The Lost Novels of Elaine Kraf

 

As Elaine Kraf's The Princess of 72nd Street is added to the Penguin Modern Classics roster, Kat Lister re-examines the author's legacy and talks to Kraf's daughter about putting together the pieces of the life of one of the most neglected and most radical novelists of the 1970s

Around thirty pages into Elaine Kraf’s 1979 novella, The Princess of 72nd Street, we encounter our narrator, Ellen, riding up and down in her apartment elevator, embracing anyone who enters it: “sweet people, the mean ones, old, young, the pushers, heroin addicts, cocaine snorters, drunks, married men.” In Ellen’s eyes, this ordinary lift has been transformed into a magical box “with blue lights gleaming from its roof and walls of flaming orange.” It is, on this particular evening, a conduit to another world, another way of being. Until, that is, she wakes up the next morning with bruises and memory gaps and a cue card pinned to her fridge that reads: DON’T LET STRANGE MEN INTO YOUR APARTMENT. “I wonder, “ she ponders her handwriting, “what I really meant.”

And so begins Kraf’s prismatic take on female agency and mental health – now declared to be “a lost classic for fans of Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick”. As the American author Melissa Broder asks in her introduction to Penguin Classics’ latest edition of The Princess of 72nd Street: “Who is entitled to hold power over the inner world of another? What defines sanity?” While we’re posing these kinds of questions: what defines liberation? For Ellen, a mentally unstable artist living alone (and possibly with bipolar disorder – although it’s never disclosed) in New York, the answers are never clear-cut as she battles to live life on her own terms in a world that seeks to diminish it.

 

 

At the centre of this tug-of-war are her “radiances”: kaleidoscopic bursts of manic energy that transform her neighbourhood on the Upper West Side into a joyful kingdom she resides over as Princess Esmeralda. During one of these synesthetic highs, she sees drifts of blue circles and large orange flowers; during another, hissing waves that run over her toes, the floor turning to white sand. In the midst of all this colour and glow, Ellen gleefully topless dances to the beat of her own drum. And her subjects on 72nd street, “the people who elected me,” are all nonconformists, too: “men standing on corners half asleep with drugs, the proprietors of small grocery stores, the Argentinian pianist who sells records.” For Esmeralda at the centre of all this, her radiances – at least, at the time she is experiencing them – are her strength. But for those around her – mostly a revolving cast of deranged and inadequate men who tumble in and out of her bed – they are her shame, something to repress and control.

That this feminist classic was written with such visionary abandon, and that its author should then disappear from view, never to publish again, only adds to the cult mystique surrounding Kraf 45 years later. How did the author of four novels – I Am Clarence (1969), The House of Madelaine (1971), Find Him! (1977) and The Princess of 72nd Street (1979) – end up with only a 250-word Wikipedia page, and three of these novels now out of print?

“Even as her daughter, I’m still putting together the pieces of the puzzle,” Kraf’s only child, Milena Kraf Altman, admits on a video call from her home in New York. “For the longest time I just thought of her as ‘mom’ and I never got to fully understand her as a writer.” But when Kraf died in 2013, at the age of 77, Altman discovered a storage unit crammed full of her poems, diaries and stories. She has since been reading them, little by little, to understand her mother’s life in the 1970s better, using those words to fill in the gaps she left behind.

Kraf, Altman tells me, was born in the Bronx, in 1936, the daughter of a New York senator. An academically bright child, by the age of sixteen she had already graduated from high school, and, against her parents wishes, chose to go to art college. The willfulness she displayed in her teenage years would soon find its way onto the writing page with her simultaneous fragile-yet-strong-willed female characters. In other words: women on the periphery of what is considered ‘normal’. What does it mean to be deemed mentally unstable in a world that too-often appears mentally unstable itself? It’s a theme she would return to again and again, beginning with her first novel, I Am Clarence, a story that, like The Princess of 72nd Street, would deconstruct the relationship between a mentally ill woman and the patriarchal forces that meddle and interfere with her. In the case of her debut, a deteriorating mother struggles to love and care for her disabled child against a backdrop of cruel jibes, crass doctors, and self-seeking lovers. “When a novelist tells a good story well, it becomes a good novel,” a New York Times reviewer wrote upon the publication of I Am Clarence in 1969. “When a novelist uses words as if they were a sacred love, what he writes becomes poetry.”

Or should we now amend: what she wrote became poetry. And yet despite a decade of bold and beautiful writing: “she had a lot of issues getting noticed,” Altman says. When she was, she could sometimes be misunderstood. “Elaine Kraf’s Find Him! had me confused at times as to the significance of its collage-like bits and pieces, but left no doubt as to her gifts as a stylist,” one reviewer wrote of her third novel in 1977. The mixed feedback frustrated her, Altman tells me. As did her struggles to get published. In a letter she has since found in her mother’s storage unit, Kraf writes that things would have been easier if she’d been a man. “A lot of women back then were being encouraged to put their names as men in order to get published,” Altman expands. Although her first two novels were put out by the corporate might of Doubleday, her last two would be supported by the smaller indies Fiction Collective and New Directions. But when Kraf’s agent passed away shortly after The Princess of 72nd Street was published, things became harder to navigate as an avant-garde writer, and despite her keenness to keep writing, she wouldn’t be published again.

“There was a pile of unpublished novels”, Altman recalls of her childhood home in the 90s. “Next to that, a pile of rejection letters.” What’s more: “The rejection letters were very harsh – and usually written by men.” Hearing about Kraf’s determination to live a creatively autonomous life within the confines of a rigidly patriarchal framework, I am reminded of the fictional women she so vividly brought to life, full of desire and self-awareness and will. “Who are they to pass judgement anyhow?” a doubtful Ellen asks as her seventh radiance wilts and dissipates in The Princess of 72nd Street. “Aren’t these my streets?” On the one hand we have Ellen: a narrator that Kraf once described as “very critical and conservative.” On the other hand, Esmeralda: “who is free and doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her.” And yet: “They are both a part of the same person, often at odds with each other.” It’s a Janus-like creation, the one woman nestled inside the other like Russian dolls – and an innovative one. Now Kraf is being republished, it’s almost like we’re finally catching up with her pioneering mind, a few steps behind.

“She was so driven,” Altman pays tribute to that mind. “Not just in her writing, but in everything she did.” Her painting, for instance, which led her out into the city where “she would find drawers on the street and that would be her canvas.” Then in the 1980s, she became a principal of a special-education school, and so began another chapter in her life. “She instilled this notion in me that you reinvent yourself every few years. You don’t have to be set in one thing that you do.” Although she would always be a painter to Altman: “The evolution of who she was was never set.” Which is what makes her reappraisal in 2025 all the more apt. This summer, Penguin Modern Classics will republish I Am Clarence for the next generation of readers. But perhaps the most thrilling news is that there are potentially more stories yet to come. Altman’s favourite of her mother’s novels is yet to be published, she tells me. “There’s a lot more powerful work that I would love for the world to see.”

As for the ones that are already out there, the feeling, for Altman, is a joyful one. “I’m ecstatic by it, to see other people digest her work in whatever way they interpret it, it’s the conversation she [Kraf] always hoped for.” What’s more, as the world lurches further to the far-right, Kraf’s third eye on female liberation makes her writing as vital as ever. The one woman nestled inside the other – with her eyes looking up at the sun. For as Ellen puts it, the sun is the only entity that understands her. “It roars its comprehension of everything I am.”

 

Blue Lights Gleaming & Walls of Flaming Orange: The Lost Novels of Elaine Kraf. By Kat Lister. The Quietus, January 18, 2025.

All images of Kraf's work courtesy Milena Kraf Altman 

 

 

 

 

 

According to my feed, the book of the summer is a tie between Miranda July’s sexy midlife-crisis drama, All Fours; the new Sally Rooney galley; and a slim experimental novel published in 1979. Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street lyrically details the seventh “radiance” experienced by a young figure painter named Ellen who, during fits of seeming psychosis, believes herself to be the sovereign ruler of West 72nd between Broadway and Central Park. Ellen/Princess Esmerelda makes witty observations about creativity, femininity, and public life with a voice that feels startlingly modern: Of Eastside men flirting with her kingdom’s subjects, she says, “We don’t like to be bullied by slick strangers in Gucci jeans.”

Kraf died in 2013, but her fourth and final book lives on — recommended on Twitter by critic Lauren Oyler, snapped on Stories by Substack darling Rayne Fisher-Quann. 45 years since it was first published and two years since writer Hannah Williams dubbed it "a true underappreciated classic" in the New Yorker, The Princess of 72nd Strret gets a reissue from Random House, out August 6. It includes an introduction by Melissa Broder, author of Death Valley, Milk Fed, and the iconic millennial-malaise essay collection So Sad Today, born of her Twitter account that catalogs such bangers as “am i an independent woman or just scared of everyone and isolated.” A veritable expert on writing from the perspective of the afflicted woman, Broder tells NYLON why The Princess of 72nd Street should be in the pantheon of mental-illness fiction.

