Fear of Ugliness

What the word actually measures

What the word measures is how unfavourably somebody else rates a person's physical features, which makes it a property assigned by the observer rather than held by the observed. It is described as a quality unpleasant to look upon that produces a highly unfavourable evaluation, and the associated vocabulary, hideousness and unsightliness among it, exists to make that evaluation stick.

What the measurable harm is

The strongest reason to treat this as prejudice rather than aesthetics is what happens to people on the receiving end. There is research indicating that sentencing diverges by appearance, with a recommendation of psychiatric care arriving more readily for defendants rated unattractive than for those rated attractive. In courtship and dating, judging others purely on outward appearance is acknowledged as something that happens while being widely regarded as superficial and shallow, which is a mild way of describing a mechanism that operates whether or not anyone approves of it.

The prejudice is not simple, either. Gretchen Henderson points out the paradox that the culture is suspicious of beauty and of ugliness both.

What people did with it

Three figures are cited for having turned the judgement into something else:

• Jean-Paul Sartre, who lived with strabismus and with a face he described as bloated and out of true, and traced a good deal of his philosophy back to the work of reconciling himself to how he looked
• Socrates, who made the same material into an argument, arriving at the position that philosophy is what rescues a person from the way they appear
• Abraham Lincoln, whose case follows

Abraham Lincoln was famous in his own lifetime for his looks, and one contemporary judged that to say he is ugly is nothing and to add that his figure is grotesque conveys no adequate impression. His appearance nonetheless worked for him personally and politically. His law partner William Herndon described a man neither pretty nor ugly but homely, careless of his looks, plain-looking and plain-acting, with no pomp or display, simple in bearing, sad-looking, his melancholy dripping from him as he walked. The gloom worked on the people around him. It drew sympathy, and Herndon put it among the things that carried Lincoln as far as he went.

The problem also has a history in theology and Christian thought, where it has frequently been attached to dangerous stereotypes.