单选题
In a provocative new book
The Beauty Bias
, Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor who proposes a legal regime in which discrimination on the basis of looks is as serious as discrimination based on gender or race, lays out the case for an American in which appearance discrimination is no longer allowed.
Rhode is at her most persuasive when arguing that in America, discrimination against unattractive women and short men is as pernicious and widespread as bias based on race, sex, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability. Rhode cites research to prove her point: 11 percent of surveyed couples say they would abort a fetus predisposed toward obesity. College students tell surveyors they"d rather have a spouse who is an embezzler, drug user, or a shoplifter than one who is obese. The less attractive you are in America, the more likely you are to receive a longer prison sentence, a lower damage award, a lower salary, and poorer performance reviews. You are less likely to be married and more likely to be poor.
And all of this is compounded by a virtually unregulated beauty and diet industry and soaring rates of elective cosmetic surgery. Rhode reminds us how Hillary Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor were savaged by the media for their looks, and says it"s no surprise that Sarah Palin paid her makeup artist more than any member of her staff in her run for the vice presidency.
Critics such as Andrew Sullivan claim that if we legally ban appearance discrimination, the next step will be legal protection of "the short, the skinny, the bald, the knobbly kneed, the flat-chested and the stupid." But Rhode points out that there are already laws against appearance discrimination on the books in Michigan and six other locales. This hasn"t resulted in an explosion of frivolous suits, she notes. In each jurisdiction the new laws have generated between zero and nine cases annually.
Of course the problem with making appearance discrimination illegal is that Americans just really, really like hot girls. And so long as being a hot girl is deemed a bona fide occupational qualification, there will be cocktail waitresses fired for gaining three pounds. It"s not just American men who like things this way. In the most troubling chapter in her book, Rhode explores the feminist movement"s complicated relationship to eternal youth. The truth is that women feel good about competing in beauty pageants. They love six-inch heels. They feel beautiful after cosmetic surgery. You can"t succeed in public life if you look old in America.
This doesn"t mean we shouldn"t work toward eradicating discrimination based on appearance. But it may mean recognizing that the law won"t stop us from discriminating against the overweight, the aging, and the imperfect, so long as it"s the quality we all hate most in ourselves.
单选题
Rhode tries to argue that appearance discrimination ______.