Why do ugly people get treated badly

I am in my mid 30s now and only rarely experience negative treatment for being 'ugly', but the one thing my looks do impact on my life is romance/dating. Women just don't fancy me/find me physically attractive, so all I am ever seen as is a friend. But that really hurts me and makes me feel worthless, ashamed, inadequate, inferior, unloveable, etc.

I really do hate the negative impact my looks have had on my life.

Because ugly people are viewed as inferior or inconsequential. There's no need to be nice to an ugly person. In addition, people prefer beautiful things to ugly things. As an ugly person or a person with BDD, you're of course sensitive to this concept, so you'll consciously go out of your way to be nicer to ugly people. But in general, the majority of people will treat beautiful people like kings while paying no heed to the uglies.

Coolness wrote:Because ugly people are viewed as inferior or inconsequential. There's no need to be nice to an ugly person. In addition, people prefer beautiful things to ugly things. As an ugly person or a person with BDD, you're of course sensitive to this concept, so you'll consciously go out of your way to be nicer to ugly people. But in general, the majority of people will treat beautiful people like kings while paying no heed to the uglies.

This seems to be the case with me...which means I'm ugly,right? I've seen other people talk about this and I looked online and saw some studie about this and they all conclude that ugly people get treated worse than attractive people..and I know from. Y own experience that this is true.
An issue I have is why doesn't the psych field acknowledge this? My therapists/psychiatrists always doubt that I get treated worse than regular people. maybe they don't want to hurt feelings, which I can understand and I don't think a therapist or dr. Should tell a patient what they think about their appearance. I just feel like there is no progress when there is no admitting that ugly people get treated worse. I guess there's nothing to be done about it....maybe just hearing from my Drs so they understand my pain?
If anyone could provide good sources on studies done on attractiveness, recent ones, I'd appreciate.

I'd like to try addressing your earlier response to my post line by line.

I don't think I'm ugly, other people think I'm ugly.. No one says it, because they are afraid to tell me. I had rhinoplasty no it ruined my face so it doesn't work for everyone.

I don't mean to sound contrarian, but how do you know with certainty what other people are thinking, specifically about your appearance? What objective evidence do you have that people think you're ugly?

If I happen to look good one day but I don't feel great people treat me well. It works the opposite too.

So by opposite, do you mean that people treat you poorly if you feel bad (opposite of great)? This assumes of course that the "look good" variable doesn't change (or does it to you?).

You can post on here arguing with me that it's all in how I feel and the it's in my mind etc etc but I'm not doing that. I've made enough of my own observations with clear enough insight to realize that people are treating me badly by how they perceive my appearance, and that's it.

I really sympathize with you and Im sorry if it seems like I'm trying to undermine your observations, but Im personally trying to figure this out for myself and just really testing some assumptions that I also make.

What I'm reading from you is that you don't think you're ugly but others do. This ugliness began after the rhinoplasty. And your main concern/question is: why the psych field doesn't admit that ugly people are treated poorly compared to "non-ugly" people? I think the answer might just be one that you probably don't want to hear: beauty is almost entirely subjective. And if that's true, then you can't generalize the findings. I mean, everyone will have a different opinion about beauty. My girlfriend thinks I'm hot, but I don't see it. Other women think I'm ugly. And yet others think I'm average. Which one is it in that case? Who's correct?

MirrorMan wrote:I'd like to try addressing your earlier response to my post line by line.

I don't think I'm ugly, other people think I'm ugly.. No one says it, because they are afraid to tell me. I had rhinoplasty no it ruined my face so it doesn't work for everyone.

I don't mean to sound contrarian, but how do you know with certainty what other people are thinking, specifically about your appearance? What objective evidence do you have that people think you're ugly?

If I happen to look good one day but I don't feel great people treat me well. It works the opposite too.

So by opposite, do you mean that people treat you poorly if you feel bad (opposite of great)? This assumes of course that the "look good" variable doesn't change (or does it to you?).

You can post on here arguing with me that it's all in how I feel and the it's in my mind etc etc but I'm not doing that. I've made enough of my own observations with clear enough insight to realize that people are treating me badly by how they perceive my appearance, and that's it.

I really sympathize with you and Im sorry if it seems like I'm trying to undermine your observations, but Im personally trying to figure this out for myself and just really testing some assumptions that I also make.

What I'm reading from you is that you don't think you're ugly but others do. This ugliness began after the rhinoplasty. And your main concern/question is: why the psych field doesn't admit that ugly people are treated poorly compared to "non-ugly" people? I think the answer might just be one that you probably don't want to hear: beauty is almost entirely subjective. And if that's true, then you can't generalize the findings. I mean, everyone will have a different opinion about beauty. My girlfriend thinks I'm hot, but I don't see it. Other women think I'm ugly. And yet others think I'm average. Which one is it in that case? Who's correct?

Before my surgery, i went through what you went through ...some people thought I was attractive, some average...now after my surgery I can't say what people think but people's behavior has changed towards me and its negative, it has to come down to a change in my appearance...
90% language is nonverbal and I've learned to read it.
But not everyday is bad which confuses me. My life is different than it was before the surgery. I don't know how else to respond ...I can't show or prove everything that happens to me on a daily basis. It's too tiresome. I just know something is wrong. Something is off and it's making me depressed me unhappy. I can say that when I was attractive I was a much happier person...I don't know if this is true for everyone or if I just value physical beauty in myself more than others do.

