My view

The times of discrimination of people by color are long past. However, the modern world has not yet said goodbye to discrimination of appearance. In modern society, overweight people are most often the victims of lookism. Moreover, the researchers argue that discrimination by body weight is “acceptable.” In many cultures, it is widely believed that it is good to be thin and ill to be full, and because of this, the expression of negative attitudes towards obese people becomes permissible. Lookism has always existed. In childhood we all read fairy tales about beautiful princesses and ugly witches. The beautiful was always associated with good, and the ugly with evil. A beautiful girl in the class was a success, and an unattractive became an outcast. Adult people, growing up, still automatically judge others, based on the assessment of appearance. The fact is that the appearance of a person is his most accessible feature. When we meet a person for the first time, we form instant judgments about him or her, determined by the impression made up on the basis of all the information we perceive. This “first impression” can persist for a long time and have a strong influence on our relationship with this person. I found one study conducted by Landy and Seagall in 1974, where male students were asked to rate one of two essays differing in the quality of performance, each of which was attached a picture of the author - a girl student. In one version of the conditions, a photo of an attractive girl was attached to a “good” essay, and then a photo of her unattractive peer was evaluated as“bad” essay. As expected, Landy and Seagall found out that “beauty means talent”: in both conditions, higher grades were given to attractive female students. People with an attractive appearance are better perceived in society. Studies show that, on average, individuals with an attractive appearance have much more friends, they are more socialized and their sex life is much more active. Having rummaged through the internet, I found a study conducted by Timothy Judge and Daniel Coyb in 2004, showing that an individual with a height of over 180 centimetres for 30 years of work experience earns $ 166,000 more than an individual with a height of 160 centimetres. Nancy Etkoff, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Hospital, argues that "today we live in a world where lookism is one of the most common prejudices". As a result, dissatisfaction with one’s own body has become commonplace. More and more people fall under the surgeons' knife, put themselves to the test of extreme diets and fasting, use steroids and many other procedures, which adversely affect health. Lookism is primarily beneficial to manufacturers of drugs and cosmetics, as well as for the fashion, sports and medical industry. Thanks to modern photo and video processing technologies, advertising companies can demonstrate “perfect” bodies, thereby devaluing the bodies of ordinary women and men and forcing them to resort to a wide variety of products and procedures that promise to make them more beautiful. The debate about beauty will never end, nor will the exploitation of this concept for capital increase.