Essay About Pretty Privilege

I first learned that life was unfair when I learned about pretty privilege. The idea of pretty privilege is people will generally treat you better on the basis of if you’re attractive or not. Pretty privilege can be applied to a multitude of situations ranging from deciding not to date somebody if they are ugly to you or even an ugly person receiving a much longer prison sentence then an attractive person. It is a wide scale problem that is rarely talked about and needs to be addressed.

The most common example of pretty privilege is the media’s clear bias against unattractive people. This can range from social media to TV to advertisements of products that the general public (a good amount of unattractive people) will buy. Tik Tok, one of the most popular social media platforms most commonly used by teenagers has openly admitted to only supporting attractive people on their platform. According to documents obtained by the inter-sad, Tik Tok advised moderators to keep certain body types and lifestyles out of the For You page . That includes anyone who falls into these categories: “abnormal body shape, chubby, have obvious beer belly, obese or too thin”. They also put down people with “ugly facial looks “, a category which includes traits like “disformatted” faces, missing teeth, and old people with, “too many wrinkles”. Not to mention they remove any posts that have called this out or speak on it. Additionally, I rarely ever see TV shows or movies where the protagonist isn’t classically attractive. If an actor or actress isn’t classically attractive their character tends to be the butt of the joke or is overly confident and an inspiration to all. 

Pretty people also have much more of an advantage in the job market. As comprehensive academic review summarized: “physically attractive people are more likely to be interviewed for jobs and hired, they are more likely to advance rapidly in their careers through frequent promotions, and they even earn higher wages than unattractive individuals” Unattractive people are most commonly discriminated on the basis of being overweight, poorly dressed, and skin color. One major example of blatant discrimination on the basis of attractiveness was when Mike Jeffries the current CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch expressed their view on unattractive people buying and selling their clothes. In 2006 he said: “That's why we hire good looking people in our stores. Because good looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that”. “In every school they are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not so cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong in our clothes, and they can’t be long. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” Along with us came a ton of discrimination based on attractiveness, race, and weight. Even now as a teenager who is looking to work in retail, there are certain stores that I avoid. For example, I saw that PacSun was hiring a couple months ago and I wanted to work there. But I didn’t apply because I knew for a fact that they were not going to hire me because I wasn’t that all American girl look that they are looking for.

There’s also a lot of psychology behind pretty privilege. Pretty people are most commonly presumed to be more competent, smarter, and more friendly. That’s why a lot of the time classically attractive people have an easier time with finding a date or being more accepted in social situations. Overall this is a huge problem that makes life extremely unfair for a huge amount of people. It can honestly affect anyone and it’s something that probably won’t change for a very long time.