Physical appearance as a category of discrimination

[Krypton]

There's definitely different kinds of attractiveness and they come with their own benefits and drawbacks--e.g., 6'+ musclechads vs skinnier/shorter people who are attractive in unconventional ways. Only one of those is getting tinder dates, but the other still benefits. The way people hit on attractive men and attractive women is different and might influence how each perceives that.

I'll say for my personal part, I always wanna be at least as attractive as I am now.

 

[aeon]

Right now, many consider the Ogee curve/S curve from brow to cheek to be more important than fitting the golden ratio.

JFC—determining beauty by taking a three-dimensional human head, viewing it from an oblique angle to derive a two-dimensional projection, and then determining the degree to which a given facial contour is congruent with the parameters that describe a particular quadratic Bézier curve.

Humans love to be gatekeepers as a means to edify their egos and accumulate fat stacks.

Wow,
Ian

 

[Wyote]

Humans love to be gatekeepers as a means to edify their egos and accumulate fat stacks.

Like I said, I'm still gonna discriminate

 

[Asa]

JFC—determining beauty by taking a three-dimensional human head, viewing it from an oblique angle to derive a two-dimensional projection, and then determining the degree to which a given facial contour is congruent with the parameters that describe a particular quadratic Bézier curve.

Humans love to be gatekeepers as a means to edify their egos and accumulate fat stacks.

Wow,
Ian

If you convince people there is a lower-cost procedure that will make them beautiful, they'll do it. Right now it is the ogee curve and the jawline. Unfortunately, beauty is like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. It's an endless chase nobody can win. Aside from the concept of beauty being too subjective and personal to each of us, the maintenance for many procedures is endless, and too many factors can go wrong.

 

[uuu]

Let me get pedantic again...

On the contrary, I think this negates the point of discussion. Beautiful people experience similar rejections as uggos so what's the topic now?

Depends how you understand “the point of the discussion.” My overarching point has always been

physical attractiveness has a huge influence on how you move through the world and what kinds of opportunities you get

and then I went to give some of the disadvantages faced by ugly people. But the overarching point also encompasses the fact that attractive people face discrimination, stereotyping, and harassment because of their appearance. I never said that the graph of "attractiveness" vs. "life easiness" (or whatever) is strictly increasing, only that it isn't a flat line. (Well, I also said that it was generally positively correlated, but this is my personal view and not an integral part of the argument presented in the OP.)

Also, I don't think that beautiful "experience similar rejections" as ugly people: These two groups experience qualitatively different forms of discrimination that are incommensurate—it's a waste of time to try to regard the difficulties faced by one group as harsher than those faced by the other.

My purpose here isn't to identify the range of physical attractiveness that makes life least uncomfortable so that we can, like, punish those people with higher taxes or something—I'm not into "oppression Olympics." I only want, perhaps naively, to draw attention to an issue that has affected me personally and to find out if others have experienced as well.

 

[Rit4lin]

 

[uuu]

Our desire to move did include a desire to live among fewer people. I think the reason people bother me less is multi-faceted. There are fewer people, the culture is different here (people are more polite and keep to themselves, plus they place more value on farm women), I rarely go out alone anymore, I'm older and finally look like I'm 35+ so people treat me differently. I don't fit the current beauty standards. I don't try to contour, wear false lashes, get filler, or have fancy hair, et, and I haven't augmented anything. I also think more people are more respectful now.

I have moved back and forth between the city and the country several times, and I have also noticed that people in rural areas tend to be more polite, and less quick to dismiss you over superficial things like personality. I guess when there aren't many people around, the people who you do have become that much more precious. But rural life was confining in other ways: It's hard to escape socialization when you can run into someone you know around at any street corner. Paradoxically, the Seoul subway at rush hour is one of the only places I feel I can be truly alone.

