Wesley Clark rolls up shirt sleeves, pretends to be a decent human being
Define society. I don’t think the physical appearance of Aung san suu kyi or Melinda Gates has ever come up for good or bad. Their goals and actions are what people care about.
Then again with female politicians, musicians, etc it is usually brought up either implicitly or explicitly. Especially women in the arts like actresses or musicians. I remember a comedian (either Doug Stanhope or Bill Burr) remarking that there are no famous, unattractive female musicians.
Either way I don’t agree that is ‘all’ society cares about. Some aspects of society (esp the media) care about it way more than they should but I do not think it is as widespread as that.
There is a bit of a Catch-22 here, just observing female friends on Facebook leads me to believe that the importance of looks is so ingrained in society that if every single new profile picture wasn’t absolutely inundated with at least 10 of their friends telling them how pretty they are they’d be pretty devastated. Okay that’s a bit of hyperbole, but I have noticed even though most accolades towards the women I know mention their looks (where comparable male-targeted accolades wouldn’t), on the odd occasion they don’t, the women legitimately wonder if something is wrong.
It’s kind of a problem that if you compliment a woman on her looks when it’s not relevant, you’re contributing in a small way to a problem that perpetuates that a woman’s looks are important even in irrelevant contexts, but if you try not to contribute, you may end up triggering anxiety due to a complex that this same culture conditions women to have. It’s very similar to when kids are praised for being smart and develop into adults who get really flustered whenever they make a mistakes because “smart people don’t do that.”
And I’m not talking about big sweeping things, a lot of women seem to notice just something as innocuous as not introducing them as “the beautiful Katie Black” or leaving “pretty” off the list when you say “Tamara is an excellent colleague; cunning, intelligent, and skilled.”
I see no easy way to proceed. It’s tempting to say “rip the band-aid off”, but it still feels kind of jerkish to make a woman who legitimately cares (which is many of them) concerned that she’s not pretty.
The OP might be right because I’ve noticed relationships like that. For instance I’ve noticed that men who think feminists are ugly also are more likely to believe that women who won’t go out with him are lesbians.
I’ve heard Melinda Gates’s appearance come up a fair number of times, and typing “Melinda Gates is” into Google just now the top three autocomplete suggestions were:
[ul]
[li]Melinda Gates is hot[/li][li]Melinda Gates is Catholic[/li][li]Melinda Gates is ugly[/li][/ul]
Sorry, I was typing on my phone. I did mean that very little discrimination is about looks. It comes up in dating, advertising, and to some degree professionally. But all of these are overshadowed by larger concerns- career, health, motherhood, women in developing countries, household roles, etc.
How hot random men find us is occasionally an issue, but rarely among the pivotal problems in out lives.
It needs to be pointed out that the “nominations” are not for some contest in a magazine or on a website, but for a SDMB thread titled, appropriately enough, “2013 nominations for the most attractive female journalist”. I will give you three guesses as to which poster started that thing.