A matter of dignity

On Thursday, there were reports about a woman who had taken her former employer, a bar in Mayfair, London, to court for supposedly sacking her for refusing to wear their staff uniform, a short red dress which she claimed left her open to unwanted sexual advances from male customers. (The bar allege that she resigned.) What made this headline news was, of course, that this woman is a Muslim and is claiming that the uniform offends against her religious values. They discussed this on the Vanessa Feltz phone-in, and there were at least two Muslim callers that I heard, one of them a woman, who were unsympathetic. The woman said that she should not even be working in a bar and touching, let alone serving, alcohol. You can see the woman, and another wearing the dress here. The bar management claim that the red dress matches that of the furniture, but people aren’t furniture, really, are they?

I’m sure many Muslims would agree with her, and that some were probably sick of hearing Muslims claim religious discrimination for petty things for fear that people will not be able to claim them for important things later. When I first heard it, that was basically my reaction. However, there is more to this than religious rights. This woman was not claiming a right to serve drinks in a bar in hijab; she does not even wear hijab. She was claiming the right to wear a relatively modest and dignified outfit at work, and one which did not make male punters think she was there for their pleasure. If the religion was one other than Islam, one whose female adherents don’t generally cover their heads, one suspects that it would not have caused much controversy.

My take on this is that it should have been presented as more of a women’s and workers’ rights issue than a religious one. It’s a fact of life that, if you put a scantily dressed woman in front of a group of male drinkers, some of them will leer and gape at her, make suggestive comments and probably even try to touch her. Some women may like that; many don’t, whether they are religious or not. Some newspapers advance the view that men have some sort of right to ogle some “flesh” on a night out with the lads - the “get your tits out for the lads” mentality, advanced in the form of “page 3” pictures and attacks on stereotypical humourless feminists in boiler suits. Others might counter that serving food or even drink to a restaurant’s customers is a form of work akin to serving any product to any customers, and that you would not expect women demonstrating TVs and computers to wear a scanty red dress, and that they have a right to be treated with a certain degree of respect.

It brings to mind a story in the soap Brookside back in the 1990s, in which Barry Grant (the local “wide boy” businessman) demanded that his waitresses wear a black dress which barely went a quarter of the way down their thighs, and when they did, men started harassing them, as a result of which they went on strike, and Grant backed down. I think people have the right to work without experiencing sexual harassment, something which is generally accepted when the harassment is from colleagues or supervisors, so why does anyone think that waitresses should appear “available” to totally strange men, and drunk men at that? I am sure they would not want the same happening to their sisters, so they should not expect it of anyone else, particularly their staff.

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