Lookism and the Tattoo Shop

Many years ago when my now adult daughter was about five years old, I took her to a tattoo shop in the small Ohio town where we lived. It wasn’t to get a tattoo, but there was an old, abandoned dresser sitting out front, left behind by some upstairs tenants, I assumed. I wanted to repaint that old dresser and turn it into storage for mittens, hats, and scarves in our mudroom, but I had to find out if it was really abandoned or just in the process of being moved. With my little girl’s hand in mine, we stepped into the tattoo shop. All conversation ceased, and all eyes were on us. One very large man with gauges in his earlobes and tattoos covering his arms and neck said, “Can I help you?” and I asked about the dresser. He said he didn’t know, and since I didn’t want to steal a dresser from someone inadvertently, I thanked him, and we went on our way.

Outside the shop, my daughter said, “That guy looked really scary, but he was really nice.”  I was thinking the same thing, and I agreed with her that we can’t always tell about a person’s character or personality based on their looks.

This memory came to mind when I read a New York Times article called “Why Is It OK to Be Mean to the Ugly?”  by David Brooks. He says, “We live in a society that abhors discrimination on the basis of many traits. And yet one of the major forms of discrimination is lookism, prejudice against the unattractive. And this gets almost no attention and sparks little outrage.” In the article, Brooks cites research that shows how easily attractive people are given advantages and assumed to possess more positive character traits than their unattractive counterparts (i.e., halo effect). His conclusion of the issue was this: “it’s very hard to buck the core values of your culture, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.”

In my experience at the tattoo shop, the man’s gauges and tattoos were not ugly, but they were different than what my little girl and I were used to. Knowing our built-in biases and interacting with openness and curiosity is a start toward changing a culture. It doesn’t always take an abandoned dresser in front of a tattoo shop to learn that appearances don’t dictate character.