The second chapter tells us that featuring endorsements from attractive celebrities constitutes âbody shaming, ableism, and sexism.â (p. 13)
I havenât read the chapter or the book, but something like this just seems pretty plausible to me. By disproportionately featuring people filtered on the basis of a lookist[1] selection process (e.g. their popularity in lookist industries, or partially directly based on how attractive we think they are to us or to society), we may be condoning and/âor perpetuating (societal) lookism, and increasing its harms. And lookism of course overlaps with âbody shaming, ableism, and sexismâ, e.g. people discriminate on the basis of how disabilities or other conditions look, which is ableist, and women and girls seem to be more often the targets of lookism and body shaming, which is sexist. By supporting a specific standard of beauty, we may invite comparisons to it, and so possibly body shaming.
However, featuring any attractive celebrities at all doesnât necessarily seem lookist. OTOH, it could be that attractive celebrities are so rare in the population we should be sampling from (and itâs not clear what that is) that even featuring one would be very unlikely to happen other than through lookism at some step.
My guess is that our contribution to lookism here is very small relative to the impacts for animals (whether good or bad for animals).
I wonder if it would be acceptable to them if we offset our contributions to lookism (and/âor âbody shaming, ableism, and sexismâ) by supporting work against it, too. Iâd guess it wouldnât be that costly to do, if fully offsetting just means not increasing lookism on net, rather than preventing every harm of lookism weâd (foreseeably?[2]) cause.
I havenât read the chapter or the book, but something like this just seems pretty plausible to me. By disproportionately featuring people filtered on the basis of a lookist[1] selection process (e.g. their popularity in lookist industries, or partially directly based on how attractive we think they are to us or to society), we may be condoning and/âor perpetuating (societal) lookism, and increasing its harms. And lookism of course overlaps with âbody shaming, ableism, and sexismâ, e.g. people discriminate on the basis of how disabilities or other conditions look, which is ableist, and women and girls seem to be more often the targets of lookism and body shaming, which is sexist. By supporting a specific standard of beauty, we may invite comparisons to it, and so possibly body shaming.
However, featuring any attractive celebrities at all doesnât necessarily seem lookist. OTOH, it could be that attractive celebrities are so rare in the population we should be sampling from (and itâs not clear what that is) that even featuring one would be very unlikely to happen other than through lookism at some step.
My guess is that our contribution to lookism here is very small relative to the impacts for animals (whether good or bad for animals).
I wonder if it would be acceptable to them if we offset our contributions to lookism (and/âor âbody shaming, ableism, and sexismâ) by supporting work against it, too. Iâd guess it wouldnât be that costly to do, if fully offsetting just means not increasing lookism on net, rather than preventing every harm of lookism weâd (foreseeably?[2]) cause.
Discrimination on the basis of physical attractiveness against those considered less attractive or in favour of those considered more attractive.
Trying to prevent every harm of lookism weâd cause, including unforeseeable ones, probably leads to decision paralysis, due to butterfly effects.