whatNOW - Fall 2011 e-Newsletter

Book Review - The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance In Life and Law

You Lookin' At Me?

Book By Deborah L. Rhode (Oxford University Press)
Review By K.C. Washington

My roommate once got out of jury duty because he said that he couldn’t be objective. If the plaintiff (a young child) was attractive he would side with her and if she wasn’t he would side with her out of pity. True story. You know what else is true? He is not alone. Every day people decide other people’s worth, livelihood, their very fate, based on how appealing they look. Sound exaggerated? Deborah L. Rhode doesn’t think so.

Rhode, the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford University, explores this phenomenon. According to Rhode, “Most people believe that bias based on beauty is inconsequential, inevitable, or unobjectionable. They are wrong. Conventional wisdom understates the advantages that attractiveness confers, the costs of its pursuit, and the injustices that result.”

Those costs come in many forms. Almost a fifth of Americans don’t have regular healthcare yet the use of cosmetic surgery is spreading faster than our thighs (it is the fastest growing medical specialty); women totter around on heels almost guaranteed to misalign their spines and send them sprawling, and Sarah Palin’s handlers spent $150,000 on her wardrobe and makeup—transforming her into a serious contender based purely on her “pit bull” attractiveness. 

But so what? Rhode challenges those who ask, “In a country where four million women annually are victims of domestic violence and twenty million live in poverty, why put the height of heels at the top of the women’s agenda?” Because she knows from her own battles with colleagues, who felt that she was too frumpy to represent them at conventions or seminars, that even those who shouldn’t care, do. And it can erode your self-esteem and cost you your job.

Citing case after case, such as the two Borgata Babes in Atlantic City who ran afoul of their bosses after gaining weight, Black women who in the '80s fought to wear braids at their corporate jobs, or the Reno cocktail waitress who lost her job for refusing to wear heavy makeup because it lessened her authority with unruly customers, Rhode makes the case for not just concern but action.

But how? How do you define beauty? As I read, I kept thinking I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it. Rhode understands the conundrum and suggests that a good starting point for activists and lawyers is to expose the inequitable financial cost to women who are compelled to conform to stereotypical beauty standards, collectively spending millions of dollars per year on things like dangerous weight loss pills, expensive cosmetics, and plastic surgeries.  She argues that though you can’t change someone’s heart, with enough litigation highlighting individual pain and then extrapolating outward (much like the media did with the Civil Rights movement), you can eventually give women who don’t look like Heidi Klum or men who aren’t as tall as George Clooney a fighting chance.

Employing cartoons and pop culture references, her voice a cross between Cosmo and Gray’s Anatomy (the medical journal not the T.V. show), Rhode makes a concrete case for a beauty bias and its impacts. At times she gives too much repetitive minutiae, but in the end, whether you can claim Eurocentric good looks or are just passable, the book makes you look our judgmental world in the face and demand that it look deeper than skin.