Be honest: 1) When someone sends you a friend request on Facebook, do you find yourself checking their photo file to help you decide whether to accept?
2) When you are introduced to a good-looking person do you immediately assume he/she must be dumb? 3) Would you agree that one’s physical appearance has much more of an impact on our lives than we admit?
If you responded "yes" to some of the above, you are guilty of lookism, a prejudice perhaps more insidious than racism that has concerned psychologists, social scientists, feminists and spin-doctors for years.
An extraordinary story landed in my inbox this week. It was about Shirin Juwaley, the victim of an acid attack who had been refused permission recently by a college principal to enter a Mumbai college when she wanted to sensitise students to explore "how normative ideas of beauty socially exclude people with disfigurement and altered body image notions" — work that she had been doing for the last 13 years with her foundation, Palash.
Her cause was championed by Dheera Sujan, an editor with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, who in an impassioned open letter to the principal wrote: “I ask you to define ugliness. Is warped and discolored skin ugly? Would you rate skin-deep beauty higher than a strong and courageous heart?”
I visited Juwaley’s blog in which she described her post-attack agony: “It dawned on me quite by shock that people were scared of my face. It was painful to be constantly stared at, listen to the gasps and expletives and watch expressions of fright when people saw me.“
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It’s a strange business, this thing about physical appearance and what we consider beautiful, ugly, attractive and unattractive.
Jamuna Pai is one of India’s most celebrated champions of beauty.
Under her deft hands, beauty queens, socialites, hunky actors have all waxed and waned with procedures designed to construct ever more appealing faces.
To measure how skin-deep our perceptions of beauty are, I asked her how prevalent is the quest for beauty in today’s India. “Let me put it this way” she said, “today it’s considered a necessity if you want professional or personal success.“
While talking to Pai I was reminded of a poignant story I read long ago in Esquire about a businessman who, having fallen in love with his beautiful cosmetic surgeon, kept going back under her scalpel in the hope of attaining higher standards of beauty so that she would fall in love with him.
The story ended with a tear rolling down the man’s recently improved visage after his nth surgery as he chanced upon a picture of the doctor’s husband: a craggy, run-of-the-mill average looking bloke, whom she obviously loved.
The story challenged traditional notions about beauty in the same way fairy tales such as "The Ugly Duckling" and TV shows like Ugly Betty do.
Because however much corporations programme us to adhere to standards of beauty and young girls are brainwashed to become anorexic by the billion-dollar fashion industry, somewhere deep down we know that beauty is skin-deep.
Which is why I was so happy to hear Shirin end her broadcast with Sujan saying, “When I now look in the mirror I see a gorgeous woman.”
I urge all of you to visit her blog : doilooknormal.blogspot.com
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com