What is lookism? Lookism is the prejudice or discrimination of an individual based on his or her physical appearance. This is especially true when ones physical appearance is believed to fall short of societal notions of beauty (“Lookism,” 2016). There is such an importance placed on looks because we live in a visual society. People are discriminated against for a number of different reasons and there are many types of lookism in today’s society. One type of discrimination that is based off of appearance is weightism. Weightism is the bias or discrimination against those who are overweight (“Weightism,” 2016). Our society places such an emphasis on this aspect of lookism because they believe that unlike someone’s race or gender their weight …show more content…
It is possible that an individual may not want to date or be friends with someone as a result of their weight. This type of rejection can be severely damaging for this person and could cause them to not want to socialize or try and form relationships with other people. Recent reports show that overweight women are twice as vulnerable as men when it comes to forming relationships (Dye, 2008). This is not only as a result of being discriminated against for their weight, but it is also because women are held to a different standard of how they should look in order to be beautiful then men …show more content…
Being overweight can often make employers view you differently and question your abilities. My supervisor at my internship is overweight and she shared with me that she had experienced weightism at a job interview once. This job required her to be able to get on and off of the floor with young children. During her interview, the interview her asked if she would physically be able to do this because of her size. This is just one example of how individuals who are overweight in the workplace experience weightism. Studies show that 78% of managers responsible for recruiting staff will not employ an obese person if there is a thinner, equally qualified candidate (“Workplace ‘Weightism..,” 2015). Many overweight people also experience weightism when it comes to promotions, wages and other aspects of their jobs. I was very surprised to learn how serious this form of lookism has become in our society. Before completing this assignment I had never even realized that ‘weightism’ even existed. Growing up my sister was bullied for being overweight, which makes this a very personal topic for me. She had always shared how hard it was for her being over weight, but being young I never thought about how this was a problem for all people that are overweight not just my sister. Knowing that people in the world we live in can have such negative feelings towards a person because they are not thin
“Fat Acceptance”: An Argument Lacking Validity Cynara Geisslers’ essay “Fat Acceptance: A Basic Primer,” was published in Geez Magazine in 2010. The focus of the essay is to refute the pressure of society to be thin and promote self-acceptance regardless of size. While this essay touches on many agreeable points, it tends to blow many ideas out of context in an attempt to create a stronger argument. The article takes on a one-sided argument without any appropriate acknowledgement of the opposition, overlooks the risks of ignoring personal health, and has a strong feminist ideology associated towards the essay which tends to make the validity of her argument questionable.
This is an essay written in the MIT Sloan Management Review that presents the correlation between businesses and the issue of obesity in order to persuade businesses to take action in regards to preventing the issue. Therefore, its target audience is anyone who currently works in business or plans to do so in the future. In this review, the author begins by citing four internal and external reasons for which businesses should care about obesity: self-preservation, public criticism, employee productivity, and opportunity. The author proceeds by providing an idea as to how businesses can assist in reversing the trend. In order to do so, he analyzes what he considers to be the two sides of the obesity problem: physical activity and food consumption.
It looks like looks are here to stay” (Akst 331). Akst’s degenerate remarks about beauty revolves around self-centered and arrogant values. He mentioned so many scientific statements about how humans should focus on maintaining an attractive appearance for society, and not for themselves. If Mairs and Walker read Akst’s essay, they would both disagree with his opinion about beauty. Both women would convey a message of accepting and embracing one’s beauty, despite the society’s view. Akst limits differences in a degrading way by mentioning “overweight” individuals are worthless and they send a negative message to society. The reader and the women can disagree with Akst’s statement because size, appearance, height, ethnicity, gender, and other abnormalities does not send a negative message, it is the comments made by a bias hypocrite who sees beauty as the aspiration to an individual’s
In today’s job market, there are many reasons an individual could be turned down for employment. According to Deborah Rhodes, author of “Why looks are the last bastion of discrimination”, appearance should not be one of them. Rhodes is a law professor at Stanford and holder of numerous titles for her outstanding work in legal matters. She is also the author and co-author of over 250 articles (Directory). In this article, she addresses an issue with profound impact on today’s society. She proposes that appearance discrimination should be included in anti-discrimination laws in addition to what is already accepted and legalized in today’s workplace. While it is a seemingly “silly” concern, it is actually quite valid. There has been many a concern over discrimination. That is, discrimination based on race, color, gender, and others of a similar nature in the work environment.
To begin, a mechanism of discriminatory and violent systems is appearance. Appearance is the way that someone or something looks, meaning not everyone looks or acts the same by performance. In Roxane Gay’s novel, she points out that she wants acceptance for her body shape, and yet wanting to change it. Although she tried
We need to acknowledge that our methods to control overweight and obesity may commence, but must not conclude with individual accountability. Only a number of diseases require a general approach, other than the effort to hold and decrease the levels of overweight and obesity, and in few places are the stakes higher. Employers seem to have accepted this and are attempting to develop programs to address it.
