. Common gestures that you can find include rubbing chin, waving and waving arms. However, the meaning of gestures can be very different across cultures and regions, so it is important to be careful to avoid misinterpretation.

• Paralanguage

Paralanguage is the use of non-verbal cues of the voice in communication that is separated from the actual language spoken. Paralanguage may change the meaning of the words spoken and it may also the interpretations and perceptions of the person who listen to a different kinds of paralanguage used.

• Posture

Posture is defined as the position of the body or of body parts. In a simple conversation, posture can be used to determine a person's degree of attention or involvement, the difference in status, and the level of fondness a person has for the other person. Posture could be studied during communication through the indicators as direction of lean, body orientation, arm position, and body openness.

• Proxemic

Proxemic is the study of how people use and perceive the physical space around them. The space between two person communicating with each others influences the way the message is interpreted. The amount of distance we need and the amount of space we perceive as belonging to us is influenced by a number of factors including social norms, situational factors, personality characteristics, and level of familiarity. Interestingly, the perception and use of space varies significantly across cultures

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  Eye Gaze

The study of the role of eyes in non-verbal communication is also known as "oculesics". Eye contact can indicate interest, attention, and involvement. Gaze comprises the actions of looking while talking, looking while listening, amount of gaze, and frequency of glances, patterns of fixation, pupil dilation, and blink rate. The different ways of looking at another person can indicate a range of emotions, including hostility, interest, and attraction.

• Haptics

Haptics is the use of touching as non-verbal communication. Touches that can be defined as communication with another person include handshakes, holding hands, kissing, back slapping, high fives, a pat on the shoulder, and brushing an arm. Touching of oneself may include licking, picking, holding, and scratching. The information conveyed from touch is highly dependent upon the context of the situation, the relationship between communicators, and the manner of touch.

• Appearance

Elements such as physique, height, weight, hair, skin colour, gender, odours, and clothing send non-verbal messages during interaction. Our choice of colour, clothing, hairstyles, and other factors affecting appearance are also considered a means of non-verbal communication. Research on colour psychology has demonstrated that different colours can invoke different moods. Appearance can also alter physiological reactions, judgement, and interpretations. 

Of course, there are more of the non-verbal types, other than those classified above, which are not very common to be noticed. We will look further into these communicaton signals as we go along for more upcoming posts.

More books about non-verbal communications