A far cry from Southwest’s lauded “spreading love” program of the late 1970s, the airline’s public image is in tatters after two separate incidents in which female passengers were told their attire was inappropriate, and if they didn’t cover up they wouldn’t be allowed into Prom. Southwest has effectively gone from spreading the love to preventing it.
Jessica Valenti of Feministing, who is not wholly unfamiliar with controversy over women’s attire and the bodies underneath, notes that both women had large breasts and posits that they were discriminated against on this basis. As their respective outfits were well within the bounds of social acceptability, I’d say Valenti has a point.
How, exactly, is “sexiness” a bad thing? Neither woman was disrupting their flights, nor were they being lascivious. The men who harangued them were projecting their own issues with mammary glands. Breasts small, medium or large are wonderful, for the delight of sexual partners or simply as a good place to store paper money. In their objectification of the women’s bodies, they obviously never viewed the breasts as anything more than sexual objects, temping titties of knowledge incidentally connected to passengers. Then again, if they’d reached that level of thinking, they wouldn’t have metaphorically commanded “Get thee away, Satan” at their workplace in the sky.