When did you first read The Princess of 72nd Street?

I get asked about blurbing things four or five times a week and probably only blurb four to six books a year. I have this reflexive electric fence up because I need to do my own reading. If I blurb something, I have to love it, and I have to read the whole book. Less often am I asked to write an introduction. As soon as I started [The Princess of 72nd Street], I was like, “Yes, this is a text I want to grapple with.”

What details hooked you? I could not stop thinking about the woman who only wants to paint still-lifes of plums and her husband who has banished plums from their life.

I had never read a manic episode described so beautifully. The book is asking very interesting questions about personal freedom and self-governance, and the line between mental health and spirituality. But as a work of literature on an imagistic level, she’s describing these orange flowers growing from her body and joy cracking out of her every pore, or petal, or cell. There’s self-awareness, but at the same time, you can get lost in the beatific imagery of the experience. I also love the humor and the innate competition that’s going on between men and women, and the particular competition that can come within an artist’s relationship – which is what the plum thing is about.

It’s a story about artists not making art.

Romantic obsession is the same creative energy that we can channel into art. I think that love is an act of creation, too. But it’s very easy, if you have an active imagination, to treat other human beings as a blank canvas and project whatever we want to see onto them. Or to turn that inwards.

Do you experience obsession as a creative block?

When an artist isn’t obsessing about their work, we have a tendency to obsess about ourselves. This book came to me when I had just come out of a period of triple grief. My father had died, I lost an ex to suicide, and then a friend to suicide. I wasn’t really writing that much. I had canceled my Death Valley book tour. I was really obsessing about my own mental health and a lot of my creative energy was going toward trying to fix it. One thing that I identified with in the Princess is, while she is not trying to control her manic visions — she loves her manic visions and her internal experience — she is trying to establish a protocol for how she can live in this state without ending up in the hospital again. She has all kinds of rules for herself and those rules become progressively more elaborate. One might say that some of that obsessing over rules could be put towards her art.

“This woman is shapeshifting. She doesn’t have a stable concept of self – which, like, who does?”

The word “mania” doesn’t actually appear in the book. Do you think of the Princess as “bipolar” or diagnose her with some other modern medical term?

Let's put it this way: She does have manic episodes. And when they end, or if she’s given Thorazine, she does fall into a depression. So we can call that what we may. She describes mania as “full of radiance and flooded with a feeling of small bells ringing and showers of light.” Depression she describes as a pit. There’s a comedown, and the comedown is extremely painful. That is very true to life.

Why does it feel so rare and remarkable among our wellspring of contemporary writing on mental illness to feel like the Princess is a trustworthy narrator?

There are some readers who might say, “How can we trust her?” She’s having visions. She's describing herself as a ballerina, a saint, a mother, a mystic, an ethereal spirit, an Earth goddess. This woman is shapeshifting. She doesn’t have a stable concept of self – which, like, who does? Let’s be real about that fact. What is reliable is that the Princess is committed to telling the truth as she sees it. She’s not hiding anything. We are with her. We are on her side. We are in her head. Even if her view might not be “consensual reality,” her honesty is to be trusted as to her own experience.

Her honesty is what all her boyfriends find so jarring about her within the text. What do you think about the way that Kraf wrote men?

The men don’t come out very well. We’ve got Auriel, the illusionist who she’s madly in love with who then fakes his suicide. We’ve got Peter, the painter who has an emotional allergy to plums because he fears his girlfriend’s success. We’ve got her ex-husband, Adolphe, who is also an egomaniacal artist who has numerous breakdowns when his work involving traffic lights is declared unoriginal. She’s under the thumb of her ex-boyfriend George, who, when she was with him, prohibited laughter and singing and sent her to quite possibly the worst man of all in the book: the psychiatrist, Dr. Clufftrain, who’s totally batshit. He sees patients 21 hours a day and has no boundaries. He’s constantly shaking. He prescribes her weird medicines that make her sick. It’s the blind leading the blind when it comes to the medical profession in this book.

Then there’s the last man…

I wouldn’t say the end is flawed, and I wouldn’t declare it as problematic, because I don't know if there is such a thing as an objective view of art from a subjective place. But I wasn’t keen on the end. Subjectively, I was disappointed. But she has to come back down to Earth. There are sacrifices.

“Romantic obsession is the same creative energy that we can channel into art. Love is an act of creation, too.”

While trying to sell two more novels after The Princess of 72nd Street, unsuccessfully, Kraf wrote to an editor that she “never particularly liked The Princess of 72nd Street as literature.” She described the book as a “farewell to a part of my life composed of dreams and fantasies.” Can you relate to the renouncing of one’s past work?

Many writers — and not just writers, but songwriters and visual artists — look back at their work and have doubts about it. I think it’s a very natural part of the process, especially if you’re in a different place in your life than you were when you wrote it. Once the work is in the world, it can feel like it has taken on a life of its own. Sometimes I’ll read things that I’ve written and I’m like, “I don’t even know who wrote this.” I have no recollection. I guess it’s just the shedding of selves. Artists are the lucky ones who have a record of the layers of self.

What in the book do you think will be particularly resonant for the 23-year-olds reading it this summer?

Self-awareness, reflecting on one’s own interiority in a public way, seems to be something that women are more able to exercise now. With the internet, we’re always reflecting on our interiority in a public way. The romantic obsession in the book, too, that’s eternal, but the Princess has a freedom to take on many lovers that I think is contemporary. I wouldn't say she's polyamorous, but she’s not monogamous. People are interested in non-monogamy.

People are also interested in portrayals of a bygone New York.

I haven’t lived in New York in ten years. The first time I lived in New York was for a summer in 1998, then I was there from 2003 to 2013. But whenever I’m back, one of the areas that feels a little less Chase Bank-ified are parts of the Upper West Side. I mean, it’s all Chase Bank-ified, but around 110th to 116th, Broadway and Riverside, still feels like it has that resonance. There are still diners!

Is it fair to call The Princess of 72nd Street a “cult classic”?

“Cult classic” is a high compliment. Who needs to appeal to everybody? To have written a cult classic, that’s pretty f*cking cool.

Melissa Broder On The Oddball 1979 Novel Having A Summer Renaissance. By Greta Rainbow.  Nylon, August 6, 2024.

  

When Elaine Kraf died, in 2013, no major publication—or any minor ones, as far as I can tell—ran an obituary. This is perhaps unsurprising; although she had worked as a painter and as the principal of a special-education school, she was probably most notable as a novelist, and she hadn’t published a book in more than thirty years. The Times had called her first novel  "I Am Clarence",  an “extraordinary achievement,” but it was long since out of print, as were two books that had followed it. But her fourth and final book "The Princess of 72nd Street" remains in print; it was reissued by the Dalkey Archive Press in 2000, and has enough of a following to make it seem at least slightly strange that an online search for Kraf returns little more than a six-line Wikipedia page, a couple short bios on publisher Web sites, and a handful of listings for the remaining copies of her works.

I first went looking for information about Kraf after asking, on Twitter, for recommendations for a very specific sort of book. I wanted to read formally experimental novels that were written by women in the nineteen-seventies and eighties and that had what I thought of as a certain New York sensibility. I was picturing un-ashed cigarettes on empty stoops, halogen reflections in scummy puddles, hot asphalt under rushing feet. The novelist and critic Lauren Oyler suggested “The Princess of 72nd Street”; it was the only suggestion that fit the bill. When I asked Oyler how she came to know of the book, I got a sense of the novel’s following: she’d heard about it from a critic, Kaitlin Phillips, who was put on to it by the novelist Joshua Cohen. Cohen had heard of Kraf not from a writer but from a performer, the late Joel Gold, who, Cohen explained, “paid his bills as a cameraman and fashion photographer, but dedicated his life to performing, not as a standup so much as an improvising monologist in the Professor Irwin Corey/Lord Buckley tradition.”

“The Princess of 72nd Street” tells the story of Ellen, a bipolar artist who lives in Manhattan and paints “tangerines, brown teapots, rolls and books.” Much of the novel concerns her “radiances,” or manic episodes, when she becomes Esmeralda, who dresses in clothing with “flowers, cascades of color, or abstract designs,” plus medallions: an Egyptian ankh and “crushed metal found in the garbage.” She is proud and mad and charming, a star in the firmament who is often taken for “a hooker, Sabra, American Indian, actress, ballerina, witch, holy saint, mother, girl, mystic, ethereal spirit, bitch, earth goddess.” The Upper West Side that Esmeralda rules is “not a country for Nordic blondes of impeccable taste” but for “film makers who talk film but never make one, some film makers who actually do, residents who do nothing or once did something, actors and actresses waiting on line, overly casual psychologists, and a few self-made mystics”—people who drink and sleep and smoke together in tiny apartments that line “sooty streets with outdoor tables put right down among the garbage bags,” where the sunlight glitters off the grime.

