Sexiness

The concept is important to an understanding of gender and society as it relates to issues of social status. If someone can be said to gain higher social status due to the shape, height, or structure; perceived ability; age; attractiveness; or “sexiness” of her or his body rather than skill or experience, then lookism has played a part in a discriminatory practice that affects society as a whole. Lookism suggests that certain parts of society have a narrow frame of reference that is used to judge a person by how he or she appears.

Such a frame of reference allows only so-called traditional forms of beauty past its self-regulated vetting system. When this system becomes part of dominant ideologies in a given culture, unrealistic expectations may be placed on certain members of that society to conform to a set of norms. Yet it is never clear, an anti-lookist might argue, exactly what traditional forms of beauty involve (Hoffman, 55). Where an ideal is defined, such as the thinness ideal in certain societies, that ideal seems unreachable and is understood by anti-lookists to encourage worrying social trends, such as the use of plastic surgery to conform to a particular standard.

This perspective has also generated research on the more general culture of violence against women cultivated by the media. Daniel Linz and his colleagues have conducted research on the effects of “slasher” films, films that often juxtapose sex and violence for male and female victims and that pair sexiness with the torture and death of female victims. Men who repeatedly viewed movies depicting violence against women came to have fewer negative emotional reactions to the films, to consider them as significantly less violent, and to consider them less degrading to women (Hoffman, 56). It has also been found that there is a tendency for the desensitization to filmed violence against women to spill over into subjects' judgments of female victims in other contexts. Men who were exposed to large doses of filmed violence against women judged the victim of violent assault and rape to be significantly less injured than did the control groups.

This perspective emphasizes that the free flow of ideas is so valuable to the discovery of sexual truths and erotic art and literature that it should be interrupted only when a grave harm to another person occurs as a result of exposure to sex-related materials. The threshold for censorship should be ...