by Amelia Chong
Imagine yourself taking a walk in the park on a nice, windy evening. You pause to let your eyelids flutter shut as the cool air fills your lungs, feeling relaxed after a long day of work. Your eyes open only to find something shiny on the ground less than five steps from you. Would you go and inspect the gleaming object, or would you ignore it?
If you thought of inspecting the object, you are most definitely normal. I used to, as a child, investigate whatever that caught my eye, only to (almost) always find something of very little value such as the inside of a plastic wrapper of snacks. It wouldn’t be surprising that this applied to the vast majority of readers.
In his 2017 poem “Not a Silverfish”, Bao Phi writes:
“I know what it’s like to be mistaken for something else,
to feel that the first reaction when a new set of eyes encounters your body
is to want to smash you.”
The poem is about how he saw a bug and immediately deemed it ugly, with the rising urge to rid his home of it, only to realize how we do the same thing to other people: assess their appearances and give them a score of whether we should welcome them into our lives or otherwise.
As much as we preach not judging books by their covers, it is almost a voluntary reaction to label things as ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ without factoring in other considerations.
Have you ever wondered why women double back when they see beautiful, burnished jewels and jewelry? Or why men sometimes find themselves sneaking a glance at women who are pretty (I do not agree with objectifying people but bear with me)? Why do we want to squash the ugly bug but allow the stunning butterfly to live?
The answer is simple. We are programmed that way. Humans are biased toward beautiful things. This effect of giving a certain group more leeway than the other is known as ‘Pretty Privilege’ (or ‘the Halo effect’); it connotes that our appearances are a matter of social etiquette. While many of us fall blind in light of this effect, certain cultures and communities make full use of it; Koreans are aware of how the effect works, which is why they stress on skincare and braces from a young age, urging teenagers to take good care of their presentations.
Every one of us has our own definition of ‘pretty’, but when it comes to the topic at hand, a select few features are agreed upon: sculpted, able-bodied, and more often than not, thin. And the logic of pretty privilege is that if you satisfy the aforementioned qualities, you are entitled to more and better things and opportunities, be it popularity, grades, careers, and romance.
No matter how badly you program your brain against society’s beauty constructs, some biological wiring inside of us insists that we favor the pretty things in life—just refer back to the bug and butterfly situation, it is an instinctive, on the whim decision. When we come across beautiful things, our brain associates them with positive attributes such as warm, kind, smart, confident, healthy, and trustworthy—all of which are indicators of ‘safety’. Remember, before today’s civilization, our ancestors who lived in the open wild had to stick to people they judged as ‘safe’ to grow in numbers and, subsequently, power.
The year was 2013 when Italian researchers decided to send out over 10,000 resumes of identical qualifications, the only difference being a portion had applied with their photo attached to it. Whilst the average callback rate was 30% across all applicants, attractive women saw a massive difference in callback rate at 54%, and attractive men at 47%. This does not stop at the interview stage; though many don’t realize it, the issue of favoring one just because of their outward appearance, also known as pretty privilege, is more prevalent than you think it is, and that is a problem.
Some industries have a clear preference for attractive people such as the entertainment industry. This would come as no surprise as the entertainment industry places a heavy emphasis on looks; be it in the filming or music aspect. Despite the raised awareness of this issue and the demand for diversity in such industries, we cannot deny that there is still a deeply embedded notion of how attractive people are conceived to be better in general.
We ultimately hand out free passes to pretty things—no matter voluntarily or involuntarily.
Just A Pretty Face?
“They look good every single day, there is no way they don’t have their life together!”
Life is not always smooth for those who are deemed good-looking and attractive. Since we tend to associate beauty with ideas of health, intelligence, and competence, we subconsciously increase our expectations of these people as we have placed them on a pedestal when it comes to life in general. With this mentality, we have inflicted on these people what some would call ‘the Beauty Penalty’, where we expect more of those who are more than average in terms of outward appearance.
The privilege of being assumed to be more capable has also not always been beneficial to those who are on the receiving end of it. As stated, many gain an unfair advantage only because of their looks which in turn could result in doubts about their capabilities as they would think they are only valued for their looks. This in turn can be detrimental to one’s confidence in themselves as they would think that their looks are the only thing that has brought them thus far, taking a toll on their mental health.
In The Eye of The Beholder
Beauty has, without a doubt, always played a huge role in our society, and we have elevated the value of it to no end. There is nothing wrong with beauty, it is something natural to be on the lookout for; it is the obsession of it where things start to get ugly. This obsession seeps into every single aspect of our lives without us really realizing it. We perceive beauty in correlation to perfection; and that needs to stop.
Pretty privilege is not a myth, it plagues the world like a parasite you can never get rid of. In fact, one could go so far as to argue that it is built into the foundation of human society. The human mind is biased towards beauty; pretty privilege is only one of the ways that this mentality manifests itself. I am in no way saying that this change is something that can happen immediately; as a matter of fact, I don’t think it is something that we can fully eradicate. However, let us all take just small little steps each and every day to break down the unhealthy mindset of equating beauty to perfection.
If the butterfly can be waived from cruel fate, so should the bug.