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OH. YOU PRETTY THINGS
A few months back, I had occasion to
talk with someone who worked part-time as
a secret shopper, posing as a customer in
various retail establishments to assess the
employees' performance and compliance with
corporate guidelines. Among the businesses
she spied on was a certain clothing outlet
specializing in apparel for young adults, which
I'm not at liberty to mention by name. We'll
call it, oh, Stabberzombie and Blitch.
At this store, the lady revealed, one of the
compliance points she was asked to rate was
"attractiveness of employees." Apparently the
rumors are true: in order to be employed and
remain so at Gabberblumby and Glitch, one
must conform to a certain arbitrary standard
of physical attractiveness—that is, a lot of
symmetry, not too much ethnicity, no ecto-
morphism. The store's image of young afflu
ence depends on maintaining the illusion that
if you buy overpriced cargo shorts and T-shirts
with the name of the store on them (which is
theoretically free advertising; why doesn't the
store give them away?) from attractive people,
then you yourself are one of those attrac
tive people—certainly more attractive than
those people buying the exact same things at
Wal-Mart for a third of the price. Thin, white
and pretty—that's how they do things at
Fabberdromby and Britch.
Some people are likely to take umbrage at
what would appear to be a blatant case of dis
crimination based upon appearance. Why, after
all, shouldn't anyone be able to work at this
store regardless of appearance? Setting aside
the question of why anyone would want to, it
does bring up a prevalent question haunting
the Zeitgeist: do pretty people have an unfair
advantage, and is this disparity something
that can be addressed in Ore courts the way .
other forms of discrimination are? Is it pos
sible to legislate or adjudicate aesthetics?
Law professor Deborah L Rhode believes
so, and she makes the argument in her
new book The Beauty Bias: The Injustice
of Appearance in Ufa and Law (Oxford
University Press, 2010). Well, to be fair, she
kind of makes the argument. It goes some
thing like this. Studies have shown that in
the workplace certain characteristics carry
preconceptions of ability, or lack thereof.
Overweight men and women are considered
lazy. Shorter-than-average men are considered
less intelligent and less capable of assuming
leadership roles. Conventionally attractive
young women are more likely to be hired
because of their appearance and less likely
to be promoted because of their appearance.
Light-skinned blacks are perceived to be
smarter than dark-skinned blacks. Regardless
of the job, even when said job does not
involve contact with the public, men with
long hair are less likely to he hired than those
with short hair, even when the long-haired
men in question are more qualified.
Add to these statistics Rhode's assessment
of a billion-dollar diet industry based largely
on hack theories and bad science, a cosmetics
industry that cannot possibly deliver on its
promises, and a plastic-surgery epidemic that
does more harm than good. Reinforce
that witn the unrealistic beauty stan
dards put across by clothing manufactur
ers and "America's Next Top Model" and
a culture that convinces little girls to
start dieting while in the single-digit
ages, and the picture than emerges is one
where something must be done.
But what? Rhode believes that the
answer may lie in legislation that permits
people who feel discriminated against
based on appearance to bring lawsuits
just as people who face race or gender
discrimination are able to, an Equal
Employment Opportunity law for the
(ostensibly) unattractive.
The fact that I had to put the word
"ostensibly" in parentheses, however,
is the problem with Rhode's thesis.
Appearance discrimination does exist,
even among the "beautiful people," as
the recent ejection of 5000 customers
from the appearance-only dating site
BeautifulPeople.com for having appeared
to have gained weight demonstrates.
But the cliche applies here: beauty is in
the eye of the beholder, not the district
courts. Simply put, appearance discrimi
nation is next to impossible to prove,
and where it can be proven (such as in the
example of female casino employees who are
required to dress in revealing clothes while
male employees have no clothing restrictions),
the burden of proving that such discrimina
tion causes hardship falls upon the plaintiff
and is an ordeal unto itself which legisla
tion cannot alleviate. In the examples Rhode
cites of six districts that did enact successful
appearance-discrimination legislation, every
suit that has been brought to date carried a
further civil-rights component that obscured
the appearance issue. Rhode argues a solution
that has not been fairly tried, because it can't
be. In all fairness, Rhode does state that the
true test is yet to come, but one wonders why
she wrote the book if she's still waiting for the
lab results.
It's because something must be done.
And something can be done, only not by the
legislature or by the courts. Like most situ
ations involving business, the best way to
effect change is through negative publicity
and customer boycott. If it bothers you that
Blabbergumby and 8itch practices appearance
discrimination, don't shop there; although if
you shop there already, chances are you're not
going to care.
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