Meet the new receptionist. No, she doesn't look like Melanie Griffith... or even Agnes Dipesto. Maybe it's the mustache, the buck teeth, the schnoz, the tic, the birthmark that covers half her face, and the fact that she weighs 300 pounds. Got a problem with any of this? Uh-oh.. .that's looksism.
OK, so we're exaggerating just a tad. But study after study has shown that the goodies of this world do not accrue to the unlovely, including people with only one or two of the attributes of our mythical receptionist. As a result, there's a new social movement that's determined to fight discrimination on the basis of appearance -- especially when it involves depriving people of jobs they're otherwise qualified for. "Getting a job shouldn't be a beauty contest." says Lewis Maltby, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Task Force on Workplace Rights. According to Maltby, there's been an upsurge in concern about the issue, and "it probably has something to do with the passage of ADA [Americans With Disabilities Act]. If it's illegal to turn someone down because of serious mental or physical factors, why is it OK for something trivial?" There's even some argument that very fat people are protected under current disability laws, he adds. "What that means is that if you weigh 500 pounds you may have some protection, but if you're 20 pounds overweight you're out of luck. We need new laws."
Looksism in employment and in such areas as housing and public accommodations is already illegal in some places. There's been a law on the books in Michigan since the 1970s barring discrimination on the basis of height and weight. Washington. D.C., has a much broader law, applying to all aspects of personal appearance. (One of the most publicized cases prosecuted under the statute, in 1988, involved a black reservations agent with the Marriott Corporation who lost her job for wearing cornrows. The hotel chain eventually had to pay $40,000 in damages to the woman, plus legal fees.) Several localities are considering versions of a looks law; Santa Cruz, California, passed one earlier this year.
Not everyone thinks this is a progressive trend. "It's absolutely fascistic... a load of crap," fumes Camille Paglia, professor of humanities at Philadelphia's University of the Arts and the author of the best-selling broadside against the feminist movement, Sexual Personae. "A private company absolutely has the right to decide what sort of person symbolizes the company -- that's the nature of the modern service economy." She is especially contemptuous of those who would legalize fashion statements like nose rings and rock-and-roll hair because "if you're making outlaw gestures, you can't then turn around and expect to be coddled and embraced by the system you're rebelling against. Puh-Ieeze!" (Cornrows, in her opinion, might be a different story, since they're "traditional.")
But the real villains here, according to Paglia, are "granola feminists" who just won't accept that looksism has always been the way of human nature, from Plato on forward. "Beauty is a God-given gift," she says. "I love to be surrounded by beautiful objects and beautiful people. To say that we aren't always making such judgments in our lives is mushy sentimental garbage passing for politics."
In Santa Cruz, home of legions of tie-dyed old hippies and punked-out surfers, the looks law scraped through only after a bitter fight. The bill's original wording -- which would have protected all aspects of appearance -- was ultimately amended to cover only inborn or involuntarily acquired characteristics, such as size, facial features, natural hair color, baldness, hairy legs, scars, acne, and halitosis. Unwashed, unkempt slobs have zero protection under the law.
"Height and weight -- that sort of stuff doesn't bother me," says Kathy Manoff, the proprietor of Manoff's Rancho Burger and one of those who argued against the original bill. "I had a counter girl who was so short she could barely reach the cash drawer, but she could still do the job. But some weirdo with a pierced tongue who reeks of patchouli oil? Sorry, Charlie, but I don't think I should have to hire him."
Interestingly enough, the compromise is also just fine with one of the original bill's leading proponents, Dawn Atkins, the chairman of the Santa Cruz- based Body Image Task Force. "There was a lot of furor in the press over the grooming issue," she says, "but our focus was never on people with purple hair. My goal is to help the average woman who might be 10 or 20 or 30 pounds over the weight tables, who has facial hair or gray hair, and who doesn't happen to look like a fashion model. She should be judged on the basis of whether she can do the job."
The real problem with Iooksism is that most of us would probably have to plead guilty to practicing it to some degree. In fact, it's so embedded in our culture that it often seems "natural" even to those who are offended by other, similar forms of prejudice (like the old argument that airlines should be able to fire female flight attendants after a certain age because young women "look better"). If a business claimed that it needed to discriminate against Jewish workers in order to protect its image with its anti-Semitic customers, no one would suggest religious conversion as a solution to the problem. But an "unattractive" job applicant? The onus instantly switches to what she should do to "fix" herself.
Nowhere is this attitude more apparent than in the area of weight, which straddles the border between those things a person "can't help" and the "voluntary" conditions that were considered so unpalatable in Santa Cruz. "It's assumed, although it's usually not true, that fat people could just take off the weight if they wanted to," says William Fabrey of the Sacramento based National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. "Therefore they must be lazy, and therefore they're not good workers, and therefore it's OK not to hire them." His files are full of such cases: the star pupil tossed out of a nursing program on the grounds that she couldn't possibly tell patients about nutrition; the much-commended car salesman whose new manager fired him as a "disgrace" to the image of the company.
"Landlords have been known to tell fat people that they won't rent to them because they'll break the floor," says Esther Rothblum, associate professor of psychology at the University of Vermont. "They also get incredible flak from the medical world. I know of one whose doctor told her that if he were as fat as she was, he would shoot himself. Another woman who went to the doctor because she thought she was pregnant was told by the doctor that she couldn't cause why would any man have sex with her?"
Rothblum's academic specialty is research into attitudes toward the obese, especially women. "In every time and place," she says, "what women can look like has been restricted, and it always involves that we have some feature that's smaller than men's. It can be bound feet, or a wasp waist, or the removal of the clitoris, or -- as in our culture -- the overall slender, low-weight body. And, of course, the two times in this century that women have had to be thin all over have coincided with the first and second waves of feminism." The bottom line, she says, is that women who "take up too much space" are punished in a variety of ways, including job discrimination. In one survey, she found that more than 60 percent of obese women and 30 percent of moderately overweight women reported that they had either not been hired or not been promoted because of their weight.
Are looks laws tough to enforce? "Sure," says Atkins of the Body Image Task Force. "Plenty of murderers go free, too. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try." Do the laws open up a viper's nest of complaints, burdening a system already taxed with "isms"? Maybe. But the statistics for the last five years in both Michigan and the District of Columbia show that the number of complaints usually hovered well under 1 percent of all discrimination complaints and never exceeded 2 percent.
"If you send out two equally competent job candidates and one of them looks like Tom Selleck and the other looks like Elmer Fudd, it's a tough call," acknowledges the ACLU's Maltby. But he has hopes that looks laws could ultimately raise employer consciousness in those cases where Elmer is clearly the most qualified -- making it unnecessary for Elmer to file a lawsuit. "Most responsible companies today try not to discriminate on the basis of race," Maltby explains, "and it's not entirely because they're afraid of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Laws like this get people thinking."