The book is a high and a comedown at once—a paroxysm of sex and booze and, above all, color. It’s that rare thing: a true underappreciated classic. So why did Kraf never publish another book?

Kraf was born in the Bronx, in 1936, to a pair of lifelong New Yorkers, Harry and Lena Kraf, née Rosenfeld. Her father was a member of the New York State Senate from 1956 to 1965, and of the State Assembly from ’67 to ’72. (He got an obituary in the Times.) Elaine was their only daughter. In her early forties, she married a credit-and-collections consultant and poet named Martin Altman, who told me that his ex-wife—they divorced in 2002—had rejected her parents’ hopes that she would settle down with a businessman or a congressman’s son. Instead, she went to art school. Her father, Altman said, “would not attend her art shows or publishing events. He saw no value in art or the life of the mind.” But, he added, Elaine “had a creative force in her that strove to break the bonds that held it back, whether in art, writing, fashion.”

Altman and Kraf adopted a daughter, Milena Kraf Altman, who told me that her mother “reinvented herself every couple of years.” Kraf worked in special-education schools and, in 1986, became a principal at Astoria Blue Feather. Throughout the seventies and eighties, she painted and wrote. Her visual art, like her writing, often had a fragmentary quality. She made mixed-media portraits with “different textures and fabrics,” Milena said. “She would be walking down the streets of New York, and she would see an old drawer, and she would pick it up and be, like, ‘O.K., this is gonna be my canvas.’ ”

Kraf’s novels vary in style but share a handful of themes. She was fascinated, in particular, by those who deviate from social norms (artists, lunatics, circus performers) and by the methods used to keep social norms in place (psychoanalysis, mental institutions, lobotomies). All of the books feature a beautiful, isolated female protagonist of delicate sanity who is surrounded by untrustworthy men. “I Am Clarence,” her début, employs a series of disparate viewpoints to explore the relationship between a mentally ill mother, her suitors, and her disabled son. Like the main character in “The Princess of 72nd Street,” the mother is disintegrating, unable to find respect or love, and perhaps unable to give it, too. Her son, Clarence, is mocked and pitied. She lets a group of doctors experiment with him and possibly give him a lobotomy and, in the end, he is taken away.

Her second novel, “ The House of Madelaine" is altogether stranger: to the extent that it has a plot at all, it is about a woman who shares her first name with the author and is unable to escape the inhabitants of a house which belongs to a friend. Eventually, she is accused of murdering her friend’s husband, and faces an absurd trial; the novel’s most obvious influence is “Alice in Wonderland.” It is profoundly disorienting, like a recurring dream, the details of which keep escaping you. Passages seem to connect before lurching out of reach, as if disappearing, with the book’s characters, down the house’s central hallway, lined with Formica tables.

Kraf’s first two books were published by Doubleday, but, unsurprisingly, after “The House of Madelaine,” she left corporate publishing for independent houses. The Fiction Collective, which was run by a group of experimental writer-editors—including Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, B. H. Friedman, and Peter Spielberg—put out her third book, “Find Him!” Its narrator is an unnamed, childlike woman, who one day awakes dressed as a schoolgirl, unable to eat, speak, or clean herself without aid. Her caregiver is a man named Oliver, who alternately presents as her father, lover, captor, abuser, and teacher. Oliver, we learn, had a wife, Edith, who has vanished; it is strongly suggested that Edith is our narrator before she had a lobotomy. The text weaves together dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, and is broken up by musical notations and drawings. An unsettling meditation on patriarchal violence and the construction of femininity, the novel feels indebted to both Tillie Olsen and  Anaïs Nin, two of Kraf’s favorite authors, and deserves to be rediscovered as a significant work of feminist literature.

But, if there is one author who seems to act as a forebear for Kraf, it is Jean Rhys, whose work Kraf considered in an essay that she published in 1985. Rhys’s women, Kraf argues, are essentially a single character, a deteriorating figure who is a “victim of her self-destructive nature and of her dependence, for survival, upon men.” Rhys’s men, Kraf writes, while distinct, are generally loathsome, feckless, and chauvinistic.

It’s Rhys who comes to mind when reading “The Princess of 72nd Street,” with its unspooling account of how it feels to come apart when you were never really whole. At the beginning of the book, Ellen/Esmeralda has at least a degree of control, or if nothing else the illusion of it: she “projects a special dignity” no one would want to “defile or tamper with,” she says. She’s wrong, of course—wrong, Kraf seems to suggest, because she is a woman, wrong because that means that somebody, somewhere, will always want to defile or tamper with her dignity. When Ellen enters a radiance, the prose becomes frenetic, whirligig; we do not merely observe Esmeralda but race alongside her, across a Manhattan filled with jazz clubs and street performers and bright yellow sunlight. After this centrifugal rush, the return to earth, during her depressive periods, is wrenching. By the end, we have seen her exploited and abused, and the ache and tear of the novel comes in our recognizing that this has happened before she does. Although the book is wryly funny—“Anyone who wears a brassiere on West 72nd Street is suspect,” Esmeralda says, in one of many memorable declarations—it is also devastating.

In order to interest New Directions in publishing “The Princess of 72nd Street,” Kraf sent “letter after letter” to New Directions, Altman told me—“sort of quirky letters,” he added. They worked. In the first few years after the book was released, she wrote two more novels, with the working titles “Joachim and the Angels” and “The Final Delusions of Cinderella Korn,” and she hoped that New Directions would publish them, too. She told Peter Glassgold, an editor there, in a letter, that she had “forced out” the first of these books “during a difficult period.” The publishing house passed on that one, and also on “Cinderella Korn,” though Altman recalls that New Directions asked Kraf to rewrite it “at least twice, which she tried to do.” He got the impression from Kraf that the publisher “wanted something more like ‘The Princess of 72nd Street.’ ” Milena remembers her mother being relatively sanguine about her rejections. “She understood, I guess, the reasoning why,” Milena said. “And she just kept at it. She had a bunch of novels that she would try to get out there, but no one was picking them up.”

In another letter to Glassgold, Kraf wrote that she “never particularly liked ‘The Princess of 72nd Street’ as literature. In that,” she went on, “I guess our tastes are very different.” She was in her mid-forties, and had recently had a miscarriage and an accompanying intestinal virus; she was still recuperating. She described “The Princess of 72nd Street” as a “farewell to a part of my life composed of dreams and fantasies,” adding, “I was young for a long long time and now I am not young any longer.” She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave her a year to work on “Cinderella Korn.” She later said that the book came from “the good, creative part” of her.

Milena said that her mother, near the end of her life, was working on a play about a woman who has, perhaps, seen her younger self in Central Park. She was “very determined to finish it,” Milena said. But, in 2011, Kraf was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She died two years later. Kraf’s unfinished manuscripts, alongside starts and scraps of unrealized novels, sit in a storage space in Manhattan, which is “filled with so much of her artwork and her writings,” Milena told me. She has not yet been able to properly go through it all. ♦

Elaine Kraf wrote a cult classic. Then she was forgotten. By Hannah Williams. The New Yorker, July 28, 2022.

 

Lookism, A Societal Problem

 

We’d be outraged if a business owner told an employee she wouldn’t receive her bonus unless she lost weight. With most jobs, our looks should be regarded as irrelevant to our suitability and remuneration. What matters is that we have the skills for the job and put them to good use. Yet appearance discrimination, or ‘lookism’, is pervasive and consequential in the workplace. Can lookism in employment ever be justified? And, when it can’t, should we legislate against it?

 The first of these questions might seem to have an easy answer, namely, that lookism can be justified only when appearance is a genuine qualification for work, that is, has a real bearing on a person’s ability to do a job or do it well, such as modelling or some acting roles. But this just pushes back the problem. We must now ask: when is appearance a genuine qualification for a job? And even: should genuine qualifications always count, or can there be moral reasons for not counting them?

Much the same questions arise in relation to race and gender. There are cases when each of these can be regarded, reasonably, as a ‘genuine occupational requirement’, for example, ‘being a woman’ for a women’s refuge support worker. But it is equally clear that ‘being a man’ cannot justifiably count as a qualification for being a doctor, even if patients might be happier receiving medical advice from a man because, for sexist reasons, they rate men’s medical skills more highly. And that is so even though there’s a sense in which being a man is a genuine qualification for the job when a male doctor would be better able to minister to patients’ needs because their prejudices mean they’d trust him more and hence be more receptive to his advice. In other words, there are some genuine qualifications that it is not justifiable to count.

Consider two cases that concern the treatment of employees in the workplace and vividly raise worries about appearance unjustifiably counting as a qualification. The first relates to a performance evaluation of an employee called Courtney at a Canadian fashion company whose manager said her looks were affecting her ability to do her job. Interviewed by the BBC in 2022, Courtney said:

  “He point-blank told me that he thought I was too fat to be in the position I was in. He told me he was embarrassed having me around our vendors in meetings, and that it ruined his reputation.”

