“You gotta wear heels when he’s in Albany sweetie, that’s the rule,” Ana Liss, a former aide to Governor Andrew Cuomo, says a senior staff member instructed her, according to Gothamist/WNYC. “He,” of course, referred to the governor of New York. Cuomo has recently been accused of many gross and sexist violations of the basic human rights of women who worked for him, including sexual harassment and assault. These charges are under investigation. But what’s striking in these accounts, from many sources, is the portrait of the retrograde office culture over which Cuomo presides, one in which the boss exercised enormous control over women workers’ bodies, setting an expectation that they wear sexy clothes, including high heels, in Liss’s case, stilettos (ouch), just because he liked it.

Many women have faced similar oppressive and discriminatory dress codes on the job. In Cuomo’s case, the culprit is so high-profile that former employees can seek redress by going public. But for most women workers, the most effective way to fight the boss’s humiliating incursions on their everyday personal freedoms has been organizing in the workplace.

The obligation to look hot in the workplace was a major target of second-wave feminism (of course, with hotness defined in the most pedestrian way; after all, some of us are much more excited to see a woman in a hard hat). Strict workplace dress codes specifically for women were common for most of the twentieth century: hyperfeminine, confining skirts, uncomfortable shoes, including heels, and stockings. Women protested these restrictions through street actions like the famous 1968 Miss America protest and also through activist working women’s groups like 9to5. Today, as a result of such activism and the cultural changes wrought by second-wave feminism, fewer white-collar office workers are subjected to these sexist expectations. That’s probably why so many people were shocked to learn that Governor Cuomo allegedly imposed such degradingly specific rules on his female workforce. (Cuomo’s office denies the existence of a dress code. Cuomo’s office is denying a lot of things right now.) Unfortunately, it’s probably less shocking to those working in the service industries, which have often catered to cretinous customers who share Andrew Cuomo’s boorish sense of entitlement to female bodies.