You will have heard about privilege, you’ll have heard about it more than you ever needed to in recent times. You may not understand what it’s all about, and how people can see you living in your overprice shit-den and yell at you about how good you have it.
White privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, oh so many privileged people. If you tick multiple boxes, you may find yourself at the back of the muffin line when the famine hits next spring.
Apparently there are biases too. When your pasty face interviews another pasty face for a job at the failing business you work mildly hard for, you look at that pasty face and think ‘my oh my, look at this pasty face, it’s like my pasty face, we’re so similar, they should get the job regardless of that three year period on their CV where they didn’t do any work. Were they in jail for hideous sex crimes? I don’t care, we share this pasty face.’
This has been, like everything else you can think of, labelled. And this new exciting label is Affinity Bias. It means when we share similarities with a human, we connect, and therefore our judgement is clouded by our affinity to this human. This makes sense, and isn’t so bad, because we all would prefer to work side by side with like minded people. But this is also quite bad, because the bizarre pursuit for aesthetic diversity leads to people just recruiting people who don’t have any diversity of thought from the rest of the staff or team.
So forget affinity bias, it’s time to address the sexy elephant in the pink tutu that sits in the corner of the room. How so many have failed to aknowledge it’s big old swinging trunk I don’t know.
Our culture has become incredibly superficial and blatantly shallow. We were once taught you should judge people, and love people, for what they have on the inside. Not to be confused with the mindset of a lunatic serial killer who wants to see what your intestines look like through an open wound, what we mean is your character, your thoughts, your actions, and personality. Now all we see is aesthetics, and corporations, government bodies and activist groups only care to show you a rainbow of faces, all fronting one unified droning un-inspired voice.
The elephant in the room with the big old trunk is aesthetic bias and privilege.
I’ll address the privilege side first, and there is no better example on earth than everyone’s second favourite princess, Meghan Markle-bones. Markle-bones, or Markle to you regular TV watching folk, is clearly a 9, if not a solid 10. I say clearly a 9 because we’re going on her face, in my scoring system she would need a bouncy wagon at the back, but I have never examined or sought proof of its existence, so we can just ignore it for now.
Markle-bones is hot, she has a face you can have no problem looking at for long periods of time, even when she is banging on about how hard her life is whilst sitting in a mansion with the richest black woman on earth. Markle-bones has so little self-awareness, from what she openly displays anyway, it’s actually delightful. Markle-bones is the classic example of someone who was born into the top-tier of privilege. These people just plop out, light up the room, and by the time they come of age, you can see that this person ain’t gonna have to worry about nothing.
The beautiful people of this world don’t have to work as hard as the rest of us 4’s and 6’s, they can just walk into a room and send a signal to a prospective employers ding-dong that they should give this stunning 10 the job. Markle-bones could strut into a job interview at the Israeli embassy dressed as Goebles shouting death to the tribe of Abraham, and still get called back for a second interview. Hot people do as they like, because we all want to fuck them. Yes, crazy isn’t it? Some would say ’how disgusting’, and yes it is and why haven’t you done something about it yet?
I’ll tell you why, because you still want to fuck beautiful people.
There is no-way in hell that Harry, the new prince of progress, could land Markle-bones if he wasn’t an actual fucking prince. That is clear. But as hot as she is, in order to even get a toe into the realm where princes dwell for a shot at tearing apart one of the world’s most famous families, you need have some kind of status. There’s plenty of 10’s out there who don’t have the drive for sure, but even without much drive, they still have it pretty sweet.
Markle-bones isn’t a great actress, she’s not even a good one, she’s ok-ish. But like many super-hot actresses before her, all that matters is that she remembers at least 40% of her lines, and makes sure she doesn’t accidentally tip acid on her own face. With beauty like that, you only need a couple of opportunities, unlike the rest of life’s wannabes. There will be millions of aspiring actresses out there, and plenty of very competent ones, and enough who can kill it in any role given to them. There’s enough talent to go around, but unfortunately for them, if their boat-race resembles a kilo of smashed spam covered in sand flies, they’ll never win a role when competing with a Markle-bones.
