The marching malcontents have identified a new injustice they seek to rectify: Lookism.
The galloping injustice of “lookism” has not escaped psychologists, economists, sociologists, and legal scholars. Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode’s 2010 book, “The Beauty Bias,” lamented “the injustice of appearance in life and law,” while University of Texas, Austin economist Daniel Hamermesh’s 2011 “Beauty Pays,” recently out in paperback, traced the concrete benefits of attractiveness, including a $230,000 lifetime earnings advantage over the unattractive. […]
Tentatively, experts are beginning to float possible solutions. Some have proposed legal remedies including designating unattractive people as a protected class, creating affirmative action programs for the homely, or compensating disfigured but otherwise healthy people in personal-injury courts. Others have suggested using technology to help fight the bias, through methods like blind interviews that take attraction out of job selection. There’s promising evidence from psychology that good old-fashioned consciousness-raising has a role to play, too.
None of these approaches will be a panacea, and to some aesthetes among us, even trying to counter the bias may sound ridiculous. But the reason to seek fairness for the less glamorous isn’t just social or charitable. Our preference for beautiful people makes us poor judges of qualities that have nothing to do with physical appearance—it means that when we select employees, teachers, protégés, borrowers, and even friends, we may not really be making the best choice. It’s an embarrassing and stubborn truth—and the question is now whether, having established it, social researchers can find a way to help us level the playing field.
Harrison Bergeron, please pick up the courtesy phone.
I have an oh so innocent question for the S-M-R-T SMART leftoid equalists pushing this latest load of reality transmogrification: If, as feminists and their consanguineous misfits (hi, fat acceptors!) are constantly telling everyone, beauty is subjective, socially conditioned, and in the eye of the beholder, how is it possible to make laws that punish beautiful people? If there is no innate biologically-based beauty standard (hi, Naomi Wolf!) that is fairly universally agreed upon in practice (if not in stated principle), then there is no way to know who is ugly and who is beautiful. That job applicant you think looks like a toad could just as well look like a goddess to another interviewer. After all, “you are a big, beautiful woman”.
Maybe the equalists want to gum up the machinery of civilization so badly because they harbor a self-annihilating death wish absent any strong authoritarian figure to dispense the discipline they sorely need? It’s as good an explanation as any. Leftoids are like emo Jesse on a meth bender acting out a “stop me before I hurt myself” tard tragedy.
Try to imagine a world where “lookism” laws were rigorously enforced. Will there be a “Caliper General” of the United States who runs the department assigned to measuring people’s faces for closeness to the golden ratio? Who will be qualified to serve as “Beauty Judge” if beauty is a matter of personal opinion, as liberals and fatties and liberal fatties have been swearing for generations? I can tell you if I were a hot babe I wouldn’t want a jury of jackal-faced feminists sitting in judgment of my pretty face. That’s enough psychotically bitter, self-loathing baggage projected onto me to make me persona non grata at any company afraid of attracting attention from malicious government operatives tasked with creating a better, fairer world.
The opportunity for gaming a lookism system created by liberals chin-deep in their self-contradictions is tremendous. Picture a handsome dude at a job interview or admissions office with a cadre of paid witnesses at his side to testify to his ugliness. “Ma’am, the dude is an ugly mofo. Just look at that jaunty cowlick. Have you seen a more repulsive deformity?”, “I wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole. And I know from hunkiness!”, “Ugh, I need a vomit bag. Go ahead. Measure my pupil dilation if you don’t believe me.”
Or maybe an ugly woman will be sitting in an EEOC anti-discrimination government office, and she has brought a penile plethysmograph and a male subject to make her case that his limp member proves she is the ugliest of them all, and she deserves recompense for suffering a lifetime under the cold gaze of looks privilege. Or maybe hot chicks start showing up to job interviews wearing potato sacks. (Won’t help. They’ll still look better than well-dressed fugs.) What will happen when master system gamers bring hard data to the table showing that beauty and smarts and charisma correlate, and thus there’s good reason why people naturally favor the beautiful? Or when the obvious logical connection is made that people shouldn’t be punished for an advantage in life they had no control over receiving? (hi, IQ denialists!)
You can see where this will lead: a mountain of lawsuits claiming reverse discrimination based on a misleading, subjective experience of beauty; an anti-anti-lookism argument, however tactically disingenuous, to which liberals who created the anti-lookism laws will have no counter, without transparently betraying their very own cherished beliefs and principles. Never underestimate the scope of the infinite logic traps into which equalists are capable of boxing themselves. You have entered… The Dissonance Zone.
The only way an anti-lookism legal apparatus could conceivably “work” — that is, operate long enough to generate substantial revenues for interested lawyerly middlemen — without instantly imploding from internal contradictions is if liberals admit that beauty is objective and thus measurable with precision instruments. Without that cave on one of the liberal core tenets — without that craven loss of leftoid face — an anti-lookism bureaucracy won’t last any longer than the first lawsuit filed by an aggrieved hottie which claims beauty is a personal experience that can vary depending on the person observing it. The platitudes and pretty lies that so entrance liberals will ring like a symphony in the Courtroom of Playing Field Leveling, deafening liberals with their own dulcet ear poison. Oh, the irony, it is delicious.
Even were liberals to happily and expediently kick out a major pillar girding their ideology and proclaim in the interest of wallet-fattening litigiousness that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but is an objective fact of biology and cosmic law, there would still be no way for “anti-lookism” laws to survive their intrinsic parodical nature. For as soon as liberals admit that beauty has a factual, objective basis they will be forced, by circumstance or by subversion, to also admit that other unequal distributions of favorable human traits have a sound, objective biological basis… and then the whole goddamn house of equalist cards comes crashing down in the ensuing rush for biological inequality reparations and anti-discrimination compensation. And once that path is taken, illimitable chaos must follow in its wake. The body politic will be bled dry, or it will seize a rationale for eugenics.
Coerced eugenics, if you think about it, is the logical end game of equalism.
I predict that the advocate of lookism laws in that article is a beautiful woman who feels guilty for catching breaks in life, and wants to atone for her sins. To satisfy my curiosity, I found her photo to see if I’m right.
Curses! Foiled again!
Equalists, I’ll make this very simple for you: Life is unfair. Deal with it.
[crypto-donation-box]
