“As a happily married academic, I have been blissfully insulated from serious concerns about appearance,” writes Deborah L. Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford University and a self-described sartorial sinner. Rhode’s blasé attitude toward her looks makes her an outlier, at least according to the research she cites in her new book, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law (Oxford University Press). In one “representative” survey, three-quarters of women said that their appearance is one of the main factors affecting their self-image; a third ranked it above job performance and intelligence. Another poll indicates that half of women are very or moderately unhappy with their bodies. Perhaps most troubling, by age 9, anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of girls want to lose weight.
Rhode, who seems appalled by those figures, spends more than a few pages fingering, among other targets, the news media and advertisers for pushing an unattainable standard of female attractiveness. Only 5 percent of American women are in the same weight category as models and actresses, and, Rhode writes, “efforts to replicate their figures often lead to eating disorders and related psychological dysfunctions.” The pursuit of perfection also leads to debt. The annual global investment in grooming is at least $115-billion; Americans also spend $40-billion annually on diets. Liposuction is the world’s most common surgery. “Beauty may be only skin deep,” Rhode writes, “but the damages associated with its pursuit go much deeper.”
In our looks-obsessed culture, appearance-related prejudice is rampant. “Discrimination based on appearance appears at least as widespread as other forms of prohibited bias,” Rhode writes. Legal scholars, however, have consistently played down its deleterious consequences. Among those she takes to task is Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford colleague, who has argued that unattractive people are “spread pretty evenly across families and social classes, so the ill effects of bias against them are often ameliorated by other social advantages.” “Ford is simply wrong,” Rhode writes. “Overweight individuals are the most common targets of appearance discrimination,” and “they are overrepresented among low-income and minority groups.”
But is the problem amenable to legal remedy? Some critics of prohibitions on appearance-based discrimination note that standards of physical attractiveness are hard-wired and therefore impervious to legal intervention. Rhode disagrees. Pointing to civil-rights statutes, Rhode insists that “we can legislate conduct, and a half-century’s experience makes clear that changes in attitudes can follow. Providing legal forums to expose injustice and break down racial segregation has helped to transform cultural perceptions and practices.”
Only one state—Michigan—and six cities or counties prohibit discrimination strictly on the basis of appearance (i.e. not race, sex, or disability). Other jurisdictions, of course, have statutes that ban discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, and religion. But those frameworks, Rhode argues, don’t adequately apply to appearance bias. In the book’s concluding chapter, she proposes new legal interventions, like strengthening consumer protection to police marketers’ dubious cosmetic and weight-loss claims, and expanding current bans on discrimination to explicitly include appearance. Rhode writes, “A nation committed to individual liberty and equal opportunity should more actively foster those values where matters of appearance are at stake.”
Naked Truth
Philip Carr-Gomm has an idea: Stop reading and start taking off your clothes. He makes that suggestion at the outset of his new book, A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion Books). He aims to underscore the extent to which our stance toward nudity is riddled with contradiction. He has a point. The Discovery Channel airs a series called “Surgery Saved My Life” that graphically depicts operations, but when Janet Jackson’s breast was briefly exposed during halftime of the Super Bowl in 2004, the federal government fined CBS, which broadcast the event, $550,000. Bodyworlds, a traveling exhibition of human bodies preserved by a process known as plastination, has been viewed by more than 18 million people around the world, but if you decide to heed Carr-Gomm’s suggestion to disrobe, and you are reading this in public, you will most likely end up in prison.
We strip for many reasons: ascetic, functional, sexual, spiritual, and political, among others. And Carr-Gomm, a British psychologist, writes about all of them with the zeal of a convert. As he explains in a postscript, in 2001 at the age of 49 he visited a naturist resort in Britain. His first thought, “Why has it taken me almost half a century to discover this delightful pastime?” Soon he was on his way to the south coast of France to visit Cap d’Agde, a town known for its permissiveness of public nudity; later he tried out nude modeling and dancing naked with a witch’s coven.
A Brief History of Nakedness is most rewarding when Carr-Gomm focuses on the intersection of nudity and politics. His examples of naked protests are striking and often humorous. A topless California-based antiwar group adopted the chant, “Breasts not bombs, titties not tanks, nipples not napalm, mammaries not missiles.” In 2007, when a Spanish security guard ordered a mother to leave a restaurant for breastfeeding her child, a group of 50 women staged a “tit-in,” and breastfed their children outside the restaurant. And no discussion of the political utility of nakedness would be complete without mentioning the animal-rights organization PETA, whose ad campaign featuring nude celebrities and the mantra “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” has attracted a great deal of attention.
Carr-Gomm argues, plausibly, that female nudity makes a more powerful political statement because women are more likely to be viewed as sex objects, more likely to be the victims of sexual abuse and rape, and face more pressure to adhere to idealized images of the body. For those reason, Carr-Gomm writes, a woman choosing to bare herself “indicates a deep level of commitment to a cause, on behalf of which she is willing to override her instinct to maintain the protection of clothing.”
But if the history of naked protest stretches back to the likely apocryphal story of Lady Godiva’s ride through the streets of Coventry in the 11th century, has the effectiveness of this tactic begun to wane? Carr-Gomm thinks not. And he is particularly bullish about the future of political nakedness in Asia, where it has only in recent years been adopted by activists in China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Tibet, and elsewhere. “By standing with nothing,” Carr-Gomm writes about nude protestors, “they say everything about the human condition. When it comes to a political statement, less is indeed more.”