He then advised her to start going to the gym and avoid wearing fitted clothing. Unsurprisingly, Courtney felt shell-shocked. Subsequently, her appearance anxieties had a negative impact on her work because she was distracted by worries about what her colleagues thought of her.

The second case relates to an accusation in 2020 by the UK radio journalist Libby Purves against the BBC. Purves claimed that, for presenters on both television and radio, older women were under greater pressure than men of a similar age to appear younger, since women are judged on their looks, and part of what it is to be attractive for women is to look youthful. In an opinion piece for the Radio Times, she wrote:

“Sue Barker has been binned from A Question of Sport after 23 years. She is 64. More willingly, Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey depart from Woman’s Hour, aged 70 and 56. They are replaced by Emma Barnett, a mere 35. What is this? … Are we written off as old trouts while men become revered elders, sacred patriarchs, silver foxes?”

In both cases, lookism seems entangled with sex or gender discrimination, and, in the second case, with age discrimination too. This might provoke the thought that appearance discrimination is problematic only when it is entwined with some other form of discrimination, and that there is no reason to be concerned about it when it occurs on its own. But that seems clearly false. Appearance discrimination matters in its own right, and indeed operates in many of the same ways as other forms of discrimination we are committed to fighting, such as racial discrimination. Just as prejudices influence behaviour consciously and non-consciously in racial discrimination, so too they operate in conscious and non-conscious ways in lookism. Our responses to the looks of others often involve unjustified associations, whether positive or negative, between appearance features and character traits. These associations may function as implicit biases, or sometimes take the form of stereotypes that are endorsed with varying degrees of unreflectiveness.

Women especially are often seen as lazy or lacking in self-discipline if they are perceived as overweight. But even though lifestyle choices make a difference to shape, the hunger we experience and how much we weigh are largely determined by metabolism or physiology. So the idea that all or even most people with a heavier weight lack self-control is unsustainable when brought into contact with the evidence. In her book Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia (2024), Kate Manne concludes that ‘fatness has a strong genetic basis … at least 70 per cent of the variance in body mass that we find in the human population is likely due to genetics.’

Of course, it is not just selectors evaluating qualifications who are prone to biases. Good looks tend to be beneficial in doing a range of jobs because of how others respond to them. Viewers may prefer to watch attractive newsreaders deliver the TV news, perhaps in part because they associate their appearance with desirable character traits, such as trustworthiness. Customers may be put off interacting with employees they regard as fat because they find their appearance unattractive or judge them to be ill-disciplined. It’s for reasons of this sort that good looks can be genuine qualifications for working in customer-facing roles, even though there is a further question about whether it’s justifiable to count them.

Qualifications that arise in this way are often referred to as ‘reaction qualifications’, meaning qualifications produced by customer reactions to employee characteristics. As a result, even selectors who do not share the customers’ biases have a reason to appoint people with their customers’ preferred features, and to reject those with features their customers dislike. In contrast, when a technical skill is a qualification for a job, its role as a qualification, and indeed its status as a skill, doesn’t generally rely on others’ reactions to it. All that matters is that it is deployed in making a product that people want or providing a service they need. For example, the skill of giving competent legal advice is a qualification for being a lawyer, regardless of how others respond to it.

In addition to the association between heavier weight and laziness or lack of self-control, people routinely make other appearance-related associations. Short men are often regarded as prickly or prone to aggression on the basis that they have inferiority complexes. Facial scarring, and other so-called ‘facial disfigurements’, are often associated with unpleasantness or nastiness – think of Hollywood villains. Again, these associations don’t stand up against the evidence. When reaction qualifications are rooted in unjustified associations, is it fair to count them? We don’t think it’s morally acceptable to count reaction qualifications when they are grounded in, say, customers’ prejudices against women or members of a particular race, so why think it’s morally acceptable to count such qualifications when they are grounded in customers’ prejudices against particular appearance features?

Even when they don’t involve prejudices or unjustified associations, customers’ perceptions about whether an assistant is good looking, and indeed the perceptions of job recruiters, are usually a product of ‘internalising’ appearance norms – that is, rules concerning how we should look – that reflect conventional aesthetic preferences. Some of these norms may have gained currency over many generations, as a result of the way that being disposed to act from them when choosing sexual partners bestows evolutionary advantages, as Nancy Etcoff argues in Survival of the Prettiest (2000). Perhaps this is true of norms that favour unblemished skin or symmetrical faces. But other appearance norms expressing aesthetic preferences emerge from practices that are specific to particular cultures, and may even be a product of differences in power and privilege. For example, the emergence of norms regarding tightly coiled hair as messy, or favouring narrow rather than broad noses, or lighter over darker skin tones, can perhaps be fully explained by the way in which they reflect and perpetuate racial hierarchies – that is, they come to be endorsed because they legitimate the power and privilege that accrues to membership in particular racial groups. Even when norms are not the product of power and privilege, their application may end up benefiting people who are already advantaged, and further disadvantaging those who are already disadvantaged. Think here of norms biased against women or the elderly, or both, such as norms that regard youthfulness as part of what it is to be an attractive woman, which Purves thinks are influencing decisions at the BBC.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that ignoring customer preferences would be bad for business. Therefore, reaction qualifications grounded in such preferences provide some credibility to recruitment decisions based on them. In contrast, when selectors but not customers are influenced by looks, then no such justification is available. We don’t know whether vendors were put off by Courtney’s appearance or whether it was only her manager who had a problem with it. But it is surely unfair to candidates when managers’ hiring (or promotion) decisions are influenced by employees’ appearance if it is not even a reaction qualification. Indeed, it is generally unfair to take into account features of a person, whether racial membership or looks, when these have absolutely nothing to do with their ability to do the job.

Prejudices and negative associations concerning various appearance features unfairly reduce the range of career opportunities for people with these features. This then contributes to an unjust distribution of resources, and may even reinforce structural injustices. According to Daniel Hamermesh’s analysis of data from the United States in Beauty Pays (2011), the overall ‘beauty premium’ for above-average-looking women, compared with below-average-looking women, is 12 per cent; for above-average-looking men, compared with below-average-looking men, it is 17 per cent. Perhaps appearance is a legitimate qualification for some jobs, such as modelling, in which case not all such inequalities will be unjust, but often lookism seems analogous to racial discrimination, and condemnable for many of the same reasons.

But there are also cases of lookism that are rather different from racial discrimination because they involve responding to chosen features of appearance, such as tattoos, hairstyles and piercings. It is tempting to say that if a person is disadvantaged by an appearance feature they’ve chosen, in full knowledge that acquiring it will affect their employment prospects, then there is no injustice. But even here, customers may be opposed to such features for no good reason, for example, when tattoos are unjustifiably associated with aggression or mental health problems. Is it fair, in a job market, to disadvantage a person by her choices when that disadvantage reflects the prejudices of selectors or customers responding negatively to features she’s chosen for herself and that may even have become part of her identity?

 People may also make choices designed to improve their chances in particular job markets, for example, they may have liposuction, Botox injections or hair transplants, often to appear younger. This is especially so in visual media where, as Purves points out, part of what it is for women to be attractive is to look youthful. It would be easy to describe these interventions as chosen, but we should hesitate before doing so. Decisions to have them are often a product not only of seeking to improve one’s employment opportunities but also body-shaming practices. Indeed, as Heather Widdows argues in Perfect Me (2018), appearance norms form an ethical ideal, with those who fail to comply being regarded as not merely unattractive but morally flawed, because they are seen as failing in their duty to make the best of themselves. This ideal has become so demanding that it is oppressive to many people, especially women and younger men. When jobs are allocated in a way that rewards people who conform to these norms, then they are reinforced, and the pressures to conform to them become even greater.

Appearance features that are favoured or disfavoured in the job market may also be chosen by people in a way that reflects their own ethical commitments rather than dominant appearance norms. For example, some women choose not to wear makeup because they want to resist the idea of women as aesthetically appealing objects. As Clare Chambers writes in Intact (2022), they endorse the principle of the unmodified body – that our bodies are alright just as they are. As a resistance to body-shaming practices, people may consciously eschew body modifications and withstand the pressures placed on them by the often vicious comments they receive. Others may be committed to ethical principles derived from their religion requiring conformity to unconventional appearance norms or dress codes.

So appearance features may express deeply held convictions about how one should live. When companies have an ethos that reflects such convictions, and they discriminate in their selection practices to promote that ethos, then that often seems unobjectionable. Suppose, for example, that a company has an ethos that reflects a commitment to not wearing makeup, and requires their employees to adopt ‘a natural look’ as a condition of employment. That does not seem morally problematic in the context of a society where there is an expectation in a wide range of jobs that women should wear makeup. Yet in other cases, appearance codes may discriminate against members of a particular religion, even if they do so unintentionally. For example, a dress code forbidding employees from wearing head coverings seems morally problematic because of the way in which it disadvantages Muslim women.