 

[uuu]

As I contemplated responding to the thread I realized that I’ve reached a personal comfort-threshold for sharing potentially unpopular, harmony-threatening, perspectives on the forum for a while

Threaten the harmony! FIDLAR!

 

[Asa]

I have moved back and forth between the city and the country several times, and I have also noticed that people in rural areas tend to be more polite, and less quick to dismiss you over superficial things like personality. I guess when there aren't many people around, the people who you do have become that much more precious. But rural life was confining in other ways: It's hard to escape socialization when you can run into someone you know around at any street corner. Paradoxically, the Seoul subway at rush hour is one of the only places I feel I can be truly alone.

It's the opposite for me. In the city, I couldn't go anywhere without bumping into people I knew. Plus, strangers would bother me, so it wasn't an anonymous experience. I don't know many people here and people don't bother each other the way they do in the city. (Plus, if you do anything gossipy, it will be all over town so people mind their business.)

 

[slant]

I read this thread and my only unhelpful response is:

That's just the way it is.

It's a very accurate observation.

We all have our cards we are dealt in life. Some people are ugly, some people were born in North Korea. It's all very terrible and we deal with whatever our specific problem is the best we can.

I think you're wrong that people aren't talking about this much, though. The incel community is very much built around the inequality in attractiveness levels and stoking resentment and anger over it.

 

[Wyote]

That's just the way it is.

To paraphrase Slant:
Why do you care about things you can't change

The incel community is very much built around the inequality in attractiveness levels and stoking resentment and anger over it.

Let's all get angrier
rawrrrrrrrr

 

[slant]

To paraphrase Slant:
Why do you care about things you can't change



Let's all get angrier
rawrrrrrrrr

You know me so well

 

[Wyote]

You know me so well

Not really tho

 

[uuu]

I think you're wrong that people aren't talking about this much, though. The incel community is very much built around the inequality in attractiveness levels and stoking resentment and anger over it.

Well, yeah, this is kind of the problem. On this other forum I frequent (I cheated, I'm sorry, etc.), when I tried to bring this topic up I was immediately flamed for invoking "incel rhetoric."

I don't know what to make of this: I guess incels kind of suck, but when that term first got popular on reddit around 2010 or so, the incels were just a group of depressed young men. Sure, they enabled each other with defeatist remarks about how things would never get better, but the explicitly violent and hateful tendencies came latter, after the UCSB shooting with that guy's YouTube manifesto.

I want to be able to talk about this without being mistaken for an incel. And honestly, I think that as a society, if we judge this kind of discrimination to be a serious issue, then we ought to muster a more robust than "That's just the way it is."

 

[slant]

Well, yeah, this is kind of the problem. On this other forum I frequent (I cheated, I'm sorry, etc.), when I tried to bring this topic up I was immediately flamed for invoking "incel rhetoric."

I don't know what to make of this: I guess incels kind of suck, but when that term first got popular on reddit around 2010 or so, the incels were just a group of depressed young men. Sure, they enabled each other with defeatist remarks about how things would never get better, but the explicitly violent and hateful tendencies came latter, after the UCSB shooting with that guy's YouTube manifesto.

I want to be able to talk about this without being mistaken for an incel. And honestly, I think that as a society, if we judge this kind of discrimination to be a serious issue, then we ought to muster a more robust than "That's just the way it is."

I definitely don't think you are an incel but I think dwelling on things in a certain way can lead to these type of thoughts. So people just need to be careful not to get too consumed by the bitterness they might feel

 

[Wyote]

I was immediately flamed for invoking "incel rhetoric."

I had to laugh at this. It's kind of pathetic how far we've come with being triggered by pretty much every topic.
But it is understandable, given how threatening incel groups tend to present themselves.
Not to mention how idiotic.

