YouSaid · the spoken record

Ashley Mears

lines on the record: 74
first: 2020-06-03
most recent: 2020-06-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Okay, these are interesting questions. So I used to have like a pretty consistent flow before I had kids that got disrupted. And that's what a lot of So here's a weird habit that I picked up in college, and it stayed with me, is I eat something sweet in college I would munch on like a box of Dunkin' Donuts to get through a term paper. And now I find like whatever cookies my kids have that I'll like, I always have, you know, some sweet junk food. This is probably not really great advice for anybody, but it's just my habit now.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, usually that kind of question would invite an individualistic answer, and that's the problem with the literature, that it's all like you as an individual parent what you should or shouldn't do. And maybe because I'm a sociologist, but yeah, my advice for parents in this country is to mobilize because it's a complete crisis that we don't have paid parental leave, that there's no state supports for daycare. I think that that's one of the tragic but really important things about the pandemic right now is that it's revealing just how difficult it is to combine a career with family and the United States is just exceptional in how unfriendly it is for family policy. Mobilize.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like, you know, guidebooks for restaurants from economists. Right. So I read a lot of ethnographies within sociology. That's probably not a surprise, that's kind of within my field. But I'm also reading now because I have two kids. I like to read advice books for parents, ranging from kind of kitschy ones on up to like from economists on like what the data say are the best child rewriting practices. So that's where I'm kind of in now. I mean, yeah, having kids maybe not a surprise kind of put me in this like parenting literature.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If somebody has read a lot and if they've read eclectic things and they have that kind of breadth, that strikes me because that means that they're curious and interested in a lot of different things and that they can bring that to whatever bizarre topic they end up landing on.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there were two of them at the University of Georgia and the sociology department. It was William Finlay. He's the sociologist of work and also James Coverdale. They wrote a book on headhunters. And so they were attuned to questions of non-standard work, precarious work. And when I took the sociology of work class with James Coverdale and he was like, yeah, you should do this. Like a sociology of work about fashion models, definitely. And then he put me in touch with William. And yeah, I was just emailing with them last week. Like they stayed my mentors for a long time.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blonde highlights or just kind of shiny hair kept up nails, clothing signifies a lot. I mean, these are all things that can be people with money can work on themselves to achieve.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so I think that upper class beauty, upper class bodies are pretty uniformly thin. And that's the economy of plenty, whoever has money can afford quality food and getting to the gym as opposed to an economy of scarcity, having a kind of plump, you know, a roton valley would be a sign of having extra money of wealth. So yeah, definitely thinness. And if you look at the rates of obesity and overweight, there's a very clear divide like upper people who are upper class tend to be thinner and people who are lower class tend to be larger. So that's one kind of clear distinction. Otherwise, you know, all of the things that are signals of beauty tend to be things that people who have money can afford to invest in. So straight teeth, clear skin, you know”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People, they're very validating or they feel pleasurable. Where do those pleasures come from? Sure, a Marxist could say that it's all false consciousness, but I think that there's probably lots more interesting answers.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Onto Asian people. But I actually think it's a bit more complicated than that. There's a certain kind of beauty that is really popular around Asia because of the rise of K-pop stars and this kind of Asian beauty as a very specific kind of face that's like very pale skin with a certain kind of makeup regime around it. And yes, the eyes, but I think it would be hard to say that anybody is looking in Asia to the west as the beauty standard. I think within Asia people are looking to K-pop as a beauty standard now. And, you know, in the US, like there's all kinds of things that could be read as oppressive too that people do like hair extensions and these eyelash extensions, you know, to make really long and dark eyelashes and all kinds of practices that when you actually talk to”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I saw this on the question mark. I thought that maybe you were asking me at first because my dad is half Korean. So my grandmother is Korean. She was born and raised in Hawaii. But in any case, so yeah, I've never been to Korea. And so my Korean connections actually really, I know from the literature. But so to your question, it's a common perception that plastic surgery is oppressive, but I think from my understanding, you know, there's an opposite reading, which is that it's really validating and really quite pleasurable to modify the appearance. So you're right, in South Korea, it leads the world in double eyelid surgery to make that eyelid fold that is typical of a western shaped eye, but less so of an Asian shaped eye. And so this is often read as like, oh, this is like internalized white Western hegemony.