Lookism in employment is therefore a mixed bag. Some cases seem to involve the same characteristic mechanisms as racial discrimination, including prejudices influencing hiring decisions, to be morally condemned for much the same reasons. Other cases seem rather different. They may differ because the appearance-related values that companies express in their hiring practices neither reflect prejudices nor deny the fundamental equality of different people. Or they may differ because the appearance features that recruiters count as reaction qualifications are unobjectionable, perhaps in part because these features are genuinely a matter of choice for job applicants.

In cases where lookism is morally problematic, what should we do about it? Should we think of it as posing a moral problem of sufficient magnitude that there is a case for seeking to prevent it by legislation? Or is it better to tackle it without recourse to the legal system? There is evidence that lookism in employment is comparable in pervasiveness and harmfulness with other forms of discrimination, including racial discrimination. On the basis of his analysis of the data, Hamermesh maintains that, in the US:

“African American men’s earnings disadvantage, adjusted for the earnings-enhancing characteristics that they bring to labour markets, is similar to the disadvantage experienced by below-average compared to above-average-looking male workers generally.”

Of course, there are differences between racial discrimination and appearance discrimination that may impact upon the case for enacting legislation to prevent it, and not merely the fact that (unlike race) some appearance features are chosen. Racial membership is commonly transmitted from one generation to another, whereas the inheritance of appearance-related characteristics is less reliable. The way in which racial discrimination contributes to and reproduces structural disadvantages through practices of segregation gives rise to distinctive problems in tackling it. Nevertheless, some of the same reasons that provide a strong case for prohibiting racial discrimination also apply to appearance discrimination.

The long-term solution to the injustices of lookism involves taking measures to reduce the enormous weight ordinarily placed on appearance in our society and seeking to change appearance norms so that they become more inclusive. But given the magnitude of the problem, we should take seriously the idea that legislation also has role to play. Should we make ‘appearance’ or appearance features such as height, weight and facial differences protected characteristics, in the same way that, in countries like the UK, race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, religion and age are ‘protected characteristics’, meaning it is illegal to discriminate on their basis?

Perhaps legislation against ‘indirect’ discrimination, that is, against policies and practices that unintentionally affect people with a protected characteristic in a negative way, is enough to criminalise much appearance discrimination in hiring and promotion decisions, providing an underutilised way of combatting it. Suppose that appearance norms and dress codes are biased against people with tightly coiled hair, or with darker skin tones, or with asymmetrical faces or bodies, or with wrinkly skin, or against those who see it as part of their religious duty to dress modestly, or against women who object to being required to wear makeup or heels. Then selecting people on the basis of their conformity to these norms (or their willingness to conform to them) will stand in need of justification in any legislative scheme that requires indirect discrimination on grounds of race, sex, disability, age or religion to be a proportionate means to a legitimate goal. But it is not clear that legislation against indirect discrimination is enough to deal adequately with the moral challenge posed by lookism in employment.

My proposal would be this: we make it illegal to reject a person on the basis of their appearance, or particular appearance-related features, when no plausible case can be made that these features are qualifications for the job in question – when possession of them can’t even be seen as a way of conforming to a company’s ethos or attracting its customers or clients. We could add to this the requirement that reaction qualifications, that is, qualifications that rely on the responses of customers, shouldn’t be given any weight if they rest upon customers’ prejudices about an appearance feature, where prejudices are generalisations or associations that aren’t sustained by the publicly available evidence. And we could make it a presumption that when the background culture is infused with these prejudices about a particular appearance feature, then reaction qualifications related to that feature should be regarded as illegitimate, unless evidence can be produced for thinking that customer preferences for it are unconnected to such prejudices.

Some may be sceptical about whether legislation against lookism could be effective, with good reasons. Part of the problem with legislation in this area is that there is likely to be resistance to making use of it – who wants to admit that others regard them as unattractive? Furthermore, appearance discrimination can be hard to detect and monitor. The legislation itself wouldn’t require us to make objective judgments about people’s attractiveness. We just have to know that selectors have been influenced by the candidates’ appearance, or by the particular appearance features they possess, when these have nothing to do with their ability to do the job. But we do need to be able to monitor different companies to see whether there is any reason to think that they aren’t complying with the legislation. With race and gender, we can examine percentages in the workforce or selected through the appointment process. But how can we do that in relation to an attractive appearance?

There is a surprisingly large amount of intersubjective agreement concerning judgments of attractiveness, and it may well be enough to collect the data required for monitoring purposes. So I think that the objections to legislation against appearance discrimination are not insuperable. It is feasible, and no less desirable than other forms of antidiscrimination legislation. But perhaps the main function of legislation against appearance discrimination would be to send out a message to employers, and society more generally, that lookism is unacceptable, and to give companies a reason to examine their practices and reform them if they encourage lookism or give it too much space in which to operate. We might even regard it as good practice for recruitment interviewees to be behind a screen, as is sometimes done when auditioning musicians. In the context of employment at least, we should combat what Francesca Minerva calls the ‘invisible discrimination’ that takes place right before our eyes. We’ve been too complacent about lookism at the workplace for too long.

The scourge of lookism. By Andrew Mason. Aeon, April 4, 2024.

Today, let’s peel back the layers on a topic that’s as delicate as it is pervasive: the beauty bias. You know, that unspoken rule in both professional and social circles that often dictates who gets ahead and who gets overlooked based on looks alone. It’s a bit like choosing players for a team based on their jerseys rather than their skills. Sounds unfair, right? Because it is.

A Personal Wake-Up Call

I’ll never forget my first real encounter with lookism. It was during a job interview right out of college. I was prepared, my resume polished to a shine, but the feedback I got was a curveball I didn’t see coming. “You just don’t fit the image we’re looking for,” they said. It was a moment that made me question: since when did capability come with a “look”?

The Unfair Advantage of Beauty

Lookism, or beauty bias, is this unwritten rule that attractive people are more likely to succeed. Studies have shown that those deemed more attractive are often hired sooner, promoted faster, and even paid more. It’s as if their appearance adds an invisible boost to their qualifications. In social settings, this bias can dictate who gets noticed and who fades into the background, shaping friendships and relationships in subtle but significant ways.

1. The Professional Impact

In the workplace, lookism can undermine meritocracy, creating an environment where looks can trump talent. It’s a tricky terrain to navigate, especially when feedback on performance gets entangled with appearance. The message it sends? That your skills and hard work might not be enough if you don’t “look the part.”

2. The Social Spiral

Socially, the beauty bias can be equally damaging, setting unrealistic standards for acceptance and belonging. It can lead to a spiral of comparison and self-doubt, affecting our self-esteem and how we interact with others. It’s like being back in high school, where the social hierarchy was often based on appearances.

Challenging Lookism

So, how do we confront this bias? It starts with awareness. Recognizing that lookism exists is the first step toward dismantling it. From there, we can actively challenge our perceptions and the stereotypes we’ve unconsciously bought into.

1. Promoting Diversity and Inclusion

In professional settings, promoting diversity and inclusion goes beyond race and gender. It’s about valuing individuals for their talents and contributions, not their conformity to a certain aesthetic. Companies need to lead by example, creating cultures where diversity in appearance is celebrated as much as diversity in thought.

2. Fostering Genuine Connections

Socially, we can strive to build connections based on shared interests, values, and mutual respect. It’s about looking beyond the surface and appreciating people for who they are, not just what they look like. True beauty, after all, is found in the depth of our character and the kindness we extend to others.

Your Thoughts?

I’m curious to hear about your experiences with the beauty bias. Have you felt its impact in your professional or personal life? How do you think we can work together to challenge and change these deep-seated perceptions?

Remember, confronting lookism isn’t about diminishing the importance of self-presentation; it’s about broadening our definition of beauty and recognizing the value in diversity.

 

The Beauty Bias: Confronting Lookism in Professional and Social Arenas. By Brightbluemind. Medium, February 15, 2024. 

Miss Universe is turning 71 — not the current titleholder, who is aged 29, but the competition itself. A proud septuagenarian sashaying toward its next birthday (the more modestly titled Miss World is only a year older), Miss Universe will hold its annual show on Saturday, 18 November. Many readers might be surprised to learn both competitions are still going strong. In fairness, from the stiletto heels and robotic hand waves to the pouting pursuit of world peace, it is hard to deny that these pageants seem passé. If beauty contests seem pitiful and anachronistic, a phenomenon from a bygone era, it would still be a mistake to believe we live in a post-beauty world.

 Whilst the crowned winner of Miss Universe can expect to net some lucrative marketing deals and make a cool million or two from endorsements and advertising, for the rest of us, beauty is also bankable.

I speak not of the billion-dollar industries devoted to peddling makeup and skincare products, nor of the trade in nips, tucks and tweaks from cosmetic surgery or Botox. Instead, I speak of the most concealed, yet in-your-face bias known to humankind: pretty privilege. The fact is that beauty is not merely skin-deep; it has deep pockets.