I definitely don't think you are an incel but I think dwelling on things in a certain way can lead to these type of thoughts. So people just need to be careful not to get too consumed by the bitterness they might feel

I think this is at least one important aspect of defining context when discussing any contentious topic.
How much is a person really truly invested in whatever contentious topic they are bringing up? How much is it actually weighing on them?
It's ok and even perfectly healthy to talk about pretty much anything as long as you make your current understandings transparent and remain open to input.
There's a lot of context that needs to be filled in to really understand where a person might be coming from and how to engage with them appropriately based on that.

 

[slant]

I mean, besides venting, what's the outcome of talking about it?

It almost always seems to lead to a thought process of "here is an inequality, we need to find a way to equalize it", but do we?

Do we really need to worry about people's individual struggles and feel like there is some cultural corruption that has to change in order for these people to find success and happiness? What is the change, that we develop an objective attractiveness scale and then if you fall below a certain range you should be considered for jobs because of your unattractiveness score, you should be entitled to a certain amount of dates from people with a certain higher score of attractiveness, this way we will "level the field"?

I'm sure some people are satisfied with just venting but the more people you rally around a shared experience the more wronged and victimized the collective will begin to feel and then challenge the societal norms and demand things be different.

I guess that isn't inherently wrong in itself but it's annoying when constantly it's everyone else's fault for your individual problems.

I don't think unattractiveness or the problems associated with that can be fixed. It seems to me just a factor of life. So if that's the case, what are we accomplishing by discussing it besides just, "Man that sucks sorry man".

And if that was the point of this thread then yes:

It does suck to compare yourself to others and feel others have more than you, in this case, thinking you are ugly and others are more attractive. That sucks! And it also sucks that because of these perceived differences sometimes people might treat you differently. That sucks too!

 

[Wyote]

Somewhat relevant, and also hilarious

 

[aeon]

On this other forum I frequent (I cheated, I'm sorry, etc.)

How dare you!

 

[uuu]

I mean, besides venting, what's the outcome of talking about it?

Haha, this gives me deja vu from our conversation in the other thread I made where I was talking about my labmate with motivation issues! My reasons for participating in this thread:

• To vent
• To see if anyone else has experienced this, too
• To get some social feedback on whether I'm too passionate about this issue
• Most importantly: because talking about this kind of thing is my hobby

Just bear that in mind if you choose to read on, since I would be remiss if anyone thought I took myself or my thoughts surrounding this issue too seriously...

Do we really need to worry about people's individual struggles and feel like there is some cultural corruption that has to change in order for these people to find success and happiness? What is the change, that we develop an objective attractiveness scale and then if you fall below a certain range you should be considered for jobs because of your unattractiveness score, you should be entitled to a certain amount of dates from people with a certain higher score of attractiveness, this way we will "level the field"?

Yeah, I don't know what kind of change I would like to see come of this either. The famous short story "Harrison Bergeron" (might have spelled this wrong) imagines a dystopia in which beautiful people are forced to wear ugly masks, good singers are physically restrained from singing at their fullest etc. all in pursuit of a more "fair" society. The punchline is, of course, that these restrictions end up making existence dreary and oppressive. But the climax of the story, in which these two performers on a TV show take off their masks and are revealed to be exceptionally beautiful, wasn't particularly satisfying to me either: The entire story is sort of arguing against a strawman; it imagines a society that has eradicated all trace of social differentiation and then shows you that "Whew, that would suck."

It doesn't seem to me like anyone, even incels, is arguing for public intervention of the sort portrayed in Harrison Bergeron. Rather, incels (for their part) have taken note of the larger habit of modern civic culture to try to identify "structural inequalities" in the social structure and try to rectify them—and the incels want to grab a seat on this bandwagon, too.

So, let me turn your argument around on you: You can argue that this kind of victim mentality that blames society for one's personal struggles is entitled and counterproductive, but (to steal one of your favorite lines) that particular mode of civic participation is here to stay: "It is what it is." And to the extent that identify a source of social inequality and whine about it is, in the larger culture, a "thing" that we are doing, we might as well do it on behalf of ugly people too, right?