A New "ism"

Travel with me to the 1980's...a time of big hair, abundant neon, and words  like "rad" "neato" and "tubular".  Picture little girl me:  7 years old, with long, shiny blond hair (that adult me wishes I still posessed) and an innocent child mind.  Ok, got the setting in your head?  Here's the story:

In second grade, or was it third?  I forget.  I will go with third.  Okay.  In third grade, we had a pen pal program.  (Yes, that's when snail mail was the only option for long distance written communication.)We were each assigned pen pals from schools far away.  I had two pen pals, because I liked to write so much.  Their names were Jenny and Olivia.

I decided that Olivia, because she had an elegant & beautiful name, was my favorite pen pal.  She would get the best-ever letters.  And Jenny...well, I'd write her nice things, I suppose, but Olivia would receive my best adjectives.  And that's how things went.

Until I received their school photos.

Olivia's picture did not reveal a princess-looking girl, as her name made her sound, but a homely little girl.  How shocking! 
 
And Jenny, whose common name was posessed by half the girls in my school, looked princess-y.  So immediately, without even consciously making the decision, Jenny became my favorite pen pal.

This was the first time in my life that I became aware of lookism.  (Although I did not know the name of it then.)  I was a raging, 7 year old looksist.

Fast forward time to the present.  I now know what the term "lookism" means, and I see it all around me.  On Fox News channel, where the female journalists must look like pageant contenstants, and the male journalists may look like trolls.  In movies, where there are VERY few roles written for women over 40.  In politics, where women candidates are scruntized for their looks and the male candidates' looks are rarely mentioned.  It's everywhere.

But the place where looksism resides that bothers me the most.....is within my own heart. 

Research reveals that mothers of attractive infants respond to their babies' cries quicker than do mothers of unattractive infants.  So even in the tenderest, most devoted of relationships, looksism resides.

How I wish it were not so!  I want to pluck lookism from my heart.  I want to pluck it from humanity's heart.  But it seems hard-wired into us.  Is there an antedote to this infirmity?

I believe there is.  It is LOVE.  Love is the ultimate beautifier!

Love is what makes us look at a family member whose body is wasting from cancer, and see beauty.  Love is what makes us view a freshly born, sticky with body fluid baby and see beauty.  Love is what makes a couple married 60 years look into each other's wrinkled faces and see beauty.  LOVE.

I cannot, wish as I might, cure the world of looksism.  I cannot even cure the lookism in my own heart.  But I believe that it can be crowded out---- with love.