How to tackle discrimination against the unattractive?
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2018
- Lookism is discrimination against unattractive people. How serious is this problem? What is the cost of lookism to unattractive people and to society? What should we do about lookism? In this interview with Katrien Devolder, Dr Francesca Minerva (Philosopher, Ghent University) provides us with some answers to these thorny questions.
I've been the victim of lookism for years, both inside the workplace and outside the workplace. I've had strangers actually calling me 'ugly' as they walk past me in public. Or laugh and joke about me based on my looks with their friends or co workers again in public. I've had shop or department store workers make comments about my appearance when I'm shopping minding my own business. When I complain to them about it. They just completely deny it. Even the people I share an apartment with. Regularly call me ugly and talk about my looks amongst themselves. It's really shocking. Just how most people can treat you if you're not sexually attractive.
I agree with you sir . They always deny it
I've hoped you've moved out long ago
Even if your a bang average guy you arent sexually attractive to most women. But to be called ugly by random strangers is unheard of by most people. You have my condolences, your life must be torture.
you're absolutely very right about what you say. I wish there were many more people as wise as you're... but sexually attractive people have always been the center of attention in any race ever before ... Looks are important and so many people pretend they're not and it's just about "confidence" ... If lookism were a global permanent topic to discuss about, you would not have been this heavily judged by awful horrendous people you had to see publicly.
Thanks for sharing some of your experiences.
Loving this channel.
I think lookism is a thing that is severely underrated and way less talked like other current trend topics like feminism, body positivity, aborting, racism.
People really do not realize how much this either biological or social bias actually affects people that are simply not attractive, but specially men who are mostly not attractive to the opposite gender.
You do truly get way worse treatment by any society by things that are not socially accepted as attractive like introverted personality o unattractive/not symmetrical features like face or height or breasts size depending upon the gender.
Also its important to note that intersectionality is a thing too. If you notice, any time theres an anti(whatever) post that has an image, more often than not, the portray the target demographic as ugly, scary looking or deformed.
The cost that society pays for practicing lookism is EXTREMELY HIGH when it comes to the dynamics of hiring people, and quite frankly it was about time to bring this to the table since in places like South America how a person look (facial features, skin color, weight and clothes) is far more important for a company of any kind than the intelectual and academic development the aspirant for the job have, and thanks to this practice thousands (maybe millions) of intelectual individuals (mostly women) with great ideas get their access denied to contribute to the society just because they don't look good. And thanks to this, South America is plagued by incompetent "good looking" bosses and employees making of course a sea of bad desitions. Have you ever wonder why these countries are in the mess they are? Well, lookism represents more than the 60% of the reason why.
looks have been always inheretely important to living beings for sex nor better social treatment. I don't realize why lookism is a permanent trend for many aspects of life, aside from other centuries topic like racism or current feminism ... It pays you off a huge life-time issue to be ugly or beautiful. You just get economical or emotional benefits out of being pretty, and this is a topic that needs a ton of discuss but way more often.
Either way, this discrimination you say women get is same garbage upon men. It's just this inheret sex and genetics obsession people have that affects many people's life aspects.
@@naam4769 The comment I wrote has nothing to do with sex or better social treatment.
It is about educated individuals, people with degrees, academic knowledge getting rejected just because they don't fit in beauty standards. This is a huge issue that affects us all because without competent people making decisions chances are low to see good results in the fields that have impact in our society (human sciences, medical sciences, pure sciences, finance, engineering, arts)
And by the way, in the places I have lived people that "look good" aren't keen to study the fields I mentioned above. So, if this nonsense stills goes on, how incoherent do you think the future will be?
@@Lymor1 that's pretty much what happens anywhere, lady. You can expect a good looking people to work on sex market, aka onlyfans, prostitution, webcam girls, twitch girl streaming or in case of males just modelling... This lookism issue you just talk about is on the high end of social influence but it happens the same for social treatment in just daily basis talking with people, either people are not aware or they're about these topics.
I dont want to give you bad news, but people on the average are way too stupid to ever talk about these issues. Attractive genetics are a main focus to a big amount of people, either by biological or social influence.
Unfortunately many people dont ever want to talk about it because inheretely mostly of us are fucked one way or another in sexual attraction. Not to mention, most of people are not intelligent to ever acknowledge these bias exist pretty much in any other living race since the beginning of times.
Industries earn money to keep perpetuating beauty stereotypes to keep people insecure about themselves over just audio/visual content, but not directly talking about it.
