A British study says girls don't benefit from sex-segregated education.

Unfortunately, that's not relevant. To quote my own post about it, "Ultimately single-sex schools are not about improving girls' performance any more than abstinence-only education is about reducing the risk of STIs. Both are equally about sexually repressing teens and children, and covering it up in pseudo-realist language."

Your depiction of the 11th circuit ruling has been oversimplified into something it doesn't say at all. The issue actually revolved around whether or not the clothing style issued by Hooters was sufficiently distinctive outside of its functional role to warrant trade dress protection. The judge decided it wasn't.

Any declaration of waitresses as either products or symbols is being made by a subsequent reader either being randomly snarky or with insufficient grasp of the legalities, not by the 11th circuit.

Mind you, I don't intend to imply by this that Hooters doesn't see their waitresses as products...

I agree with you, Zed, in that the ruling was oversimplified, but I think the point was that either way, it objectified and degraded women. They can be a product, or women of a certain shape can be trademarked.

As a woman of that shape, I object to either ruling.

Er, no, the case wasn't about the women. It was about the clothing. I only briefly scanned the ruling, but at no time did I see the shape of the women being mentioned.

Trade dress protection would have given Hooters the legal right to sue to prevent another business with a similar business model from using a uniform similar in style to the one Hooters uses for its waitresses.

A perhaps more accurate one-sentence summary of the ruling is this: since Hooters is in the business of selling sex appeal in a food service setting, and the type of clothing involved in any business selling sex appeal in a food service setting is likely to be similar, Hooters may not claim protection of the look of their uniform, on the grounds that it will unfairly restrict competition.

Any examination of whether or not competition among companies basing their business on objectification is a good thing is completely outside the scope of the ruling. The only question before the court was whether or not forbidding another company from issuing similar outfits constituted an undue competetive burden due to the basic nature of the business. Both the basic legal question and the ruling are gender-neutral in this case.

While I haven't seen the results of the study and I'm always sceptical of media representation of scientific studies any way. I went to a girl’s school for my secondary education and can't say I found it sexually repressive at all.

I mixed with boys outside of school and we did as much wood/metal work as you would expect to get in a mixed school, but there wasn't a lot of focus on having to have a boyfriend all the time. In the last few years of my mixed primary school there were so many people 'pairing off' and all the drama that comes with breaking up with people in the same class (about half of the year did this, the other half -myself included - didn't for another year or so after leaving primary school) that I am happy that my secondary education was separate.

It wasn't so much that boys misbehaving are distracting (there are plenty of girls who do this too) rather sex and relationships are kept outside school (we still had boyfriends). I would still go to a girl’s only school if I had the choice again.

sorry my last post doesn't explain a few things....

Rather than agreeing or disagreeing with the study I was commenting on the Alon Levy post.

My school wasn't a private or grammer school but I would say that regardless certain types of people probably do choose single sex schools over mixed anyway. This is also a reasonable explaination for why I may have found my school less threatening than some of my friends in mixed schools in the same area.

Zed:

So Hooters sued, claiming that busty waitresses in tanks and shorts constitutes a signifier of origin. It's more than people just happen to know that Hooters puts out such a product/service -- people actually recognize these things as a trademark. In other words, the shape of the Hooters girl is just like the shape of the Coke bottle.

Later:

Aha! Hoist on their petard. See, awhile back Hooters was sued by the EEOC for sex discrimination. The lawsuit was settled, but when Hooters defended its policy of hiring only women of a certain ... um .. shape, it argued that it needed to engage in such practices because the actual product it was selling was sexual titillation.

Yes, it's the companies that are doing the objectifying, but I still find it irritating.

Technically, it's the customers that are doing the objectifying, not the companies OR the 11th circuit. ;)

Like so many objectionable things, including vitriolic tabloids and prostitution, if the customers would just stop buying the product, the business would dry up. Sigh...

prairielily:

The LGM writer is clueless, and inserted that first paragraph without understanding either the appeal ruling (which was on a technicality, actually) or the original ruling. No matter what the blog writer there thinks, the case was only about the clothing. In fact, part of the case touched upon Hooters' violation of an arbitration agreement that changing the color would be sufficient for them not to sue.

See:

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1135764310905

for a better analysis.

The District Court ruling is unavailable for direct review, but the linked ruling from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals doesn't even once mention the word shape, and my scan of reviews of the District Court case didn't show anything but a standard trade dress case, which also would not involve shape. In fact, I'm having difficulty believing that it would have been mentioned in court at all -- nobody remotely competent could seriously believe that an injunction would be granted against a competing company preventing them from hiring women of a specific body shape, and just mentioning it strikes me as a good way to prejudice a judge against you.

I'm not arguing that Hooters isn't irritating, but the courts have nothing to do with it, and the LGF description of what happened touches on reality only at very few points.

There's nothing to object to in the ruling.

ARGH. I pasted the wrong link:

http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=38796&email_access=on

(Actually, just reading the law.com article linked by the blog entry isn't a bad start, but I think the above explains the decision significantly more clearly.)

Okay, chem_fem... honestly, my problem with single-sex school begins and ends when they're foisted on children. I lived for several years in Singapore, where all the good schools are single-sex up to and including grade 10; in that country and others, going to a single-sex school isn't really a choice.

So I guess that what I'm getting at is anti-choice laws; if a student's personal decision is to go to a single-sex school, then so be it.

Alon Levy,

Fair enough. :)

women are "no longer afraid to be seen" driving pickup trucks

When and where was this ever the case?

When actress Anne Hathaway asked her "The Devil Wears Prada" co-star Stanley Tucci to stop touching her breasts, he responded, "What do you expect? You're flinging those melons around like it's harvest season."

Because his right to not see swinging breasts without being able to touch them is more important than her right to not be touched and groped against her will, right?

What does she expect? To be treated like a human being, how about! What the hell business does he have telling her what she should or shouldn't be doing with her body, let alone deciding he's entitled to essentially punish her for not conforming to his expectations?! She's not invading his personal space swinging them around, yet he feels justified in invading hers. I suppose she should guard all her movements, all the time, so that he is spared the trouble of restraining himself occasionaly---not like it matters if she has to suffer a greater burden to maintain the status quo, or anything---he's spared a smaller burden (that involves nothing more than basic human decency), so everything's just peachy.

I hope she breaks his fingers. Or puts on gloves and rubs poison ivy on her shirt over her breasts. Hey, what did he expect, touching her like that against her will? It's no more of a leap in logic than the idea of her actions entitling him to physical access to her breasts.