I found that in all of these reasons, Smith only says that they (the oppositional side) are discriminating against "fat" people, but she refrains from going deeper to present why they do it. Sadly, there are some people do discriminate against the “people of size.” Although just because something is done, like a policy revision or disqualification to a job, due to a person’s weight, one should look deeper into the reason why it is done. Do not always misinterpret this as discrimination, because it could possibly be done to benefit that person in the end. Maybe even ensure his or her safety in a time of crisis.
Pinfitore, R., Dugoni. B. L., Tindale, R. S., Spring, B. (1994). Bias against overweight job applicants in a simulated employment interview. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79(6), 909-917.
Interest in the social aspects of obesity is nothing new. Jeffrey Sobal has written extensively about the social and psychological consequences of obesity , including the stigmatisation and discrimination of obese and even overweight individuals (Sobal 2004).
Discriminating against a person because of one's weight can be a seriously hurtful and demeaning thing. Many people assume that the causes for being overweight are eating all day and rarely exercising. Some people call overweight people slobs or lazy, when in most instances this isn't the case. Some have health problems that lead to being overweight, like a kidney disease or malfunction, or the person may even be suffering from a birth defect.
Libal, Autumn. "The Poor Get Fat, The Rich Get Thin?" Social Discrimination & Body Size: Too Big to FIt? 2005. 40-55. Print. 10 Nov. 2013.
In the media there are people who view women a certain way, and if we don't hold to the standard that we are not as good as other women who are the size the media says we have to be. In an article it said that "Large women in America are to all intents and purposes invisible in today's thinness-obsessed culture. A big women is neither seen nor heard, and is defined purely in terms of her weight and other people's prejudice." (Goodman par 1) This is a hard thing for women that a heavier to understand because they want the person to think that they are heard. This plays into the way that they think and the way that women look at their bodies. You can see this happening with different types of televisions shows, which put on the show thinner women. "Practically the only television programming that addresses her directly consists of weight-loss ads, the message: lose weight. You're not real women unless you're thin (Goodman)". It is hard to think that this statement could be true, but
Physical beauty is constructed by the society that we live in. We are socialized from a very young age to aspire to become what our culture deems ideal. Living in the United States, as in many other Western cultures, we are expected to be well-educated, maintain middle-class or upper-class status, be employed as well as maintain a physical standard of beauty. Although beauty is relative to each culture, it is obvious that we as Americans, especially women, are expected to be maintain a youthful appearance, wear cosmetics and fashionable clothes, but most importantly: not to be overweight. Our society is socially constructed to expect certain physical features to be the norm, anything outside this is considered deviant. Obesity is defined as outside the norms of our culture's aesthetic norms (Gros). “People who do not match idealized or normative expectations of the body are subjected to stigmatization” (Heckert 32). Obesity is a physical deviance; it is one that is an overwhelming problem in our society as we are always judged daily, by our appearance. Those who do not conform to the standards of beauty, especially when it comes to weight, are stigmatized and suffer at the hands of a society that labels them as deviants.
Therefore, in the forty years of her experiencing fat activism it has shown that there are alternative ways to promote fitness and wellbeing for those whom suffer from obesity, that does not comprise of punishing diets or with humiliating practices. Cooper insinuates that the stigmatization that obese people, poses a contrast to the normalised views of an individual, by stating ‘being fat affects ordinary areas of our lives’ (Cooper, 1998: 32). Thus, daily life for an obese individual becomes a struggle and activities that ‘normal’ individuals take for granted take much longer for an individual that suffers from obesity to accomplish. Obesity becomes a social stigma and more than often they are judged on their appearance and Cooper emphasises that in the result of this ‘fat people receive a huge amount of unwanted attention’ (Cooper, 1998:
Historically, legislation aimed at physical appearance is not a revolutionary concept. Many jurisdictions had laws in the past that barred “ugly” or “unsightly” people from appearing in public places. Such laws today would cause an outcry among civil rights activists. Yet, legislation aimed at protecting “ugly” people from discrimination does not exist on a national level with other employment discrimination legislation. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act affords protection against discrimination based on many aspects, including race, disability, sex, and age. However, before a new kind of characteristic can become protected under federal civil rights law, it must be associated in some form with an already protected characteristic under anti-discrimination law. For example, someone who is grossly obese and believes they have suffered employment discrimination as a result will have a good chance of winning a lawsuit based on discrimination if the obesity is due to some kind of disability or medical condition. However, if the obesity is not related to some already protected characteristics, chances are the courts would not view it as discriminati...