You might suspect that “attractiveness bias” is a bogus source of bigotry, a parvenu of prejudice eager to jump on the injustice bandwagon. In fact, beauty bias is a force for some pretty ugly modern discrimination. Sometimes called “lookism” the phenomenon has even given rise to an economic field called “pulchronomics”. Less attractive people are less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired. In contrast, beautiful people do better when it comes to loans, employment and even restaurant tips. In 2015, a US study reported that more attractive servers pocketed $1,261 more per year in tips than their unattractive peers.

The better-looking aren’t just better off; beauty is a life-altering asset. It can interfere with teachers’ accuracy in rating students’ academic performance. Beauty also influences our life-long earning potential. Earlier this month, a study tracking the fate of American adolescents twenty years into adulthood found that physical attractiveness independently predicted social mobility, with the effect size greater for men than women.

One of the most underreported side effects of the pandemic was that social distancing seemed to momentarily take off the beauty blinkers. COVID-19 afforded countless more opportunities to show that covering up can influence our judgments. A study conducted in China during the pandemic found that after masking up, more average-looking hotel employees received a boost in their customer service ratings; this reversed when the wearers were better-looking. In Sweden, when classes moved online, attractive female students missing the boon of face-to-face teaching scored lower grades (though for male students, the “beauty premium” remained).

Beauty can also serve as aesthetic armour, protecting the fate of the physically fortunate when they screw up. Multiple studies show that even when they commit crimes, the gorgeous are less likely to be found guilty. In the U.S., a recent long-term study reported that young people who were judged to be more attractive were “less likely to be arrested and convicted than less attractive persons”.

If all this isn’t enough, aside from crowning them with tiaras, we bestow on the beautiful halo of morality. Whilst movie moguls cast the blemished, scarred or pockmarked as baddies, the rest of us are equally guilty of casting the good-looking as, well, morally good and stereotyping the less captivating amongst us as less moral and more impure.

Despite this, and decades of research holding up a mirror to humankind’s ugly tendencies, defending the less lovely hasn’t exactly taken off. Maybe that’s because it’s less Instagram-able. My best bet is we’ll never witness celebrities with an activist bracelet highlighting beauty bigotry or adopting the hashtag “end lookism”. In an epoch of social activism, attractiveness bias is the last taboo. We shouldn’t give up, though, just because the bold and beautiful literally have skin in the game.

 In the quest to right these wrongs, some have taken an unhelpful if well-meaning tack. One such common approach is to deny beauty exists in any objective sense. Earlier in November the Guardian inaugurated “Ask Ugly” — a self-styled anti-attractiveness agony aunt column. Here, the word beauty was embarrassed to be seen without scare quotes: “‘Beauty’”, the feature declared “is a culturally constructed illusion … It is meaningless …” Yet, in a Schrodinger’s cat-like confession, the columnist seemed to admit beauty did exist after all, since “it affects how a person is perceived”.

Attractiveness certainly does have a subjective aspect. When it comes to pin-ups, we can and do differ in our personal tastes and preferences.

Beauty is not merely in the eye of one beholder, though. The truth is people tend to agree about who is more and who is less attractive, both within and across cultures. Of the 7.8 billion of us on planet Earth, we do not all get to become a pin-up.

The Guardian column’s suggestion that beauty is simply imprinted on our minds by some external force, like a giant cultural embossing stamp in a Terry Gilliam Monty Python cartoon, does not hold either. Ideas of attractiveness did not demand to grace the cover of Vogue magazine, like some alien diva determined to manipulate human thinking.

Reality is more prosaic. We are great apes, and our mindware is primarily influenced but not implacably determined by the four fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproduction. It should come as no great surprise to any human being that beauty is linked to health, fertility and strength. Consequently, it is unlikely a 71-year-old will win Miss Universe, that consumers will demand cosmetic surgeons create wrinkles, or that Boots will ever sell products to make crepey skin. Beauty will always be the provenance of the young. We all know this.

Of course, attractiveness has its place. Who doesn’t enjoy a looker? In some jobs, beauty might be exactly what we need and want. In other contexts, when it leads to injustice or harm, we need to work harder and do better. We can’t do that if we don’t first admit beauty exists.

When the Miss Universe candidates start to strut their stuff on Saturday, rather than labelling them shallow, we would do well to remember we’ve all got a touch of the pageant jurist. The only difference is, outside the sequined realm of beauty queens, the rewards at stake are more substantial than rhinestone tiaras.

 

The tyranny of beauty. By Charlotte Blease.  The Critic,  November 18, 2023. 

 

 

A manager sits behind a table and decides he’s going to fire a woman because he doesn’t like her skin. If he fires her because her skin is brown, we call that racism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is female, we call that sexism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is pockmarked and he finds her unattractive, well, we don’t talk about that much and, in most places in America, there is no legal recourse.

This is puzzling. We live in a society that abhors discrimination on the basis of many traits. And yet one of the major forms of discrimination is lookism, prejudice against the unattractive. And this gets almost no attention and sparks little outrage. Why?

Lookism starts, like every form of bigotry, with prejudice and stereotypes.

Studies show that most people consider an “attractive” face to have clean, symmetrical features. We find it easier to recognize and categorize these prototypical faces than we do irregular and “unattractive” ones. So we find it easier — from a brain processing perspective — to look at attractive people.

Attractive people thus start off with a slight physical advantage. But then people project all sorts of widely unrelated stereotypes onto them. In survey after survey, beautiful people are described as trustworthy, competent, friendly, likable and intelligent, while ugly people get the opposite labels. This is a version of the halo effect.

Not all the time, but often, the attractive get the first-class treatment. Research suggests they are more likely to be offered job interviews, more likely to be hired when interviewed and more likely to be promoted than less attractive individuals. They are more likely to receive loans and more likely to receive lower interest rates on those loans.

The discriminatory effects of lookism are pervasive. Attractive economists are more likely to study at high-ranked graduate programs and their papers are cited more often than papers from their less attractive peers. One study found that when unattractive criminals committed a moderate misdemeanor, their fines were about four times as large as those of attractive criminals.

 Daniel Hamermesh, a leading scholar in this field, observed that an American worker who is among the bottom one-seventh in looks earns about 10 to 15 percent less a year than one in the top third. An unattractive person misses out on nearly a quarter-million dollars in earnings over a lifetime.

The overall effect of these biases is vast. One 2004 study found that more people report being discriminated against because of their looks than because of their ethnicity.

In a study published in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Ellis P. Monk Jr., Michael H. Esposito and Hedwig Lee report that the earnings gap between people perceived as attractive and unattractive rivals or exceeds the earnings gap between white and Black adults. They find the attractiveness curve is especially punishing for Black women. Those who meet the socially dominant criteria for beauty see an earnings boost; those who don’t earn on average just 63 cents to the dollar of those who do.

Why are we so blasé about this kind of discrimination? Maybe people think lookism is baked into human nature and there’s not much they can do about it. Maybe it’s because there’s no National Association of Ugly People lobbying for change. The economist Tyler Cowen notices that it’s often the educated coastal class that most strictly enforces norms about thinness and dress. Maybe we don’t like policing the bigotry we’re most guilty of?

My general answer is that it’s very hard to buck the core values of your culture, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.

Over the past few decades, social media, the meritocracy and celebrity culture have fused to form a modern culture that is almost pagan in its values. That is, it places tremendous emphasis on competitive display, personal achievement and the idea that physical beauty is an external sign of moral beauty and overall worth.

Pagan culture holds up a certain ideal hero — those who are genetically endowed in the realms of athleticism, intelligence and beauty. This culture looks at obesity as a moral weakness and a sign that you’re in a lower social class.

Our pagan culture places great emphasis on the sports arena, the university and the social media screen, where beauty, strength and I.Q. can be most impressively displayed.

This ethos underlies many athletic shoe and gym ads, which hold up heroes in whom physical endowments and moral goodness are one. It’s the paganism of the C.E.O. who likes to be flanked by a team of hot staffers. (“I must be a winner because I’m surrounded by the beautiful.”) It’s the fashion magazine in which articles about social justice are interspersed with photo spreads of the impossibly beautiful. (“We believe in social equality, as long as you’re gorgeous.”) It’s the lookist one-upmanship of TikTok.

A society that celebrates beauty this obsessively is going to be a social context in which the less beautiful will be slighted. The only solution is to shift the norms and practices. One positive example comes, oddly, from Victoria’s Secret, which replaced its “Angels” with seven women of more diverse body types. When Victoria’s Secret is on the cutting edge of the fight against lookism, the rest of us have some catching up to do.

Why Is It OK to Be Mean to the Ugly? By David Brooks. The New York Times, June 24, 2021. 

The Beauty Bias.

So-called “ugly” persons and persons with facial difference for example, are being discriminated against. We rack our brains on questions of discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexual preference, but people whose appearance may be considered unattractive are discriminated against at least as often. Is ‘lookism’ – discrimination on the basis of attractiveness – morally problematic? And if so, why are we doing so little about it? Listen to Italian philosopher Francesca Minerva on the beauty bias and the need to address this form of discrimination.

