Lookism

"We face a world," says Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, "where lookism is one of the most pervasive but denied prejudices."

This is what I love about R4 - lookism goes out the window. But in comes voicism. Don't even consider a career in radio if you're from Toxteth or the Gorbals.

Joseph Connor's job as a cook at a McDonald's in Hamden, Conn., never materialized, and he thinks he knows why — lookism.

And those valiant people who fight lookism (many of them unattractive themselves) tell us that one problem is that in our society, those who get to be called beautiful and those who are called ugly are determined by standards arbitrarily set by us.