Should We Do More to Fight Lookism?

In 2007, Miranda Fricker, a British philosopher, published a book called “Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.” It became a smash hit, philosophically speaking, because it diagnosed a problem that had been hard to put into words. Imagine that you witness a crime, Fricker wrote, but find that the police won’t credit your testimony because of the color of your skin. Or suppose you’re being tormented by someone in power, but lack the ability to explain to others—or even to yourself—exactly how you’re being wronged. (You might be like the women in “Mad Men,” who were being sexually harassed by their bosses but lacked the term “sexual harassment.”) These two kinds of injury seem different but are actually related, Fricker argued, because they both have to do with knowledge. In the first case, you know something, but no one will listen to you; in the second, you have trouble fully knowing what’s going on in your life. In either case, you’re suffering from an unfairness of knowledge that limits what you’re able to communicate, what others are willing to hear from you, or what you can understand about yourself and your circumstances. In the years since the appearance of Fricker’s book, the effort to overcome bias and discrimination has acquired a new flavor. In this latest phase, many harms that were once difficult to describe have been given names, so that they can be better identified and confronted. (We now talk about mansplaining, microaggressions, and gaslighting.) Populations that might not otherwise have seen what they have in common—neurodivergent people, or patients with contested diagnoses—have formed identities and found cause for solidarity. It can be life-changing to have a name for what harms you; society can shift when new groups assert themselves. And yet the pursuit of epistemic justice also risks what the psychologist Nick Haslam has called concept creep—“the progressive expansion of concepts of harm.” The new terms or categories that some find liberating might not reflect an underlying reality. (Not all patients with contested diagnoses face the same struggle.) A new identity can create burdens that aren’t easily shrugged off. “I have never, until now, confessed to anyone that I felt I was ugly,” the journalist Stephanie Fairyington writes in her new book, “Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter.” Since childhood, she’s felt unattractive; she’s also found it “hard to say the words I am ugly or even I am seen as ugly.” When she’s succeeded in giving voice to such ideas, perhaps using softened language (“My looks aren’t my strong suit”), well-meaning people are quick to disagree, telling her that she looks good. But she’s certain that this isn’t true, and that her appearance has shaped her life. She recalls a moment from her childhood, on “a sunny day in 1986,” when the mother of a friend, parked in a minivan, leaned out the window and exclaimed, incredulously, “That’s Chrysí’s daughter?” Fairyington’s mother and brother were notably good-looking. “Where they had full lips, I had thin ones,” she writes. “Where they had aquiline noses, I had a bulbous red one.” Moreover, “it wasn’t just my face that made me unattractive . . . it was also the legibility of my queerness.” Fairyington cites the philosopher Thomas J. Spiegel, who, in a paper from 2022, argued that “lookism”—discrimination based on unattractiveness—is not just unfair in itself but also a form of epistemic injustice. Lookism’s existence is beyond dispute: research has shown that pretty people have an easier time making money, finding partners, and even succeeding in court, while unattractive people are judged more harshly, treated more meanly, and seen as lower performing. Yet there is a “taboo” around the subject of ugliness, Spiegel writes, that leads us to hide from ourselves the toll it takes on individuals. Lookism “does not generate the same awareness as gender or race-based discrimination partially for the reason that there is a different kind of discomfort associated with being identified as ugly,” he writes. “Ugly” is an ugly word. It’s painful to point it at yourself, and cruel to point it at others. It’s also a complicated word, since, as Fairyington shows in her wide-ranging book, beauty and ugliness are not just aesthetic ideas—they have cultural, biological, subjective, intersubjective, political, commercial, and historical dimensions. All this contributes to the fact that there’s no National Association for Unattractive People. No one urges H.R. departments to hold training sessions on overcoming lookism in the workplace; schools don’t teach kids about the costs of lauding beauty and denigrating its opposite. This gap in our defenses against bias may be understandable—but it leaves lookism unnamed and unopposed. What would it take for us to face the problem directly? The writer Ted Chiang imagines a solution to lookism in the short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” In his near-future scenario, it’s become easy and cheap to get your brain modified so that you don’t notice facial beauty. Someone who’s undergone the reversible procedure, which is called calliagnosia—kalos is the Greek word for beauty—“can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin,” a neurologist explains. But “he or she simply doesn’t experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences.” The story’s protagonist, a college freshman named Tamera, had the procedure done when she was a child, because her progressive parents were against lookism. Gazing into the mirror, she can’t tell if she’s pretty. It’s only when someone else sees a picture of her with her ex-boyfriend that she learns that she’s out of his league. At Tamera’s college, an organization called Students for Equality Everywhere, or SEE, wants to amend the school’s code of conduct so that calliagnosia is mandatory. They argue that it makes no sense to fight racism and sexism while tolerating lookism. They also point out that young people are pawns in a technological-arms race. In the story, generative video technology is being used to make models, spokespeople, and politicians unnaturally persuasive, charismatic, and beautiful. An advocate of calliagnosia says that, while it’s reasonable to enjoy looking at ordinary beautiful people, these digital manipulations conjure the equivalent