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes and no. I mean, I can't say that I'm like a winner in the academic field. I mean, yes, having a good tenured job is because I know that they're increasingly in short supply. But in some ways, it's such less volatile of a world than these cultural production fields. I mean, it's the complete opposite job model. It just entered my mind in the last month of like, wow, what would happen if I didn't have this lifetime job security that I've counted on? But it's a complete opposite. Fashion modeling is a 180 where you can be dismissed, you know, from one day to the next and your fortunes can change for the better or for the worse. So yeah, it's a winner take all maybe like in terms of prestige, but once you're in the tenured world, it's pretty steady.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I should say I was a really good student all throughout high school and college. And I got into the modeling kind of as a side job. And then I found a way through sociology to turn my experiences in modeling into an academic project. And I could kind of even see when I was in college reading these ethnographies of the workplace because I took this great class on the sociology of work. I could see like, wow, someone should really do this of fashion modeling and like I could be the Barbara Ehrenreich in sociology of like fashion in high status. So in some ways I've always been a scholar. I've always been, I mean, I've always been a student first and foremost. My alignment was in academia and I was always looking searching for the status and the winner-take-all hierarchy of academia and modeling kind of got me there.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“School, you have a lot more control over your time, you're a lot more flexible, fewer demands, and you can kind of stretch your grad school clock in a way. So in some ways, sometimes looking back, I think like that's also an option to maybe loosen up the expectation that women have kids after their careers are all stitched up because that's what I followed. And it worked out for me, but it can't work out for everyone. And it also was quite a big stress for those six years.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, or maybe not abolish it, but maybe change the terms of it so that the clock doesn't completely overlap with the so-called biological clock for women who want to have families. So perhaps there could be a way to lengthen it or pause it or start it in a way that makes it fit better with having kids. There's also a couple of, you know, so I had my kids write when I got tenure. I had my first child. She arrived right after I received my positive tenure decision. I didn't plan it that way, but it worked out really luckily. But I remember in graduate school, a couple of people had kids in grad school, and I was thinking like, no, this is a ridiculous, you know, that's not the right plan. Like, I could never imagine having kids in grad school. But actually, it does make sense to in grad school.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tied to a prominent person or an IV university will catch our eye. And so we're starting, you know, we have now discussions about how to safeguard against those biases. But yeah, that is kind of a bizarre thing the way we reproduce inequalities all the time.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stranger bizarre. Oh, that's a really interesting question. There's so many things about it. I guess the way that it portends to be so meritocratic, I mean, thinking here about academia and the world of professors, the way, yeah, the way that it's very meritocratic and ostensibly within sociology, we're so attuned to inequalities by gender and by class and by race. Like that's the bread and butter of our discipline. And yet we reproduce inequities all the time. I mean, not in the least with this notion of the disproportionate amount of emotional work of women faculty, disproportionate ways that women faculty and people of color are do more service work, certain kinds of hierarchies get reproduced in the hiring all the time. So even though we're supposedly all about equity, it's just the fact that, you know, somebody who's”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like a perennial conversation that I have with my women colleagues about the number of students that ask for exceptions in their grades, especially of younger faculty, young women faculty, the number of students that open up with their problems. And we are more likely, I think, to keep tissues in our offices for crying students than like how our male colleagues. So there's that. Yeah, just kind of being a crutch to students and being seen as somebody that's more relatable by virtue of age and by gender means that we have more of these kinds of drains on our, I don't know, emotional work than male colleagues. I don't know if you've agree or if you find that do you also keep tissues in your office?”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having beauty definitely eases the way for people to respond more favorably to me because of that halo effect of beauty. So maybe people are more likely to answer an email or to agree to a meeting or the meeting will go smoothly and people will listen more to what I say because I look the way they do. I'll find that out. I mean, that question is to be continued because as we know as women age, so-called lose their bodily capital, aging comes with a decline of beauty for women. And so, yeah, I'll have to answer that in 10 or 15 years.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think it looks matter everywhere in academia. Does this double edged sword for women's beauty? So some studies show that it's important for women, especially to conform to these traditional notions of beautiful, but they can't overdo it in the professional workplace. So some makeup is appropriate, but like too much eyeliner is considered too sexual and inappropriate. So yeah, I tried to balance that. For instance, even before I got my job at Boston University, I was coached by my advisor to dress in a fairly drab way, to really try to assert my authority and to distance myself from the femininity and the beauty, which was kind of always going to be plaguing me because of my work and because the fact that I was a model. So I tried to distance it as I could. That question though, for sure, I think at an interactional level having”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to conclude it's overrated, but there is something really delightful about it as a party good because you can shake it and spray it without destroying clothes unlike say red wine and it's bubbly and you know this is kind of mad. It has this sort of fun magical quality. So yeah, on the whole overrated, but well, overrated because you can get all those things with Prosecco.