Before my surgery, i went through what you went through ...some people thought I was attractive, some average...now after my surgery I can't say what people think but people's behavior has changed towards me and its negative, it has to come down to a change in my appearance...
90% language is nonverbal and I've learned to read it.
But not everyday is bad which confuses me. My life is different than it was before the surgery. I don't know how else to respond ...I can't show or prove everything that happens to me on a daily basis. It's too tiresome. I just know something is wrong. Something is off and it's making me depressed me unhappy. I can say that when I was attractive I was a much happier person...I don't know if this is true for everyone or if I just value physical beauty in myself more than others do.

It might very well be that people treat you differently now that you are not as attractive as before. But am I wrong to guess that your new appearance also affects your personality on some level? And if that's true, perhaps some people are reacting (at least partially) to your personality? The reason I ask this is because you say that not everyday is bad, and this means that your appearance isn't entirely culpable. Agreed?

When I feel attractive, I'm definitely happier, so I can totally agree with you on that. And for me, I found that my personal approach to getting to that point of feeling attractive is a mix of things including exercise/gym, productivity, dressing well, grooming, not giving a ###$ about what others think. Those combined make me feel pretty darn sexy lol. But everyone is different.

MirrorMan wrote:

Before my surgery, i went through what you went through ...some people thought I was attractive, some average...now after my surgery I can't say what people think but people's behavior has changed towards me and its negative, it has to come down to a change in my appearance...
90% language is nonverbal and I've learned to read it.
But not everyday is bad which confuses me. My life is different than it was before the surgery. I don't know how else to respond ...I can't show or prove everything that happens to me on a daily basis. It's too tiresome. I just know something is wrong. Something is off and it's making me depressed me unhappy. I can say that when I was attractive I was a much happier person...I don't know if this is true for everyone or if I just value physical beauty in myself more than others do.

It might very well be that people treat you differently now that you are not as attractive as before. But am I wrong to guess that your new appearance also affects your personality on some level? And if that's true, perhaps some people are reacting (at least partially) to your personality? The reason I ask this is because you say that not everyday is bad, and this means that your appearance isn't entirely culpable. Agreed?

When I feel attractive, I'm definitely happier, so I can totally agree with you on that. And for me, I found that my personal approach to getting to that point of feeling attractive is a mix of things including exercise/gym, productivity, dressing well, grooming, not giving a ###$ about what others think. Those combined make me feel pretty darn sexy lol. But everyone is different.[/quote

I feel different each day but nothing correlates. For example, if I feel good one day I can still get negative behavior from strangers or I can feel like crap one day and get positive feedback from strangers..i also know it isn't my personality because all these people know about me is what I look like and they react to that...I have tried behaving differently but I always get negative feedback if it's a day that I appear unnattrctive..nothing I do can make people like me on those days...ny appearance has SOMETHING if not everything, to do with the negative feedback I'm getting from society. It's not hard to believe this, considering there's been studies done that prove this.

IIRC, it's not we are ugly but rather people treat us differently. So generic people get treated one way and then "unique" people get treat a different way.

Here's an accurate description by a person on the Big Nose Tumblr website:

The amount of grief and anxiety that has been caused by my nose is absurd. I hate society for making me feel so… different. For me, it’s the little things that really get to me. These little subconscious indicators that people send. A quick touch to the nose, as if to make sure their perfect little socially acceptable nose still looks okay. It’s like I’ve made them uncomfortable simply because I exist the way that I do. The worst part is that it’s constant. It’s everywhere. I can’t avoid it. Everyone does it. The people I love, the people I look up to, and sometimes the worst, people I’ve just met. It’s like my nose precedes me. It says enough about me to people that I don’t even know and I hate it. It’s more than a loss of happiness and acceptance—its a loss of freedom. I hate it and I hate everyone who “enforces” it. I’ve grown numb to life to avoid the pain. I’m not sure I believe in true love anymore, not for me at least.

-Andrew

He describes it perfectly. The way you are one entity and your nose is another entity in of itself. Automatically people have an opinion regarding it. It causes you to be judged more critically and scornfully by others over something you have no control over.

I just wrote a very long reply to this topic, but when I tried to submit it, the forum redirected me to the login page (altough I was already logged in!!! wtf?; I could't have written my post if I wasn't logged in in the first place!). So I lost everything I wrote

But anyways, to make (originally very) long post short.

There are people who are considered attractive (by majority).

And there are people who are considered unattractive (by majority).

And then there are people who are genuinly considered attractive by a notably large number of people and genuinly unattractive by a notably large number of people.

I belong to the third group. We are rare.

People in the third group create cognitive dissonance in other people. It's a cognitive experience of unease, surprise, disappointment, confusion and most importantly people feel a strong urge to solve the contradiction. In this case the contradiction is: "is that person unattractive or attractive?"

People want their everyday life to be simple and easy, so they can feel anxiety, anger and resentment towards an individual who causes cognitive dissonance for them.

There are people who are more sensitive to cognitive dissonance and hence react more emotionally or abruptly than others, but nobody is immune to it.

There are people who even feel decepted when someone they first thought was attractive (because of, say, slim figure, shiny hair and high cheekbones) looks unattractive to them the next minute!

Like I said, I belong to the small third group myself, and I've experienced some strange things from complete strangers because of it. For example once a stranger came to me and made a gesture of wanting to shake hands with me, and when I responded to it, he all of a sudden pulled his hand away. And then he said: "That's how you made me feel" and then walked away. Only later did I realise what he meant.

True; the third group are attractive - it's just they possess something "flawed" so it makes people have varied/mixed opinions about them. I belonged to that group prior to my surgery - women treated me really well or smiled at me all the time, but I got put down by men. Hence it made me feel in 'no man's land'.

On that website; you can see a lot of them are attractive despite their different noses - but they still feel anxiety, grief, etc. because they know society treats them differently and in a way they ostracized for being different.