[mellosouls]

It's certainly true that beauty is a massive privilege and discriminator but the title is somewhat hyperbolic; it is unlikely to be the greatest (compared to the more obvious ones like race and gender etc) and is certainly talked about, though not as much as it should be.

[Sessions]

The title is not saying 'this is the greatest privilege of all, and we don't talk about it'- it's saying 'among the privileges we don't talk about, this is the greatest.'

Still might not be true, but it's less hyperbolic.

[mellosouls]

Yes, fair point - I misread. My second point stands though, it's certainly talked about, but maybe not as much as it should be.

[greenshackle2]

You're reading it as "beauty is the greatest privilege, and we never talk about it" but I'm pretty sure it's meant to be read as "out of the privileges we never talk about, beauty is the greatest one". Race and gender are not part of the category "privileges we never talk about".

[jmmcd]

Well, there's a study in the article where being "ugly" is measured as 10x the effect size of being the "wrong" race. This was in criminal sentencing.

[gwright]

The effort to assign a total ordering to various "privileges" seems like a fools errand to me. Wouldn't these characteristics differ in magnitude from one individual to the next also? It is almost as if everyone is a unique individual combination of a multitude of characteristics.

[watwut]

The way we evaluate people as beautiful depends on race, they are not independent variable. If people inherently perceive white features as more beautiful or female features as more beautiful, then beauty perception will be impossible to distinguish from those other biases.