Trek Within: Pass The Cheesecake

Spock looked like my husband with a bigger nose. Dr. McCoy looked like a marmoset. If the original series was cast today, would the same cast have been chosen? If you put J.J. Abrams in charge, chances are they would all be a bit prettier.

Yet in spite of the cast being made up of relatively average-looking people, "Star Trek" became a huge pop culture phenomenon that continues to influence people from all walks of life. By today's standards, though, a television series seems to need a Six or Seven-of-Nine to rate a ten. Would viewers of sci-fi and fantasy TV still love "Battlestar Galactica" if Six looked like Eleanor Roosevelt or T'Pol looked like Margaret Thatcher?

Most of us have been conditioned from birth to be attracted to pretty people, or at least people we perceive as pretty. It can start with parents or siblings commenting on how So-and-so is gorgeous, or Johnny Doe needs to lose a few pounds. It’s certainly promulgated by the imagery and messages in the mass media, starting with beauty contests, and most recently with model wannabe "reality" shows.

Even what gets reported on television news seems to be determined by lookism. Of all the abductions and murders of women and girls that take place in the US, the cases of the Elizabeth Smarts, JonBenets, and Laci Petersens, all attractive white women, get headline attention, while the pretty, but African American, Latoyia Figueroas and Tamika Hustons are ignored. Lookism and racism are integrally connected, and often yield similar consequences.

In a study done in Texas and Michigan, researchers found that an attractive worker is paid 10 percent more than his or her unattractive counterpart, even where they perform the same work and have similar levels of experience.

In schools, teachers often give better grades to their more attractive students. In court, good-looking defendants are more likely to be exonerated than their not-so-pretty counterparts. Mothers of beautiful children give them more attention than mothers of plain or unattractive children. Beautiful white women tend to have few traffic tickets, even though they are just as likely to commit traffic violations as anyone else.

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