I feel a little bit like I have just entered an adult video store organized by color. All the reds are nestled in the back, the bright blues in front, the greens and yellows sitting right in the middle. Plastered on the walls are posters full of muted colors, advertising half-open mouths, bedroom eyes, smooth skin.
All I wanted was a discounted T-shirt, but I’m getting the feeling that buying that shirt involves a lot more than forking over 10 bucks.
Standing in line at the American Apparel factory store downtown, I realize that this purchase also involves me selling a little piece of my dignity.
But the semi-pornographic photographs of men, women and children only hint at what is underneath the otherwise trendy and worker-friendly image of American Apparel.
Last week, former sales manager Mary Nelson took CEO Dov Charney to court for sexual harassment.
And this isn’t the first sexual harassment lawsuit he’s been handed. It’s just the first to go to court ““ the other two were settled outside of court, quietly.
It’s about time we look past that guilt-free “Made in Downtown L.A.” message that American Apparel’s marketing team has handed us. Of course, when we buy their shiny gold leggings, we can be free of guilt about the general working conditions of their factory workers. They make an average of $12 an hour and they are all given health benefits.
But Charney ultimately works against the progress he creates. According to the New York Post, the skinny, mustachioed man refers to himself as a “hustler,” “walks around his office in his underwear, sleeps with employees, and calls women bitches, sluts, whores and the c-word ““ and that’s the stuff he admits to.”
So now we have to decide whether we feel more guilty supporting intolerable working conditions or more guilty for contributing to the fortune of a man who markets and treats women as a conglomeration of lips, breasts, and thighs and who sells many items to women as “one size fits most.” (Most women are equally stick-thin, right?)
Even if we decide that working conditions are of more immediate concern than women’s equality, we can’t ignore the fact that American Apparel even fails on this count: Charney does not allow his workers to join UNITE, the garment workers union.
Furthermore, our concern for working conditions must include our concern for gender equality in the workplace. According to The New York Times, Charney has admitted to sleeping with his female employees and hiring women in whom he has a sexual interest. Sweatshop or no sweatshop, this constitutes oppressive working conditions for women.
Even more disturbing: American Apparel is centered right here in Los Angeles. Take a walk a few blocks and you’ve reached the store in Westwood.
The hub of American Apparel’s operations is just a 20-minute drive from UCLA’s campus. This is where Charney allegedly sexually harassed the defendant, holding a meeting with her while “wearing only a fragment of clothing called a “˜c–k sock'” and asking her to join him in masturbation. Charney allegedly fired her after finding out she would inform a lawyer of the occurrence.
Still, Charney defends his behavior.
He attempts to turn sexism into something socially progressive. For example, when asked why he referred to his female employees as sluts, he responded, “There are some of us that love sluts. … It could … also be an endearing term.”
But to whom exactly? I’ve heard the word used when referring to prostitutes, between feuding teenagers and in fights with jealous ex-boyfriends, but never have I welcomed the word from a superior at work. I’d like to think that we are above such insults now, that it’s about time we used them in joking ways in order to reveal their absurdity. But the workplace is not where this movement should start.
The juxtaposition of the guilt-free shopping motif with the degradation of my gender forces me to choose one cause over another. There shouldn’t be a give and take.
I could do without the photographs of women’s open legs and bare chests. These advertisements are not art. They are art as marketing tools, which is an insult to art as well as those “real women” Charney says he depicts. We should face the fact that sex sells and sell it in a more empowering way.
Only when we are able to do this and get past our hormones can we hope to break down sexual repression. As it is right now, American Apparel and many other retail companies’ objectification of women only fuels such repression.
I’d like to think that Charney is right, that his views are just “unconventional” and are actually sexually “liberating,” but it’s hard to believe when liberation of one gender becomes persecution of another.
If you’d like to burn your shiny gold unitard, e-mail Jones at cjones@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.