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated. Although right now, I think that, well, because of that hit song, it's the end of the world as we know it. They're having a moment coming back, perhaps unfortunate.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated, yeah, overrated. Overrated, although there's pockets of it that I think are probably more interesting, but the kind of glossy glitzy glamorous part of Miami Beach totally overrated. I mean, it's your thing of like all glamour bad food.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated. We should all still watch Zulander. This is a fantastic treatise on gender and the impossibilities of male beauty.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true, yeah, it's true, and there have been important correctives to that, but I think that it was a huge contribution to insert culture into class hierarchy. So everybody pays homage for that reason.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I have to be careful here because, you know, one of my fields is cultural sociology. It can't write a paper without citing the guy.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there an option to say it's appropriate? Of course. Yeah, I think that this is appropriate. I mean, I think that I would be either somewhat doing a disservice to my discipline if I were to say that it's been overrated because it is one of the major findings within economic sociology that's kind of continually shown that there are all these advantages for having loose ties, arm's length ties.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, but it's really the terms of the work in the Japanese market, it produces passivity unlike anything I'd ever experienced because the language barrier and the ways that models would usually have a little bit of control in the casting situation is to talk, to show their personalities, you know, to connect, to relate. And it's really difficult in the Japanese market because Western models, not only do they not speak Japanese in most Japanese people do not speak English in the fashion world, in lots of other worlds. So the solution there is that every agency has a manager whose job is also to drive the models to their castings and then introduce the models to the clients and then clients talk in Japanese and the models stands there and then the manager introduces the next one. So it's like just a very weird kind of passive experience. It also meant that a lot of my time in Tokyo was”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, I modeled in Japan, and these were just some observations. I didn't do a comparison with the local models, like Japanese models, but indeed there were lots of observations I took of the Western models coming into Japan and doing all kinds of just bizarre, silly things, infantilizing things. I think that there's some interpretivist cultural studies that I reference in that paper that suggest that this is a way of, I don't know, diffusing or, yeah, diffusing the Western hegemony or maybe bridging the divide between Western beauty and Eastern beauty. But I'm really not sure.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close and projecting this aspirational distant kind of beauty that is not meant to be relatable. If I could add just a lesson from the art world is that the more people and the more kind of socially different types of people that a work of art is meant to relate to, the lesser its value. So in the editorial end of the market, the fact that your average consumer doesn't get that kind of look doesn't get that cold distant on smiling body or face. That's kind of deliberate. It's not meant to make sense to you. It's meant to make sense to like the Anna Winters of the world.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it depends which segment of the fashion modeling market we're talking about. So if you look in your catalogs that used to come in the nail but now are mostly online, models are pretty relatable. They have the kind of look that would be described as girl next door or like classic apple pie and you see a lot of smiles when people are selling things directly in the catalog or commercial realm on television commercials as well. Really relatable people, aspirational in the way they look. They look good, but they're connecting, they're smiling, and they're not meant to be intimidating unlike the editorial side of fashion, which is like the catwalk or the magazines, especially the Vogue magazines. These are the kinds of looks of models that are projecting what people in the fashion world think of as being in fashion. And those kinds of models almost never smile. There's almost never a smile on the catwalk. It's remarkable. It's supposed to be all about showing the”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a wonderful dissertation out of the University of Amsterdam called Why Fashion Models Don't Smile. And why don't they?”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. I regret that I didn't use it in a smarter way because I was, I think that, you know, I started traveling to Milan and Japan when I was 19 and 20. And so that's still quite a young age, I think, like mentally and emotionally to kind of pick up and go somewhere. But if I sometimes feel like if I had had, I don't know, a better, if I knew what I know now, you know, back then I could have built stronger connections with interesting people. I could have tried harder to understand the creative side of producing fashion. Yeah, I could have tried harder to.