Here is a piece on two (popular) girls who carried out a simple psychology experiment. One of them dressed up as a goth and then they both went for job interviews in local stores. They padded the resume of the one who was dressed up more gothily, while the other claimed to have no retail experience at all.
Can you guess which one got all the interviews?
On the way there, Nichols walked with her boyfriend Cameron Newton, 17. Newton, decked out in his varsity jacket and looking like Joe All-American, caught more than few puzzled looks with goth-Nichols at his side.
"It was bad," he acknowledged.
Nichols says people were obviously rude to her, with two women passing the couple and one commenting, "What is HE doing with HER?"
The ebullient Nichols says she passed a woman pushing a stroller with a toddler beside her. As she often does, Nichols leaned close to the stroller and gushed about the cute baby inside.
"Nothing like this has ever happened to me before," Nichols says. "She literally shoved the toddler behind her and rushed away like I was a dangerous person."
This seems to be worse in the US than over here in the UK - where you _do_ get some negative responses, but they seem to be lower level. On the other hand, there seems to be a fair bit more of it about over here - there were pretty-much no goths in Stirling when I arrived there 10 years ago, and now there's a definite contingent of people who at least _look_ that way.
I despise the treatment of people by looks (with the obvious exceptions of people wearing "I love the Conservative Party" t-shirts and other indicators of incipient dangerousness), and the recent trend towards a certain level of casualness has been great. I'd be very happy to never have to wear a tie ever again - the focus on them strikes me as a peculiar cultural madness and makes no sense to me whatsoever - I really might as well be required to wear a sash or a belt to show my business-worthiness.
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bradhicks for the link) ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