The fact that aesthetic privilege is completely ignored is one of the funniest things on earth. In a culture that screams about privilege at every turn, the one privilege that transcends race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and even to an extent, age, has been forever ignored. I’m not going to hate on someone for being born a 10, but I will fucking point it out.
How on earth can any regular person sit and listen to a c-list actress harp on about how hard it is for them and how Mr Bumpkins from Shit-Piss Town near Gateshead, who has four kids on heroin and a face that resembles a safety advert photograph spreading awareness of the dangers of kissing angle-grinders, has unlimited amounts of privilege is insane. Why hasn’t Mr Bumpkins thrown his piss weak mug of tea at his stupidly priced television and shouted ‘you’re c-list actress who played a supporting role in a TV show that no-one cares about that became a literal fucking princess! Do you know how difficult it is to become a literal princess!’?
You could hike deep into the dense jungles of the Amazon and find a tribe that hasn’t seen an outsider since wooly mammoths were on the rampage and spot a 10. You know this lady or man has no idea about your business, they don’t even know how to read of write, nor do they even wear clothes. But you’ll still give them a probatory period as CFO of your corporation because you might be able to smash them at the Christmas shin-dig.
Aesthetic bias would be similar to aesthetic privilege, but is different to affinity bias, well, mostly. Sure some beautiful people out there will only want to be surrounded by other beautiful people, and that makes sense. But mostly aesthetic bias is about what your contents of front man or lady panel wants.
You sit there interviewing for a job at your rubbish warehouse where everyday you dream of a better life, a life where you have the balls or lips to finally hang yourself on Monday morning. You have to recruit one new employee because the hard-working and beloved Mr Tippings died during his favourite pub quiz night. You have 4 prospects coming in to perform simple but physically tasking labour in your horror den of a warehouse. 3 strapping men and women come in, they have experience, they are friendly, and display the traits that confirm they are team players. Perfect, but ‘oh how to make a decision?’ You can’t, because you just don’t want to fuck any of them. You even ask about which football team they support. None of them like football, oh fuck.
You consider just picking straws, as the guidance of the universe is your best bet on making the correct decision. But as you try to find some straws, you’re reminded that there is a fourth candidate, and they’re ready to be interviewed. They plod in, the face is acceptable, but the attitude is terrible. They have no experience, they hate being part of a team, and they support Man Utd. Every box says no, no, no, and again, no.
During this whole time you have barely paid attention to the thick sweater they’re wearing. But as you pretend to make notes about them, the clicky part of your biro pen points out a crucial detail you had been blind to all this time. Behind that thick sweater are a set of 10 titties. Not titties as in they have ten of them and are some bizarre experiment that escaped a Gates Foundation facility. No, these titties are 10 out of 10.
Suddenly your brain is producing porno movies for your usually mundane imagination, without going into sordid detail, these titties lead to countless fun scenarios. Now it’s decision time, do you want to spend the next 5 years chatting and working with good members of staff who stimulate your libido about as much as an HR head with a humanities degree? Or do you spend 5 years looking at a pair of titties so great that when God made them he gave himself a week off because as reward for his damn fine work. You choose the titties, because the dreams of titties will replace the dreams of Monday morning suicide. That’s the reality.
The beautiful people of this world do not have the same struggles that we have. They may complain about all the ‘unwanted’ attention they get, but for a person whose face looks like it hit every branch on it’s way down from the top of the ugly tree, that’ some bullshit. Acknowledging how hot you are isn’t exactly a great trait, but ignoring it and demanding everyone else recognises your ‘struggle’ is far worse. You were born with something others don’t have, embrace it, use it, and get on with it, and please pipe down. Some of us have to be funny as hell to get ahead, cos we ain’t got much else going on.