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But by that point, by that time that that had happened, I was already told by people like my friends in high school that I was skinny enough that I looked like one of these girls in these magazines and I should consider it. So it was already kind of on my mind that it was something that I wanted to do. And then, of course, my mom, she sent me a Vogue magazine 1993 Cindy Crawford was on the cover. I still have it. And then I just got really into whatever fashion modeling was. I didn't fully understand, but I was like, I want to be this.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, so I spent a lot of time in the fashion malls of Atlanta in my teenage years. And so, yeah, a scout would come up and say, like, oh, I'd love for you to come into the office. And, you know, we could probably work if you're interested to have you ever thought about becoming a model”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a mix. I mean, that surprise can come with fear that this is something that might be shady. It could also come, yeah, with the sense of disinterest. I think that a lot of people in the modeling industry, they have a couple of experiences with getting scouted. So the first time might be complete surprise and like, yeah, this might be creepy or like buzz off. I'm not interested right now. But if it happens again or a third time, then the idea starts to develop that maybe there's something to it. Was yeah.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, okay, so I know this from interviewing the models for my first book. Surprise. Surprise because as I said, so a scout has to be able to identify a look and to be able to see how somebody who's not in the context of the fashion modeling industry could be really great under certain kinds of conditions. And so these are usually young women. They're scouting stories or like, you know, I was just coming out of soccer practice or I was just getting off of like an overnight airplane and I had braces and I was the ugly duckling and nobody looked twice at me in middle school. And then here's this person, you know, saying I should be a model in London or something. So yeah, surprise.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit shy, I think, when I to go and talk to people. So I think that a good scout, they have to have a good eye. That's the primary thing and to see what they would call like a diamond in the rough. I could do that. I think that any model that scunned through the system and is exposed to this kind of look over and over can make these assessments and to kind of see things together, how different features come together. But I think that scouts also, I've spent some time with them, they have a kind of ease in talking to young people and they have an ease in talking with their parents. And I just don't have that. I think I would feel awkward or like creepy or in some way like offering false dreams that I think probably I would have serious hesitations about trying to pull somebody into the modeling industry.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the thing that models sell in the market is called a look, but you're definitely right that it's part physicality but part personality and that comes through in a picture, it comes through in a walk and also a conversation. I think a lot can be captured in video and Zoom and Instagram. So, you know, I think that there are ways to capture that, but a scout maybe who gets a picture and gets videos that they like from somebody would eventually need to go and meet them in their part of the world. And also probably, you know, depending if it's a woman in her age, to meet her parents as well and to develop a rapport so that someone would feel good about sending their teenage daughter to a new market.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that that's happening less and less in a digital and globally connected world. So it used to be that scouts would travel all across the like nine time zones of Russia and go to these beauty pageants across all these different little cities and pluck someone from obscurity and center to Paris. But now there's so many small modeling agencies or even just women with Wi-Fi connections and Instagrams all around the world that they can email their pictures directly to a scout who's based in New York. So I think that that model is starting to cut down where the professional paid scout whose job is to go on the hunt will become less and less or is becoming less and less but that person will just look through pictures on their computer so they're still scouting but in a different form.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're young. This is a population of people who are young and often politically unexperienced and often not educated, especially for women. The age for a fashion model, typically their late teenage years into their 20s. This is the age for going to college. So yeah, I would have to say that they are amorphous. And perhaps they're leaning left if for no other reason because it's a creative industry and they're exposed to more creatives and bohemians who tend to lean to the left or tend to be more progressive.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that people participate in their own exploitation all the time. I mean, you see this in all kinds of different forms of work as academics, like, yeah, you get paid for your talks, but you're doing a lot of work that's unpaid and uncompensated and often unrecognized as well. Like all of the service work, all of the things that academia runs on, it also, a lot of this is free labor that we give up because we believe in it and we find it validating and someone should tell us not to do it that we'd probably still do it anyway because it's validating. So I think that exploitation works best when it's pleasurable and when it's made meaningful. But that doesn't mean that the inequities can't be challenged at a structural level if at a subjective level people consent to them.