Radboud Reflects, June 16, 2021. Lecture by Francesca Minerva. Followed by a conversation with Rona Jualla van Oudenhoven. 

The way we perceive and look at each other has consequences. Beautiful people get more attention and have more chances in society. Philosopher Francesca Minerva clears out the topics of this so-called lookism and beauty bias.

In our culture, we are constantly surrounded by images of beautiful people: from movie or sport icons on the screen to people that we meet daily. Since we pay a lot of attention to visuals, we tend to think of what is attractive is good. However, these notions of what is attractive and what is not, cause a lot of bias. Scientific studies show that beautiful people are more likely to get a job or even get bigger wages. People who’re considered unattractive might get lesser chances in society.

 Italian philosopher and researcher Francesca Minerva (University of Milan), even calls it another form of discrimination. Thursday, she will give a lecture on so-called ‘lookism’ at Radboud Reflects.

What is lookism?

‘Lookism is a term that describes the discriminatory treatment of people who are considered to be physically unattractive. The Western standard of beauty is really narrow, such as fair-skinned, youthful, thin, toned, and able-bodied.’

Isn’t beauty a subjective concept?

‘Of course, there are subjective elements, as people have different aesthetic preferences. But it’s surprising how people tend to agree on what or who is attractive or not. We know for example, that there’s a lot of agreement when it comes to famous icons, people, who are considered attractive over time.’

Different cultures have different understandings of beauty, can we generalize this?

‘While each culture has its own standards of beauty, there are certain features that we all consider to find attractive no matter what our culture, time, or geographic differences are. These general features are related to our evolution.’

 ‘Also, the Western standard of beauty is the one that people are the most exposed to. It has been exported due to historic and economic reasons, such as colonization, globalization, et cetera, thus it became dominant.’

Why is lookism more apparent now than before?

‘Nowadays, social media made it more radical than it used to be. All the apps and platforms enhanced our focus on appearance, especially in terms of relationships. The fact that we rely on these little pictures makes it difficult for people who are considered to be visually not attractive.’

And is there a gender dimension involved?

‘The question of physical appearance affects women more than men. Men have evolved to pay more attention to appearance, while women have evolved to look at other aspects, such as social status. Of course, there are a lot of exceptions, but this would be a biological explanation for why men are more interested in looking than women. However, social media globally shifted our attention towards appearance and made it more totalizing, thus gender dynamics in terms of lookism slowly dissolve.’

Can we undo this bias?

‘We should be more aware that the narrow Western standard of beauty is not inclusive. Though I think this change has started, now we have more diverse representations of people, but it still needs to expand. Hopefully, this will happen with time. Also, this field of study needs to be researched more.’

 

Beauty bias: another form of discrimination?  By Fausta Noreikaitė. Vox,  June 10, 2021. ,

Universities position themselves as places where brains matter. It seems strange then that students at a US university would rate attractive academics to be better teachers. This was the finding of a recent paper from the University of Memphis, which concluded that female academics suffered most from this.

It raises an uncomfortable proposition, that beauty trumps brains even in 21st century workplaces. It would certainly be supported by veteran female broadcasters such as radio presenter Libby Purves, who recently complained about the way the BBC dispenses with women of a certain age.

Another survey, this time in the UK, gave a deeper sense of the problem. It reported that employers were asking female employees to dress “sexier” and wear make-up during video meetings.

Published by law firm Slater and Gordon over the summer, and based on a poll of 2,000 office-based staff working from home during lockdown, the report found that 35% of women had experienced at least one sexist demand from their employer, usually relating to how they dressed for video meetings. Women also reported being asked to wear more makeup, do something to their hair or dress more provocatively. Reasons offered by their bosses were that it would “help win business” and be “pleasing to a client”.

It seems as though the shift to more virtual working has not eradicated what Danielle Parsons, an employment lawyer at Slater and Gordon, described as “archaic behaviour” which “has no place in the modern working world”. When employees’ performance is judged on the basis of their physical appearance, potentially shaping their pay and prospects in work, it is known as lookism. It’s not illegal, but arguably it should be.

Beauty and the boss

The Slater and Gordon survey findings affirm that many trends that we describe in our recent book, Aesthetic Labour, are widespread and continuing despite remote working. Our book reports over 20 years of research and thinking about this problem. Although our research started by focusing on frontline work in hospitality and retail, the same issue has expanded into a diverse range of roles including academics, traffic wardens, recruitment consultants, interpreters, TV news anchors and circus acrobats.

Companies think that paying greater attention to employees’ appearance will make them more competitive, while public sector organisations think it will make them more liked. As a result, they are all becoming ever more prescriptive in telling employees how they should look, dress and talk.

It happens both to men and women, though more often to women, and is often tied in more broadly with sexualising them at work. For example, while Slater and Gordon found that one-third of men and women had “put up with” comments about their appearance during video calls, women were much likelier to face degrading requests to appear sexier.

When we analysed ten years of employees’ complaints about lookism to the Equal Opportunities Commission in Australia, we found that the proportion from men was rising across sectors but that two-thirds of complaints were still from women. Interestingly, the University of Memphis study found no correlation for male academics between how their looks were perceived and how their performance was rated.

Society’s obsession

Of course, workplaces cannot be divorced from society in general, and within the book we chart the increasing obsession with appearance. This aestheticisation of individuals is partly driven by the ever-growing reach and importance of the beauty industry and a huge rise in cosmetic – now increasingly labelled aesthetic – surgery.

These trends are perhaps understandable given that those deemed to be “attractive” benefit from a “beauty premium” whereby they are more likely to get a job, more likely to get better pay and more likely to be promoted. Being deemed unattractive or lacking the right dress sense can be reasons to be denied a job, but they are not illegal.

Some researchers have described an emerging aesthetic economy. Clearly this raises concerns about unfair discrimination, but without the legal protection afforded to, say, disabled people.

Not only has this trend continued during the pandemic, it might even have been compounded. With the first genuine signs of rising unemployment reported this month, research already suggests a 14-fold increase in the number of applicants for some job roles. For example, one restaurant in Manchester had over 1,000 applicants for a receptionist position, while the upmarket pub chain All Bar One reported over 500 applicants for a single bar staff role in Liverpool.

Employers are now clearly spoilt for choice when it comes to filling available positions, and those perceived to be better looking will likely have a better chance. We know from research by the University of Strathclyde’s Tom Baum and his colleagues that the hospitality industry was precarious and exploitative enough even before COVID.

It all suggests that lookism is not going away. If we are to avoid the archaic practices of the old normal permeating the new normal, it is time to rethink what we expect from the workplace of the future. One obvious change that could happen is making discrimination on the basis of looks illegal. That would ensure that everyone, regardless of their appearance, has equal opportunity in the world of work to come.

Lookism: beauty still trumps brains in too many workplaces. By Christopher Warhurst and Dennis Nickson. . The Conversation, October 16, 2020. 

 

It’s deep, unconscious, and surprisingly universal—and means beautiful people get a much better deal. But righting injustice isn’t easy when no one wants to call themselves plain.

It’s not your imagination: Life is good for beautiful people. A drumbeat of research over the past decades has found that attractive people earn more than their average-looking peers, are more likely to be given loans by banks, and are less likely to be convicted by a jury. Voters prefer better-looking candidates; students prefer better-looking professors, while teachers prefer better-looking students. Mothers, those icons of blind love, have been shown to favor their more attractive children.

Perhaps even more discouragingly, we tend to assume that beautiful people are actually better people—in realms that have nothing to do with physical beauty. Study after study has shown that we judge attractive people to be healthier, friendlier, more intelligent, and more competent than the rest of us, and we use even the smallest differences in attractiveness to make these judgments. A startling study published earlier this year found that even identical twins judge each other by relative beauty: The more attractive twin assessed the other as less athletic, less emotionally stable, and less socially competent. The less attractive twins agreed, ranking their better-looking siblings ahead. If even minute differences in attractiveness affect us so deeply and predictably, the authors wrote, “the power of appearance-based stereotypes is greater than any study has yet suggested.”

The galloping injustice of “lookism” has not escaped psychologists, economists, sociologists, and legal scholars. Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode’s 2010 book, “The Beauty Bias,” lamented “the injustice of appearance in life and law,” while University of Texas, Austin economist Daniel Hamermesh’s 2011 “Beauty Pays,” recently out in paperback, traced the concrete benefits of attractiveness, including a $230,000 lifetime earnings advantage over the unattractive.

Still, the issue has generated few serious solutions. Though to a surprising degree, we agree on who is attractive and who isn’t, differences in looks remain largely unmentionable, unlike divisions of race, gender, disability, sexual orientation. There is no lobby for the homely. How do you change a discriminatory behavior that, even though unfair, is obviously deep, hard to pin down, and largely unconscious—and affects people who would be hurt even to admit they’re in the stigmatized category?

