Braces and The Injustice of External Beauty

I was thinking about braces recently and my wish to get one. The freedom of choice squarely rests on my shoulders which is why I believe I might be succumbing to social norms.

Braces apply pressure on your teeth thereby damaging tissue to align your teeth to a set standard. While it is unfortunate that we wish to synthetically align our teeth to a set standard, A standard that is affected by geography, economic status, and cultural views on the matter, we cannot fault people who want to do so.

Mainly because we judge people with maligned teeth. Sometimes to our own fault. Maybe we find ourselves projecting our own insecurities almost as a way to justify them.

It is possible that people with maligned teeth ought to be congratulated. Their teeth may serve as a mark of the acceptance of the condition they’ve found themselves in. it may be a way to accept who they are and to not conform.

It might be our responsibility as the privileged few to ditch braces and show solidarity to the ones who have overcome the social anxiety and support the ones who haven’t or are trapped in a system that forces them to be what they are and make them quite unable to change any part of them.

I know I would be completely justified in exercising my privilege because beauty plays an important role in our public perception.

This external beauty helped us for most of our evolution it would be unfair to not accept its merits but it might be equally unfair to disadvantage people for their genetic makeup in our modern age. How is it any better than racism, sexism or caste-ism?

It is a universally accepted privilege and a form of publicly condoned discrimination.

I do agree that I am an active participant and I definitely do not hold the moral high ground. It is possible we will never be able to alleviate this injustice.

Hopefully, technology may come to our help. How soon can we put our head in a robot and get rid of this body and preserve only our brain? We may be able to turn off this biological discrimination soon.

It would be interesting to see how many people would oppose this notion with an appeal to nature argument. We see this in the contemporary dialogue with the anti — vegan rhetoric anyway.

To anyone wondering, I did get braces