The Problem of Pretty Privilege
Or: Why being attractive matters
What does it mean for someone to have privilege? In the boring sense, privilege denotes some sort of advantage offered to a particular person. Our society, however, takes a much narrower view of what constitutes privilege — at least in the political sense. We keep the concept of advantage, and add to it that this advantage must be conferred upon someone by an accident of birth to “count” as privilege. In other words, privilege means an advantage that is unearned.
Using that definition, I’d like to explore a type of privilege that seems to be left out when we discuss unequal distributions of power: attractiveness. I’ll be showing you how attractiveness gives an unearned advantage to those that have it, and looking at how it stacks up to other types of privilege that we care about.
Attractiveness is Unearned
First, is attractiveness unearned? I’d like to begin by pointing out that what I mean by attractiveness is not some platonic prescription of what beauty should be, but instead a measure of what most people consider attractive. Many of the studies I’ll be discussing make use of panel rating of attractiveness , also known as people looking at photos of others and rating them. We know that beauty standards change over time, so some features considered attractive now are not necessarily human universals — this analysis is specifically limited to Canadian/American beauty norms in the 21st century.
The same can be said of many other axes of privilege/oppression we care about. Italians and the Irish, for example, were at one point marginalized groups that suffered discrimination. Today, however, they fall under the umbrella “white” term, and it wouldn’t be honest to say they are marginalized in the same way they were historically.
With that disclaimer out of the way, is attractiveness unearned? What we consider to be attractive tends to rely on a few characteristics — body shape, facial features, and indicators of youth. These traits are heritable to a significant degree. You don’t need a study to realize that — people tend to look like their parents, and, if they have kids, their offspring will look like them. This is not to say all variance in all physical features is genetic — only that a significant component is.
If you’ve read my summary of Fredrik deBoer’s book, “The Cult of Smart”, you’ll remember that sub-100% figures of genetic heritability still make it difficult to design meritocratic systems; even if traits are not entirely heritable, the fraction to which they are is the degree to which those who win the genetic lottery have a headstart. A person of average attractiveness could invest significant time into curating their appearance, while a person of low attractiveness could put in the same effort and fail to reach similar levels of visual appeal. Like intelligence, hard work helps — but some are simply naturally gifted. Some people are tall, others have very symmetrical faces, some have both, and some have neither.
Attractiveness is an Advantage
So attractiveness is unearned, but does it give an advantage? For this we need to rely on research, due to how many confounds there are in this domain; We know that there are racial biases in what gets marketed as attractive, environmental factors like lack of access to high quality food can cause malnourishment or obesity, and there are standards of attractiveness that vary by gender to contend with.
Here’s a sample of how being attractive can change your life:
- Attractive people are perceived as smarter — (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)
- Attractive people are considered more trustworthy (Political Research Quarterly)
- Attractive people are given higher ratings for social skills, warmth, and dominance (Psychological Bulletin)
- Attractive people are paid more attention to and, as a result, are better understood by others (Psychological Science)
- Attractive people get better wages, better jobs, and better spouses (Princeton University Press)
- Attractive people enjoy better life outcomes and, as a result, have higher psychological well-being and lower levels of depression (Journal of Happiness Studies)
There’s a massive literature regarding the life impact of attractiveness — these are what I could find in a day of exploring. I think this is sufficient evidence to claim that being attractive certainly seems to give those gifted with it an advantage in their lives.
Think about your own personal life. Who do you treat better? Have you ever been nicer to someone because they were attractive? Have you ever treated someone worse for being ugly? Consider the impact of all those tiny choices across someone’s lifetime.
We Should Care More
I think we should care more about this type of privilege than we currently do. To give you a sense of why, here’s an example:
A study published in Economics Letter showed that attractive men were found to command a wage premium of 5–7% across all levels of income, and women had premiums of 2–4% albeit primarily concentrated at the low end of the wage distribution. Compare this to another problem we care deeply about: the gender pay gap. 2020 numbers suggest that, after controlling for same job and years of experience, the pay gap for men and women in Canada and the US is somewhere between 4% and 5%. If we care about this difference, which we should, then wage premiums for attractiveness should command similar levels of perceived importance.
Note: You should not take from this that the gender wage gap is less important because of attractiveness wage premiums, for example, but that attractiveness wage premiums are more important than we currently think they are on the basis of that comparison.
Our sense of attractiveness also overlaps a lot with other categories of discrimination we already care a lot about! The beauty industry is often criticized for ads that suggest BIPOC will be more attractive after skin-lightening interventions; it’s only very recently that plus sized models have become not-front-page-news; transgender/NB models are becoming more visible. All of these are shifting the overton window of attractiveness, and are expected to contribute to better outcomes for those groups. Making attractiveness less salient in our social lives and career would, I expect, disproportionately benefit marginalized communities that have historically been told they don’t live up to American or Canadian beauty norms.
At a higher level, everyone should be treated with dignity regardless of how good they look. I have yet to see convincing evidence that attractive people are better people, better workers, or better citizens — so we shouldn’t be treating them as if they are.