Beauty and me and high school

Earlier this week I was directed to this article, which talks about the huge advantage strikingly beautiful people enjoy in life. For example, two people apply for a job. Their experience is the same, their resumes are the same, a consultant even trains them both to have similar interview skills. After the interview, the average looking person is not called back. The highly attractive person gets the job offer.

I shared this with Tim, and his response, as a strikingly attractive (if somewhat hairy) male was, "Yeah, but what kind of job?"

Well, rereading the article, the men both had "corporate experience" and had "run their own companies." The women both had been "secretaries and saleswomen." So ok, maybe these jobs weren't about living in a cave and writing code, with all meetings conducted by phone, as is the job of the most highly attractive man I know. But Tim's quick question made me wonder, and then flip the question. Are there jobs out there where the more highly attractive person would actually be discriminated against? And that made me recall a story from my past.

When I was 16, I interviewed for a high school program that involved knowing a little bit about government and social science. Just before the interview, I had been taking one of Mr. Talbot's notorious AP Biology exams. You know, the kind of exam where you get one hour with the test, and you write as fast as you can as much as you can, dumping everything you've been memorizing for weeks onto the paper, hoping and praying you put in the right key words in there somewhere, and then your arm aches from writing when you're done. That class was brutal. Anyway, as I said, my interview was immediately after the exam, and my government and social science brain waves had been buried by the more pressing biology ones.

I was dressed up nicely in a neat shirt and skirt. I had put in the time to carefully type and prepare my application. I was interested in the program -- my older brother had enjoyed participating in the boy's program the year before -- and I was motivated to do my best.

But the interview was a flop. A total joke. The interviewers consisted of about five professionally dressed older women. They were representatives from government and the Larger Community, taking seriously their charge to find the best candidates for the summer program, believing that the future of our government and community was in their hands.

To ensure they made no mistakes, they asked basic questions like, "Who is the vice-president of the United States?" and "Who signed the Declaration of Independence first?" These were questions to which I knew the answer, even at age 16, but for which I could not recall the answer without first a long, embarrassing pause as I waded past the biology facts. And then the answer came out with a big question mark at the end...?

Even more damning, they asked "Aside from your mother, what woman do you admire the most and why?" I think they were looking for an impressive stateswoman, although perhaps they would have accepted a highly regarded businesswoman or artist. Someone with name recognition. But for me, since the question was started with a reference to my mother, the only woman who came into my brain was my dead grandmother. I had recently found her old yearbook, from the 1920s, in a chest in our basement, and I had been amazed to find that she was well liked, an athlete, and a writer, and very involved in her Duchesne, Utah, community back when she was 16 and in high school. So grandma's name came out. Very wrong answer.

Interestingly, the program was not able to attract many applicants in my school. I don't think there were enough applicants to fill the slots they were supposed to fill. But when the results came out, I was definitely not on the list, or even the alternate list. I had obviously shown these important older women of the community that I was pretty much a complete idiot.

Anyway, how does this relate to the original topic of the post? Because those older women from the community, after I had completely tanked it during the interview and was standing up to leave, all commented on how pretty my skirt was and how nice I looked. I remember being a little surprised at that, but thanking them politely.

But doesn't that strike you as odd? These women, these power women of the greater community, were secretly thinking, "This girl is a complete and total idiot," and publicly they were complimenting me on my looks.

Why? Was it because they hoped to soothe my disappointment and my ego by letting me know I was pretty? Did it help them feel better about themselves as they scraped my name off my list? "Not much going for this one in the way of brains." Or were they just trying to end something that was all around a very embarrassing experience on a positive note, and the fact that I was wearing a nice skirt (it was nice, by the way -- one of my favorites) was the only positive thing they could think of as I stood to leave? A consolation prize?

You know, all these years later, I think the reason their incongruous last comment about my looks bothers me is that it seems to imply that Pretty is a lesser species. They had interviewed me and found I was definitely not Smart like they were, but I could be Pretty. As they sent me away, they tried to point out to me that I was interviewing out of my league. This position was for a Smart, and as a Pretty, I didn't have enough brains to realize it, but I was not in their class.

Probably I am reading too much into that bizarre comment. But still. I wonder.

And for the record, my label was definitely not Pretty in high school. Pretty's got asked to dances and calls by boys. I was a Smart. And most of the time, prom season being an exception, I could live with the Smart label.

Anyway, I still laugh about the interview when I think about it. But reading the article about beauty, and wondering about its effect upon where we end up in life, made me wonder again about those women.

If the interview had gone well, would they still have complimented me on my looks?

Or, going with the theme of the first paragraph of this post, if I had been strikingly beautiful, would it have mattered that I couldn't remember the vice president?