of “pharmaceutical-grade beauty”—“the cocaine of good looks.” Various people in Chiang’s story proffer all sorts of arguments, philosophical, practical, and aesthetic, against blocking the perception of human beauty. But others decide to fight fire with fire, or embrace the technology on philosophical grounds. “The foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated,” a religion professor at the college explains. “But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul.” It’s interesting to consider how our present-day world compares with Chiang’s fictional one. Like the students in his story, we’re living in an age of technologically accelerated lookism. In our sci-fi reality, those with the means can use GLP-1s to become ultra-slim; they can employ cosmetic surgery to reverse signs of aging, and to redesign their faces and bodies so that they reflect algorithmically adjudicated images of “perfection.” Dating websites reduce people to photographs, even as photo editing gets easier; the video-conferencing apps we use for work offer to enhance our appearances. We are, quite literally, surrounded by “pharmaceutical-grade beauty.” And yet our world, unlike the one in the story, does not offer an equivalent of calliagnosia. Although there are some circumstances in which we can make “blind” decisions—in ninth grade, I auditioned for the school orchestra from behind a curtain—for the most part, our predicament is worse than theirs. We might, therefore, conclude that we have no choice but to confront lookism head on. What would that effort look like? In her book “The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law,” from 2010, the legal scholar Deborah L. Rhode proposed that appearance ought to be added to current anti-discrimination laws. Today, there are jurisdictions, across the country, in which discrimination based on height and weight is specifically outlawed; only a handful of statutes use words such as “appearance.” We might imagine a world in which people more regularly sue their employers for appearance-based discrimination. (But would that be a better world?) In the past, it was not unusual to include a photograph of yourself when you submitted a résumé—an obvious vector for lookism—but the hiring process has evolved. Photographs are often prohibited, and anonymized applications and structured interviews have become more commonplace. And yet the consequences of such measures are hard to predict. There is some evidence that they lead to the hiring of candidates who end up performing better at work. But a study conducted by the Australian government, based on “blind” hiring practices in the Australian Public Service, found that they had unpredictable effects on bias, in part because “de-identification may frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity.” In “Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful,” from 2011, the economist Daniel Hamermesh attempts to estimate the “beauty premium”: he suggests that attractive people earn about a hundred and forty thousand dollars more than regular people over a lifetime. (The effect is “not small, it’s not huge,” Hamermesh has said.) In a concluding section, he weighs various options for compensating or protecting those who are denied that premium. One challenge is that attractiveness unfolds along a spectrum, rather than in categories; if the whole bottom third of the spectrum were protected, it would be the largest protected class in society. Even if it existed, would it be a class that people wanted to join? Moral progress isn’t confined to legislation, of course. It also happens individually and interpersonally; it’s created and promulgated one person at a time, through conversation. In “Ugly,” Fairyington shows how she and her spouse, Sabrina, have tried to give their daughter the tools she’ll need to perceive and resist lookism. In ways both sophisticated and simple—visiting museums, going shopping, listening to Le Tigre—they offer their child a rich understanding of the forces that shape our relationships with our corporeal selves. Their conversations can be hyper-intellectual: “Teasing apart your friend’s ‘fat’ comment, I thought about how the neo-Assyrians preferred heaviness over thinness,” Fairyington writes. But they’re also frank and revelatory; often, they move from questions about bodies or body image into discussions of history, politics, and the broader human experience. As a parent myself, I found the book inspiring. Around the time he published “Beauty Pays,” Hamermesh did a Q. & A. with readers of the blog “Freakonomics.” “Take advantage of what you’re good at—other things in which you have a comparative advantage,” he told a reader who asked about “how to utterly defeat pretty people.” “Looks are only one of many things that affect success,” he went on. Although Hamermesh was speaking in the language of economics, this isn’t too different from some of what Fairyington puts into practice. An important way to fight lookism is by recognizing human multidimensionality. Like all forms of prejudice, lookism flattens people; we can resist it by being curious, open-minded, and expansive. We can notice that giving in to lookism—a harm we can inflict by degrees, and visit upon ourselves—becomes easier when we use technologies that encourage shallow relationships and assessments. Does this require us to break the taboo around ugliness—to name it, as Fairyington does? Reading her story, I found myself uncertain. Throughout the book, Fairyington uses the word “ugly” to speak with clarity and force about unfairness. Hearing the term directed at her in middle school was “a new kind of painful,” and it “solidified my ugly self-concept”; at the same time, it “provided a weird kind of relief to know, unequivocally, that my self-understanding was accurate.” And yet, as Fairyington’s narrative shows, the self-understanding she achieved as a middle schooler wasn’t accurate. Back then, she heard “ugly” as an epithet, simple, brutal, and factual—an objective verdict. But “ugly,” as she uses it in “Ugly,” turns out to be a different kind of word: to use it to describe yourself is to evoke a whole constellation of values, many of them questionable, being brought to bear on a person whose inherent dignity resists them. It’s a word that wishes to undo itself—a word that, if we were truly to vanquish lookism, wouldn’t be needed. ♦