Furthermore, people don't even have emotional strength to accept they're ugly... everyone likes to think is beautiful one way or another, but the physical side is a thing very few gotta reach the point to admit they're not attractive except the ones who work for modelling...
What I want to get from all of this, is the fact if people could raise their global IQ even further then this very biological bias could be talked about and eventually get realistic solutions ... Including the ones you say about high end educational jobs.
I see two ways to fix this permanent war between uglies and those very overrated people claimed to be beautiful.
1) People need to stop this massive obsession upon sex and genetics but also praising model-like people and then start fully supporting medical research in order to someday being capable to fix through surgeries all possible genetic flaws both guys and girls have.
2) Influence like you talk about from highly educated jobs, which could eventually happen through progressism but the biological bias will always be there ... So for example, you could have mostly of educated "not attractive" people teaching all over the world but if females have still this biological bias about choosing tall men over short men, or men with big penises over micro ones so then doesn't matter how much you teach if the bias will always be there from nature.
@@naam4769 1) Personal preferences when choosing a partner is something that has NOTHING TO DO with academic degrees and how well a person uses this knowledge in his/her field at work.
2) I am an adult so keep the explanation of "how the world works" or "giving news" for yourself.
I think we can fix this issue by implementing "blind interview" so the interviewer won't judge the person by their looks .I understand it does not totally solve lookism but I think this is a great start to fight it
Fantastic work! I think it is worth noting that even things with deep biological foundations can be trained against. Many sexual and violent dispositions which people are inclined towards but which are immoral are ones which we train ourselves not to express. I think we can start with those fairytails. I like to write stories in which the good folk are what some might call hideous and the evil folk are those whom we might describe as beautiful. If we can train ourselves to expect physical beauty to be shallow and potentially disguise unpleasant things, then I think we will be better off.
Lookism is inherently neutral. However, it does have its positives and negatives as with any specific area of society. I choose not to fall victim to this ideology because we cannot just tell attractive people to stop being attractive because they are getting better opportunities. All we can do is work with what we got and magnify that to atleast be moderately attractive also being positive but also healing our shadows so we don't project insecurities to attractive people. Everything in life is sacrifice and we can enhance our looks but at the cost of not eating that snickers bars, not drinking so much and picking up a healthy diet, workout plan and clothing style that fits our bodies. "Ugly people" do not have to be victims to the halo effect that attractive people emit, everything is choice in this life we have to work on our physical appearance as best we can because not all of us were born equal. Some are naturally smarter, or physically gifted but we can do enough within our limits to rise above our short comings. Go on your hero's journey everyone.
Extremely overlooked issue. Thanks for covering this!
It seems we need to educate people to be more like Vulcans and exterminate animalistic passions, thus making them less likely to fall prey to the deceptive nature of beauty.
Have you seen Jason Brennan's theory of hooligans, Hobbits and Vulcans? His theory is most people are either hooligans or Hobbits: hooligans take in information but they are biased towards their team. Hobbits are just people that like living their own lives, not that interested in wider events etc. The theory of democracy and increasing participation goes something like - get the Hobbits involved, give them the info an they'll make rational decisions like Vulcans - but all the data shows that when they are involved they just become hooligans.
They only way we'll ever think like vulcans is by becoming transhuman, but that will mean we lose 'us'. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate.
U cannot eliminate animalistic/instinctual urges. We look for attractive partners to produce offspring that will in turn have easier lives and in turn higher survivability and likelihood to pass on our genes.
You can´t educate into people something which is subconscious and much older than high intelligence.
@@neoepicurean3772 If you eliminated very old, basic functions you would also eliminate everything which is tied to it and developped later. That´s why for example eliminating aggresion would also eliminate love and empathy because these evolved as counter-aggresion to ballance it and are directly tied to it. 100% objective, non-emotional human would be a psychopath on "steroids".
@@Mouse_Metal It won't be straight forward, but when we have a better understanding of the brain and can fully simulate humans or brains, then we can get past the problems you raise. Probably...
No more _discriminatory_ based isms, please. I reached my limit when I happened upon "audism".
No, not autism. Audism, no typo.
It's discrimination based on the look of people, so "lookism" seems a good word. Since the phenomenon does exist, it's good to have a word to refer to it. Is there a better term?
I'm aware. The video explains it too. My point is, there's a growing backlash against these newer, microscopic-level examinations of implicit bias *when* they come in the form of isms or sub-isms. So on a purely tactical level, if you want a previously unexplored bias to receive some attention, don't saddle it with a descriptor. The connotations to stuff like audism are too strong.
