In a workplace environment among people who do not have any kind of intimate personal relationship? It is safe to assume that it is never appropriate for co-workers in that situation to make gratuitous references to one another’s appearance.*
Seriously, I have been working various tech/academic jobs for over thirty years and have never heard any gratuitous workplace references to co-workers’ beauty or lack thereof. Among reasonably intelligent people, there are always plenty of other interesting things to talk about.
Like you, I’ve found that it tends to be the older guys in blue-collar jobs who feel that the presence of women in the workplace needs to be commented on with personal compliments or other direct references to their gender. They don’t necessarily mean any harm by it, and as I said, it’s generally not worth complaining about. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t somewhat inappropriate, and it’s reasonable to expect most other co-workers to know better.
*Note the “gratuitous” qualifier. If something about a co-worker’s appearance is relevant to something in the workplace environment, then of course referring to it is appropriate and not gratuitous (e.g., “Check to make sure the new office chairs we’re ordering will be high enough to be comfortable for Bob, because he’s really tall”).
Anyone offended by the tweet either lacks proper reading comprehension or just happens to get off on looking for any little thing to get offended over.
“Creature” really clangs off the ear nowadays, but I’ll chalk that up to Martin being 71 and generally having a different way of speaking than I do. I’m more offended by all the different ways the Force is being shoehorned into her obituaries.
I wasn’t going to respond to this, but after reading through many other posts on this thread, seeing that a large part of this particular discussion has to do with perceptions of others, without really knowing them, well, I felt the urge to answer this.
I’m 55 years old. I grew up in the late 60’s into the 70’s-80’s when misogyny and the treatment towards others because of their sex was more prevalent and out in the open.
As I grow older I find that my thinking is much less rigid. Much more open. When you get older, because you’ve experienced so much, because you’ve had all this time to learn about others and their way of life, you can’t help but to keep your mind open and to accept differences.
IMO, those who are older and rigid in their thinking was because they were that way when they were younger. As a child, teen and in the early adulthood they didn’t accept and want to learn about others, so it would be easy to see them not wanting to do so as they age.
To simply slap the “oh they’re older so they’re sexist or racist or etc…” because they’re of a certain age is just another way of prejudging someone.
This reminds me of my devoutly Catholic grandmother who certainly wouldn’t cotton to sinful gays when I was a kid. When my grandmother was around 70, two women moved into the two-bedroom apartment in her house. She adored them. For the first few years, she couldn’t understand why neither of them could find a good husband. After a few more years, she was heartbroken when they broke up and she couldn’t understand why they couldn’t stay together. Ten years later, she couldn’t understand why the remaining woman couldn’t find herself another good woman. Or why lesbians couldn’t marry – not in the church but at least a civil ceremony.
That woman remained my grandmother’s tenant until my grandmother died and was the best tenant she ever had. For the last ten or so years, my father would have paid her to stay in that apartment just to keep an eye on my grandmother. She was a wonderful person.
I totally agree that people can, and often do, actually become more tolerant as they age. Otherwise we wouldn’t have gay marriage (in some places) because it’s not only young people who approved that. We wouldn’t have any social changes, really, without older people agreeing to them as well as the young.
But I’d be more perturbed by casual unintentional sexism (or racism, etc) from a young person than an older one - not sure I’d actually count 55 as that old anyway, but I would say that since I’m 41 myself I mean comments like Nava’s workmate made, which have nothing hostile in their intention even though the cumulative effect can be negative. We might change as we get older but we can’t completely outgrow the culture we grew up in and it’s not fair to expect that of anyone. For example, someone aged 70 (in the UK) using the term half-cast (which implies not fully formed) to refer to someone who was mixed race probably wouldn’t mean anything negative by it, because that’s just the term that was used when they were young, but someone aged 20 using that term would be making a deliberate point. Does that make sense?
I mean comments like Nava’s workmate made, which have nothing hostile in their intention even though the cumulative effect can be negative. We might change as we get older but we can’t completely outgrow the culture we grew up in and it’s not fair to expect that of anyone. For example, someone aged 70 (in the UK) using the term half-cast (which implies not fully formed) to refer to someone who was mixed race probably wouldn’t mean anything negative by it, because that’s just the term that was used when they were young, but someone aged 20 using that term would be making a deliberate point. Does that make sense?