Link Between Attractiveness and Criminality
The Ugly Truth, part 2
In part 1 of this essay, I briefed you on the recent findings of a federally funded study that revealed a more or less 1-to-1 link between attractiveness and criminality. This finding interests me on several levels – but most immediately among these is this:
How long will it be before criminal lawyers start using the “ugly” defense in court?
We’re not far away from this point right now. Already, the supposed lack of self-esteem caused by anything less than a Norman Rockwell upbringing has become a cornerstone of criminal defenses for all kinds of horrible crimes. And I’ll bet it won’t be a year before pleading “ugly” replaces pleading “childhood abuse” or “temporary insanity” as the criminal defense du jour.
Now, let me be clear: I’m not saying that this study’s findings are bunk. Quite the contrary, in fact – I think there’s very definitely a link between personal appearance and path in life, in many cases. According to the Washington Post article I cited in part 1, previous studies have conclusively shown that less attractive people are not as likely to land good jobs and be paid high salaries when compared to their more comely comrades. Other research shows that attractive students get better grades and have more highly developed social skills.
And just last May (Daily Dose, 5/31/2005), I wrote to you about the disturbing study showing parents’ almost universal tendency to neglect unattractive children as opposed to adorable ones. So clearly, ugly people get a bum rap in life. But everybody knows that the pretty people are life’s winners, more often than not. We didn’t need a federally funded study to tell us – especially if it’s going to spur the advancement of yet another ludicrous criminal-as-victim court defense. I’d rather they’d kept this “official” finding to themselves
So what’s the solution?
There isn’t one. There’s no way in the world to make the “looks game” fair, other than to make everybody equally ugly. There’s no way to level the playing field in the brains department, either, other than to lobotomize smart people. To do all this, it would mean trampling on the rights of the advantaged, the best and brightest of society. And we NEED these folks to maintain our national excellence, if not our beauty. This kind of enforced mediocrity was the premise of Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant short story that both hilariously and shockingly illustrates the problems with equality better than I ever could. Keep reading
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The bottom line is this: We all must play the cards we’re dealt as best we can, without carping about how we were shortchanged in the looks or height or brains or coordination department. Under the law, we all look the same, or at least we should.
And if we were raised right (we aren’t) – and if we lived in a country that held people accountable for how they play their cards instead of inventing excuses for criminal behavior (we don’t) – we’d all be concentrating on overcoming our challenges instead of blaming them for why we aren’t CEOs or Senators, or why we ARE criminals
Then we’d be a society of TRUE equals, united in making things as fair as they can be within the scope of what we can truly help.
All this does raise at least one other interesting point (at least it does to me): Remember that old fiction “formula” I mentioned in part 1 of this essay – the clich about villains always being ugly and heros being beautiful? Well, this has existed in story and song for ages before there was any such thing as a sociologist, psychologist, or government study to show a link between attractiveness and behavior
Which breeds a chicken-or-egg question: Have storytellers through the ages inherently known that ugly people were more likely to turn out wrong – and so cast them as villains that their stories might be most believable, a simple case of art imitating life? Or is the reason why we notice and rank people’s attractiveness BECAUSE these standards have been established for us and programmed into us by fables, novels, paintings, plays, and movies?
In other words: Were there no art to exalt it, would there be no beauty to exalt – and hence greater fairness and self-esteem for all?
Food for thought?
Unfairly saddled with a beautiful mind – we can’t all have it all.
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