These ridiculous concepts are only known and used by a tiny minority of western snowflakes. Nobody else in the whole world knows what the heck these things are.
what about friendism? seems like the action of selecting friends is discrimination to me
Indeed, it is a form of discrimination. It is, however, hard to combat it through political means without making things worse for everyone (which is not the case for certain other forms of discrimination). I think, however, that there are at least some moral considerations that come into play when you consider what friends to choose. Is it not, for instance, moral for a teacher to urge children to play some more with the lonely ones?
@@BiznizTrademark I was trying to be absurd in order to invoke some kind of thinking. I wish I could tell my penis who I am supposed to respond to. That way I can have a good time at fucking my friends over. I mean, friends would be in unlimited supply in such a paradigm, right?
I think the video's trying to say that there's a stereotypical beauty standard for people, and people feel pressure to conform to that and therefore society has made people think that those who don't conform to that are "less than", even though beauty is subjective. However, I've never noticed that there's a standard "friend" stereotype for people. Different people attract a diverse amount of friends and it's often based on emotional connection etc. I mean choosing friends could be affected by lookism as well. That was my take on it!
Isn't this called nepotism?
It's the way of life, you can't try resisting reality forever.
Why not? What about racism and implicit racial bias? Shouldn't we "resist" that psychological reality?
It depends. Like how could one even in principle say that racism or racial bias is wrong in purely naturalistic world.
Killing each other is also natural way of life but normal people agree it´s wrong and murder is considered a serious crime in civilized countries.
Because lookism is the most practiced discrimination,it's been practiced since the beginning and it's getting stronger in this era.We thought it's completely normal to dehumanize/discriminate ugly people
there's nothing wrong with lookism
Maybe not to narcissisits
Its natural and occurs in every animal species. Nature is cruel to most and great to some.
@@KyAl111. wouldn’t u want to help most ppl?
It's like saying "there's nothing wrong with racism" lmao
@Fabian Kirchgessner they're normalising lookism too much
Finding a person attractive or, in order words, developing affinities towards certain persons but no towards everyone, is part of our inherent ability to think and feel for ourselves. It's called freedom of choice. It's called freedom of will. That's what makes us human. Now you can call this ability "discrimination" and claim that we need to "change the society" in order to fix that. Well. Every time we make a friend, we are discriminating other people. Every time we choose a partner, we are discriminating other people. Every time we show more love to our parents, siblings and children than to other people, we are discriminating. No, madam "after-birth abortion", you won't change society. You won't turn humans into soulless programmed beings. You won't make this orwellian nightmare come true. We won't let you.
Discrimination is not about the preferences. It is about the treatment.
The problem is not that we find some people attractive and some unattractive. The problem is that we treat attractive people better and unattractive people worse and precive them as bad people.
It is like racism. The problem of racism is not that black people exist. The problem is that black people are treated worse.
@@kiralight6661 But you're mixing completely unrelated things. Interestingly enough, you seem to understand the word "racism" as "bad treatment towards black people". While, in fact, racism is bad treatment towards people of ANY different race (including racism of, say, Asians towards whites, blacks towards Asians, etc.). Now, the way you focus on black people allows us to deduce that you are a white person and, most likely, American. Unconsciously, you categorize white people as "normal" and black people as "different", and say to yourself: "hey, let's not treat those people bad just because they're different". And this is exactly the same mental mechanism you try to apply to the "beautiful" vs. "non-beautiful" question.
@@kiralight6661 thank you, you're completely right. Lookism is a greater problem that goes beyond both genders, but needs to be permanently discussed to either avoid biological bias and the ones from society that are permanently brain washing people .. You just get worse treatment if you're ugly physical features you don't choose to have like micro penis, short height (in males), unattractive faces, flat butts, small breasts (as women) just as examples. Problem is, people really don't have the courage to talk about it because everybody has it's flaws in different body parts but actually, looks is a thing that can bring you a ton of social and economical benefits or drawbacks if you got many ugly physical traits...
The thing is, lookism is a subject to be discussed way more often and people don't give real serious talking about it.
It´s not freedom, it´s literaly the old "lizard" brain having power over us. It´s the opposite of freedom of choice. Noone can choose to be attracted to a person they aren´t attracted to on a subconscious level.
"It's our freedom of choices" ah so it's your freedom to discriminate certain people you don't find attractive?stop normalising lookism for god sake lmao .Imagine this ,you are a victim of acid attack and now your face is completely burned or maybe even deformed then suddenly people around you starts treating you differently or dehumanize you.The case would be even worse if you used to be that one popular man/woman who's become victim of acid attack.Imagine that.Would you still approve it?