It was right after women seized majority control of Congress that the woman we all know as The Big Talker revealed to her husband (that balding tenured sociologist at Bryn Mawr, possessor of a flaming red beard and soy glasses) details of her new law to criminalize Lookism:
The sorriest and most snub-nosed girls will sit down beside the majestic ones, and if he lusts after the latter, he must first bang the ugly one.
We know these words because the conservation was overheard by the famous (some say infamous) Senator Karpos, the confirmed bachelor, and he leaked it to the New York Times after the law was passed. He said, in his typical crude language to bring best to light,
The Assembly Women have decreed: if a young man desires a young woman he may not hump her until he first bangs an old woman. Should he in his desire for the young woman refuse to do this preliminary banging, the older women shall be entitled with impunity to drag off the young man by his pecker.
The text of the law is, of course, written in less shocking prose. Karpos’s gist is right, though. Lookism is now illegal. Calling a woman “ugly” results in a felony, as you have heard, punishable up to three years in the clink for the first offense. You’ve heard the phrase “All women are Equally beautiful.” That is now mandatory. Maybe this is why those Assembly Women all dress like men.
It’s true that it is illegal for a man to attempt to initiate intercourse with any woman under thirty before he has received what they are calling his Elder Certificate, issued after the man has been certified as servicing a woman past her sell-by date. (You can still speak like this in general, as far as my interpretation of the law goes, but you cannot say it of a specific woman. Though maybe I’m wrong, so be careful.)
All this you knew. But maybe you didn’t know that if a woman fishes for a compliment, denying her one is a Class B Hate Crime. The law doesn’t quite put it like that, but it is strictly illegal to deny any woman’s beauty, agency, or mental acuity. It is safer to be generous in encomiums, and to promote, all in the name of Equality.
Historians say that the law was partly due to increasing demands for Equality, and because of the work of academic philosopher Thomas J. Spiegel, who wrote the influential peer-reviewed paper “Lookism as Epistemic Injustice” in Social Epistemology.
Spiegel wrote, what was true, and still is, though acts are now illegal, that men discriminated based on looks. He said, “A whole host of empirical research suggests that lookism is a pervasive and systematic form of social discrimination.” A man would choose a woman to mate with if he found her attractive. Which is unfair to those women who were not attractive to him. And ought not all wrongs be righted?
More:
[Lookism] is particularly salient when compared to other forms of discrimination based on race or gender which have been at the forefront of epistemic injustice as a topic of research. This paper argues that lookism is associated with various forms of epistemic injustice. …[T]his hermeneutic injustice serves as the backdrop of instances of a special kind testimonial injustice in which the ugly person’s burgeoning realization that their looks influence their social standing detrimentally is discounted due to the pejorative nature of ascribing someone the property of being unattractive or ugly.
Don’t I know it. And don’t the Assembly Women who passed the Lookism Law know it.
As a magazine, popular at the time, wrote:
“Ugly” is an ugly word. It’s painful to point it at yourself, and cruel to point it at others. It’s also a complicated word, since, as Fairyington shows in her wide-ranging book [Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter], beauty and ugliness are not just aesthetic ideas—they have cultural, biological, subjective, intersubjective, political, commercial, and historical dimensions. All this contributes to the fact that there’s no National Association for Unattractive People.
There is now, but they call it the Women’s Equal Attractiveness Administration, the bureaucracy charged with administering the new law.
Experts say that the Lookism Law is only the first of many Equality efforts the Assembly Women will try to ram through (maybe that should read “ewe through”).
Like providing free meals and communal banquets, for those not part of the white supremacist patriarchy, naturally. The Big Talker said she’d “turn all the courthouses and porticoes into dining-rooms.”
And, as natural as a feminist screeching “That’s not funny!” on hearing a good joke, the final law will be some form of community of property. The Big Talker has already announced,
I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. Then we shall live on this common wealth, which we shall take care to administer with wise thrift…I intend that there shall only be one and the same condition of life for all.
What could go wrong?
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"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." We are being Borgified even within the realm of personal taste. Continue down this road and soon the fact I prefer organic dark roast coffee will be seen as epistemic injustice to those who produce only medium roast.
Sigh. The world becomes more and more ridiculous; not funny, just ridiculous.
And tall, leggy blondes should only be permitted to procreate with shorter men in order to redress the heightism that has so long plagued society. I say this purely for the good of all mankind, with no thought for myself whatsoever.