Last Bastions of Prejudice

2010-06-23 (수) 12:00:00

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In our supposedly enlightened times, only a bigoted lout would tell a cruel joke about a minority.

In reality, life is not so simple. Subtler forms of discrimination, some of them based on appearance and attractiveness, persist even where overt prejudice, against race or religion, is deplored.

Just ask an overweight person. Many of them feel that the ridicule they endure is more painful because it is socially acceptable. Research shows that while more people are overweight than ever, the stigma against them is intensifying. And as The Times reported, obesity is often attacked as a personal failing, even though science mostly points to genetics.

Meanwhile, fat people are blamed for issues like higher healthcare costs and even increased fuel consumption that contributes to global warming. Many complain that being overweight affects their job prospects.

“We’re kind of a popular punching bag,” Marilyn Wann, the author of “Fat? So!” told The Times. “You can do incredibly discriminating, hurtful, hateful things to fat people in public and not only get away with it but be seen as some kind of superhero.”

She added, “The only thing anyone can accurately diagnose by looking at a fat person is their own level of stereotype and prejudice about fat.”

Ageism is another subtle form of discrimination, particularly in Hollywood, where youth and beauty reign supreme. This year a group of older television writers won a $70 million age-discrimination lawsuit. But Tony Segall, general counsel for the Writers Guild, West, warned that “there is still a sharp decline in employment rates as writers get older.”

Others try to stop the clock with cosmetic surgery, to the point where, in some societies, women feel stigmatized if they don’t go under the knife.

“Women have always been under pressure to look good,” Susan Burke, 50, a nurse in New Jersey who has debated over having cosmetic surgery, told The Times. “But that has increased recently because we have become so used to seeing perfect, unwrinkled faces. Now when you see someone who looks like a raisin or a prune, it seems so unusual that you are almost repulsed.”

Part of the pressure is economic. “If you want to sell a million-dollar house, you have to look good,” Tracey McCallum, a real estate broker in Bowie, Maryland, told The Times. Ms. McCallum is only 33 but has already had Botox injections, chemical peels and laser treatments.

Some might say she is paranoid. But as The Times’s Maureen Dowd wrote, studies show that good-looking people get a “beauty premium” of 5 percent in wages per hour, contrasted with a “plainness penalty” of 9 percent.

Cigarette smokers are growing accustomed to their near-pariah status and for the most part have accepted that their habit is unwelcome in offices, bars and restaurants as smoking bans are enacted across the United States and in many European nations. In Belmont, California, however, some were angered when the city banned smoking virtually everywhere, including inside apartment buildings.

At least from the perspective of Edith Frederickson, a smoker for more than 50 years, the law was discriminatory. “They’re telling you how to live and what to do,” she told The Times last year, “and they’re doing it right here in America.” Unrepentant, she vowed to continue smoking at home. “I’m going to keep being a criminal, let me tell you that,” she said.

KEVIN DELANEY