It's funny, in a society with an intellectual obsession with recognising and deconstructing systems of privilege, we largely overlook what is possibly the single most powerful inborn advantage one can have - attractiveness. It's rightly considered abhorrent that people could be treated unequally based on their race or gender, but I think that we are on some level accepting of the fact that attractive people have it easier in almost every field of endeavor.
Someone, I think Sonja Starr, did a series of studies on racial bias on sentencing. Unsurprisingly, it existed. Here's the shocker: the male versus female bias on sentencing was enormous by comparison, using the same methodology.
I remember a very left forum in which someone bemoaned that one out of four homeless are women, and that's why we should care about homelessness.
Overall, I have begun to look at which privileges are examined and which are ignored as the real three card monte.
> I remember a very left forum in which someone bemoaned that one out of four homeless are women
That sounds like an extreme mischaracterization. The concern about homeless women is the extra suffering the endure at the hands (and other parts) of homeless (and other) men.
Much worse is the horrific (and never retracted) Washington Post article fretting that murder at work is a female epidemic because even though men are murdered
_more_ often than women at work, men die so much in other ways that murders of men aren't important*.
It was absolutely gobsmacking to read the utter disregard for men's lives.
"more men are murdered on the job than women. But that's because [450%] more men are killed on the job overall."
Nope. That was the thrust of their argument: we should care about the homeless because some of them were women. I've seen it elsewhere, there's even some handy samples on imgur if you search for them.
As an individual, it's not really possible to treat everyone equally.
Do you treat people unequally if you know they are smarter? What if someone else told you they were smart? If they have a high IQ, would that matter to you? Based on which college they graduated from? If they work 16 hours a week? What about 16 hours a day?
Attractiveness is an indicator just like any other [1]. It's just a reality.
Well, if I know they have a high IQ I might infer that they have strong mental faculties, are able to cope well with complex problems, etc. If they graduated from a good University, I might infer that they are intelligent and have a reasonable work ethic. If they work a great many hours, I may infer that they are motivated, or perhaps passionate about their job. I do not think that I can fairly infer similar things from attractiveness even if a correlation exists. There exist beautiful idiots, but essentially no idiots graduate from Cambridge or score 140 on an IQ test.
Most attractive people I've met put no work at all into diet or exercise or makeup. I will admit that makeup can have some effect though. It can turn a 6.0 into a 6.3, but it's really only good for a few tenths of a point at best. Diet and exercise won't give you giant doll eyes or a smaller or rounder or flatter face. It won't change the shape of your head. A taste for fashion? hahahahahahahhaha ha
Part of the issue is that it's much easier to ask somebody about their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc (at least in the context of a survey or something) than it is to ask them "Are you ugly? Y/N". It's not just a category, it's a value judgment. This also drastically reduces the number of ugly advocacy groups and advocates. It's hard to push for better treatment of a group in which almost nobody wants to claim membership.
Please remind me when ugly people were forbidden to vote, for example.
One thing is an (un)conscious bias favorable towards handsome/attractive people, another is a system that historically thought that one group of people was inferior and had less rights.
Obviously I'm not justifying this bias, and I think that society has an important role in reinforcing it, so we should try to stop it, especially in the justice system.
