Job advice for women: be pretty

In other news, Fox is hiring blondes:

[W]hen you are a woman, and you want to get ahead, it really helps if you are pretty. Ever since feminism reared its Hydra head, feminists have been making being pretty complicated. Nowadays, you can read a million different articles, blog posts, and chunks of advice about what to do about your looks at work. Play it down. Don’t be too sexy. Or they say it doesn’t matter what you look like. Or they say attractive people do better, but don’t be too attractive. Or don’t play that card, or play that card but don’t play the sexy card. It goes on and on until young women don’t know what to do anymore.

When I started out as a journalist, I was younger, and I was attractive. Attractive enough that it made a difference in meetings, that it gave me a kind of confidence that fueled my drive, that it got me on TV over 100 times. That’s the way it is.

If you’re a twentysomething woman who is looking for a job, it really helps if you’re attractive. If you’re not, or you pretend it doesn’t matter what you look like, or you attempt to hide the fact that you’re pretty in some weird way out of feminist-induced anxiety over your sexuality, it’s going to make things that much harder for you. This is just a fact.

I think it is almost remarkably courageous for Susannah Breslin to dare to point out the completely obvious. I mean, does anyone seriously believe that the pretty 23 year-old woman discussing the significance of the spike in Italian bonds on Fox or CNN or CNBC actually knows the first thing about the words coming out of her mouth?

And would they put newswomen out to pasture at the age of 40 if intelligence or experience had anything to do with working in the media?