Tentatively, experts are beginning to float possible solutions. Some have proposed legal remedies including designating unattractive people as a protected class, creating affirmative action programs for the homely, or compensating disfigured but otherwise healthy people in personal-

injury courts. Others have suggested using technology to help fight the bias, through methods like blind interviews that take attraction out of job selection. There’s promising evidence from psychology that good old-fashioned consciousness-raising has a role to play, too.

None of these approaches will be a panacea, and to some aesthetes among us, even trying to counter the bias may sound ridiculous. But the reason to seek fairness for the less glamorous isn’t just social or charitable. Our preference for beautiful people makes us poor judges of qualities that have nothing to do with physical appearance—it means that when we select employees, teachers, protégés, borrowers, and even friends, we may not really be making the best choice. It’s an embarrassing and stubborn truth—and the question is now whether, having established it, social researchers can find a way to help us level the playing field.

***

We remember  many great beauties of yore—Helen of Troy, Alexander the Great—but great contributions of history have also come from famously homely people. Socrates was considered ugly, with a pot belly and snub nose; there was the ogre-like, lazy-eyed Sartre, and George Eliot, whom Henry James called a “great horse-faced bluestocking.” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that Abraham Lincoln was “about the homeliest man I ever saw.” Lincoln himself joked often about his looks, replying to a debater who accused him of being two-faced, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”

Yet the more we know about our brains’ biases, the more remarkable it seems that these plain folks achieved such prominence. Our preference for beauty “has existed for a very long time,” said psychologist Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School whose 1999 book, “Survival of the Prettiest,” defended beauty as empowering and universal. “It’s not a 20th-century phenomenon and not a Western phenomenon, but a human dilemma.”

 

As subjective as “beauty” sounds, human beings agree to remarkable degree on who is attractive and who is not. Beauty, as it turns out, is not in the eye of the beholder. Generally, it means feminine features for women, like large eyes and a round face, and masculine features for men, like a square jaw. Even newborn infants have been shown to prefer gazing at faces adults agree are attractive.

 “Friends might have an argument about who’s more attractive, Brad Pitt or George Clooney, but both are going to say they’re both attractive, and that both are more attractive than Steve Buscemi,” Connor Principe, an assistant professor of psychology at Pacific University and the lead author of the twin study, said. “We know who the attractive people are and who the unattractive people are, and there’s a lot of agreement.” This is true both within and across cultures, even those presumed to have radically different standards of beauty.

In the 1990s, psychologists thought that beauty was merely facial symmetry. Today the emerging consensus is more subtle: A beautiful face, it appears, is an “average” face—one sheared of most idiosyncrasies, or what Principe calls the most “face-like face.” One theory for why this would be is that it’s because we’re able to recognize such faces a split second earlier, and we prefer images we can process faster. “Instead of saying that someone who is beautiful is ‘easy on the eyes,’ we should say that they are ‘easy on the mind,’” Principe explained in an e-mail. “Unfortunately for less attractive people, their appearances make our brains work harder.”

The human preference for attractiveness does seem to serve an evolutionary purpose. Qualities like pink cheeks and facial symmetry are real indicators of health and fertility—even more so before modern medicine and makeup—so it makes sense that we’d be drawn to them. But we tend to extrapolate wildly on those meager cues, and apply those extrapolations to a far wider group of scenarios than mate selection. The “what is beautiful is good” bias, as psychologist Karen Dion and colleagues called it in an influential 1972 paper, is an aspect of the broader “halo effect.” Since humans have limited cognitive resources, we use shortcuts, including taking something we know (Angelina is beautiful) and generalizing about something we don’t yet know (Angelina is kind and competent).

Those shared shortcuts, and our broad agreement on standards of beauty, are what give the human beauty bias its shocking social power. And that’s not just bad for the below-average; it raises the possibility that the next Abraham Lincoln or George Eliot is going to be ignored. Just as American society is now benefiting from previously untapped talents of minorities and women, it’s reasonable to expect we are losing out because we—all of us—put too much stock in handsome leaders and friends, and systematically underestimate the gifts of the plain.

***

How to fix  this problem depends on what kind of problem, exactly, you think it is. A number of scholars see it as fundamentally a civil-rights issue, with the unattractive a class of people who are provably and consistently discriminated against. It’s an idea that seems poised to resonate beyond the academy: A 2004 survey conducted by an economist and a legal scholar found more people reporting that they’d been discriminated against based on their looks than on their ethnicity.

 

The Constitution forbids employment discrimination on the basis of things like race, sex, and religion, but only a few jurisdictions have tried to add appearance to the list, starting with the parts of appearance you can measure. The state of Michigan banned height and weight discrimination in 1977, and six municipalities, including Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, have followed suit with similar statutes. These laws haven’t led to a flood of frivolous suits, as libertarians might fear—in fact, they haven’t led to many suits at all, which suggests they aren’t doing much more than tackling the most egregious cases. (Rhode’s book reports that in Michigan, an average of just one case a year makes it to court.)

Even with remarkable agreement on who is attractive and who is not, ugliness doesn’t feel like the same kind of quality as race or sexuality. In an ideal world, descriptors like “Asian” or “gay” are neutral, but “ugly” carries a universal emotional charge. “There are no ‘unattractive’ lobbies,” Principe said. “Who is going to fight for these people? For that to really work, you have to have people who are willing to be recognized as unattractive, and that’s going to be the hardest thing.” Who’s going to lead the way in the Ugly Pride parade? It’s hard to imagine it will be easy to find volunteers.

Hamermesh, however, thinks some people might raise their hands. He points out that when people rank photographs on a 5 to 1 scale of attractiveness—the most common method in beauty research—only 1 or 2 percent end up labeled “1,” and there’s a strong consensus about who belongs at the low end of the scale. “I would bet these people already feel themselves disadvantaged, are aware that their looks disadvantage them, and will be pleased to have some protection,” he said.

Other ideas, based on traditional legal and economic remedies for unfairness, can seem a bit utopian (or Orwellian): Hamermesh has proposed “affirmative-action programs for the ugly,” or extending the Americans with Disabilities Act to include the unattractive. But without a broad public understanding of the concrete disadvantages of unattractiveness, these ideas sound to many critics like social engineering run amok.

Recognizing our beauty bias as a cognitive problem offers a different kind of traction: For one thing, it’s possible to set up evaluation methods in the workplace that ignore differences in physical beauty. The field of industrial psychology has developed a set of best practices for businesses that want to avoid discrimination in hiring, including the use of online or standardized interviews that remove an interviewer’s unreliable gut instincts from the equation. Other best practices include scoring interview answers numerically, and committing to ask every candidate the exact same set of questions, since subtle bias often appears in the form of extra follow-up questions. (Of course, shifting the hiring process online isn’t foolproof: A 2012 study found people said online interviewees with attractive avatars deserved higher salaries.) The more systematic approach can produce interviews that feel “less like a conversation and more like a test,” said Tara Behrend, lead author of the avatar study and an assistant professor of organizational sciences at George Washington University. “But that means there’s less opportunity for bias.”

 ***

 There will be resistance , obviously, to changing the status quo to account for our bias toward beauty. A few industries have made an open case for hiring attractive employees. If customers or clients are attracted to beautiful people, they point out, then it’s perfectly rational to hire them, particularly for sales or front-office positions.

But that kind of pragmatism doesn’t hold water for many advocates. “To say that hiring salespeople who are attractive is good for business is the same argument whites made for hiring whites only during the early civil rights era,” Rhode pointed out. The law no longer allows airlines to cater to the preferences of male business travelers with all-female steward staff, for example, so why is looks-based discrimination acceptable just because customers may prefer it?

Moreover, it’s clear that we trust beauty beyond the realms in which it actually makes a difference. Beautiful people may be likelier to receive loans and receive lower interest rates, but research says they’re just as likely to default. That alone suggests there are areas where more objective kinds of evaluation would be helpful.

One means of attack is perhaps the simplest of all: There’s a chance that merely making us aware of the bias can help diffuse it, by allowing us to remind ourselves that we’re wrong if we assume that beautiful and good are one and the same. Etcoff also notes that prolonged exposure to media images skews our brain’s notion of that “average” face: In a plugged-in era in which I see Jennifer Lawrence’s face more than my own sister’s, my brain’s concept of “average” is skewed wildly far from reality. It’s up to us to put down the magazines.

Research on how to prime ourselves to overcome this bias is still in its infancy, but Principe says there are promising hints from the more robust research on racism that bad cognitive habits can be broken. A paper published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed how researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison devised a “habit-breaking intervention” that included teaching subjects to recognize their own responses and adopting the stigmatized person’s perspective. The intervention drastically reduced subjects’ racial biases, even months later.

So if we’re ever going to break our addiction to beauty, perhaps the first step is to admit we have a problem. “We do ourselves a disservice by saying looks don’t matter in society,” Principe said. “We’re told it’s what’s on the inside that matters, and to never judge a book by its cover. That’s counterproductive. We need to say, Looks do matter.”

Who will fight the beauty bias? By Ruth Graham. The Boston Globe, August 23, 2013.