Samiul Bashar Samin

The faces and forms of oppression are many, but nearly all of them flow from injustice, the treatment of people otherwise than they deserve. It’s hard to say what exactly any one person deserves, of course, but in the modern world we tend to think that desert is somehow related to what people can control. The colour of your skin is not up to you, for example, so treating you badly on its basis is oppressive. The treatment in question doesn’t have to be explicit: a society that marginalises homosexuals might not be as oppressive as one that imprisons them, but it is oppressive nonetheless. Sexuality and race are fairly obvious fault lines for oppression, as are class and gender. But if oppression is treating people otherwise than they deserve, there’s another category that tends to slip under our radar, namely the oppression of the people who fall short of having attractive looks.
Why do we care so much about the ‘obesity epidemic’? Obviously, excessive weight is bad for the health and therefore for the public purse, and this is the reason that tends to get passed around. But speaking personally – and I hope this isn’t too revealing of my own turpitude – I find it hard to believe that the movement to unburden the obese is not also driven by disgust. When you run into people of that type, you feel, I think – or I feel, I think – a kind of horror and even a kind of anger at them. It just seems wrong to be like that. It’s hard to be honest about this because it seems so immoral.
One’s chances are reduced if one has fewer gifts, and good looks count as a gift. They’re important for one’s career prospects – beginning, research shows, in school – and it doesn’t take a genius to see that they’re important for one’s relationship prospects as well. The beautiful simply have more options. Option sickness is a problem of its own, of course, and beauty can be a curse in that respect: beautiful people might be more likely to fall into adultery, for instance, simply because it stares them in the face so often. But all in all, most of us would find it hard not to want more chances in life’s various lotteries – and the ugly, on balance, have fewer.
Is this oppression, though, or just bad luck? After all, it’s not as if there are bylaws sending the ugly to the back of the bus. Granted, the gift of looks is irrelevant to performance in a job such as web design, and in cases like this it should be illegal to factor in attractiveness when hiring. Such laws would be hard to enforce, of course – and not just because hiring decisions are often opaque. The reality is that there are a number of jobs where looks do help. Not just the obvious ones such as acting, modelling or waiting tables but probably also sales, management and even teaching – as long as customers, staff members or pupils remain responsive to looks, they will have a harder time appealing to them.