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is kind of out there. I think that as a labor issue, this shows the really unequal and unfair terms of the modeling industry in particular. And the modeling industry is generating so much profit for the club industry. I mean, these unpaid women in the modeling industry, they're also generating huge untold profits to all of these other industries that benefit from their presence in the clubs, like finance or real estate, where all of these networks of powerful businessmen get consolidated, in part softened through the presence of unpaid women from the modeling industry. So I think that there could be some case to be made that unpaid fashion models or low-paid fashion models are doing enormous unpaid labor for all of these other hugely profitable industries where disproportionately the profits are going to men. So I could see redistribution work.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get them to come out with him at night. So for those women, that might be the drawing line because it's such an egregious abuse. But in this world, there's a widespread assumption that everybody uses everybody else. I mean, the women are using the club for the pleasures that they can get from it. They're using the promoter for the pleasures they can get from him, the access. The promoters are using the young women. The clients are using the promoters. The drawing line is when there's a perception of abuse, that people have a clearer sense that lying about being exclusively romantic would be a clear violation. So that would be abusive. But use is okay. Mutual exploitation is okay.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I think that they might not be too surprised even to learn that this is a job for promoters and the promoters make money doing this. Most of them know that. They didn't know how much money promoters are making. They don't know how much money the clubs are making, but they know that they're contributing to those profits and they know that there's this inequality built into it. You know, for some of the women that had a belief that they had the exclusive affections and attention of the promoter, that might come as a surprise. And those are the sadder moments that I discovered in this economy when promoters are misleading the young women into thinking that they genuinely have exclusive romantic or intimate intentions when often a promoter might be sleeping with two or three or several models in order.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They go to the movies every Wednesday afternoon and promoters do that, they'll invite girls for bowling or for picnics or to, you know, whatever Disneyland. And so these are relationships that the promoters are cultivating, which they're then profiting from. So it feels meaningful. It doesn't feel degrading. And for the women for whom it does feel degrading, they typically don't last very long or they leave over the course of the night. And they say, this isn't for me.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So it's a degrading experience if it's not fun, if it's not made meaningful. And the promoters that are really good at their job, they do it really well to make it meaningful with the young women. So they're not just recruiting models off the street, you know, giving them some free tuna rolls and then, you know, have it saying like, wear youroes and dance. It's actually that the promoters spend a lot of time developing intimacy and connections with the young women. They talk about each other as friends. They use this language of friendship. They see themselves as supporting one another and the girls are loyal to the promoter. And so under these kinds of terms, when the women go out with the promoter, it's usually a combination of things. Maybe she's needing free dinner. Maybe she doesn't have any friends because she's new to New York City. Maybe she's sleeping with the promoter and she thinks that she's his girlfriend. Or maybe she really likes the promoter because”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being like an act of desperation is going to ruin the fun of the night because you have to be there as opposed to wanting to be there.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So I was always asking this of the women and I would say like, you know, why don't we just band together and agree to show up at the club together? And then we'll each get paid $100 as opposed to going through all of these efforts of the promoter cajoling us and mobilizing us. And then he gets paid $1,000. And the answer was always no, I don't want it to be work. I want it to be fun. This is leisure, not labor. And there's all of these efforts that are expended to make it look like it's not work. Although it is, I mean, the women are performing a really valuable labor to the club and lots of profits are being made off of them, but they don't want to think about it in terms of work. And occasionally, some promoters, if they're running low on girls or they're in a desperate situation for the night, they'll call a girl and offer her, say, $40 or $80 to come out as paid. And this is looked down on by the other women.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dressed up, be looked at, you know, get drunk, have drugs. It's fantastic for a young person. It's hard to convey that kind of fun. And it was hard for me being like a sober 30-year-old to also feel it”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so I always say I really wish that I had met these promoters when I was 18 because I was in New York. I was studying at Hunter College for a year. And if I had met the promoters, then it would have been fantastic. It would have gotten to, you know, travel and eat and drink for free and stay out all night and enjoy. But when I was going back into this world of New York, when I was 30, 31, and 32, it was pretty difficult. It was pretty grueling. So just to put it in perspective, the dinner with the promoters would start at around 10 o'clock at night. We head to a club at around midnight and we stay there until 3 a.m. And the high heels are very high, like the expectation is that women wear these really high heels. So it's like physically hard to keep up and be in these spaces. I think that for some of the younger women, that's their thing. Like they love house music or they love hip-hop music. They love to stay out late.”
2020-06-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source