It’s October and the Naughty Nurse comments are starting. For instance, this just showed up in my twitter feed:
( I love you refer.ly, but gotta call out the uncoolness.)
I have a personal dislike of the whole hot nurse thing because I have personal experience of how it can lead to sexual harassment. One summer when I was in college I worked in a nursing home as a nurse’s aide. People are sexual beings and for most people in a nursing home, masturbation is their only release. I’m cool with that. I was not cool with the men who fetishized us in our nurses uniforms and flashed us or openly masturbated only when we came in the room. We were told that to do more than tell them to stop would be considered patient abuse. Leaving the room when they were due to have care of some type was considered more than telling them to stop. (Leaving the room if you walked in on someone who was attempting to masturbate in private was just respecting their privacy.) We had a patient who would refuse to use a urinal so that the ‘nurse’ would come wipe him off.
I’m also opposed to the naughty nurse stereotype because of where it came from. Why the sexy nurse, not the sexy doctor? Why the sexy secretary, not the sexy boss? Why the sexy maid? Because women who worked outside the home (versus in the family business that was usually located in the same building where they lived), had a ‘dangerous’ level of freedom and so were ‘tainted’ with the possibility of using that freedom to be sexual in unapproved ways. They were also target, unprotected by the rest of the family as they would be in the family business.
I have no objection to letting your sexy out for Halloween or any other time you won’t be performing non-consensual exhibitionism. I may show up in a sexy Halloween costume myself. But remember, it’s a costume, a fantasy, and not a reality. And there is no reason to talk about hot nurses, hot secretaries, hot whatever, when we can talk about hot costumes; because it is costume, not nursing or secretarying or whatever that we are really talking about.
The Adventures of Competent Girl 