Is Your “Type” Reproducing Injustice?

You open a dating app. You start swiping left on people who aren’t white, able-bodied, skinny, cisgender, and conventionally attractive. That’s just not my type, you think. But what if “your type” isn’t an unbiased, unalterable fact, but actually a socially acceptable way of reproducing injustice?

Studies suggest that this may be the case. First, let’s start with how we tend to view conventionally attractive people. The Halo Effect, a cognitive bias first theorized in a 1972 study by Dion, Berscheid, and Walster, reveals how one’s physical attractiveness leads people to attribute a wide range of unrelated positive traits to them. In this study, attractive people were expected to be more “nurturant,” “poised,” “modest,” and to “have better character” than unattractive individuals. Participants in the study believed that attractive individuals were more likely to have happier marriages and more prestigious careers, suggesting that physical appearance shaped expectations about life outcomes.

These associations fuel a social dialectic wherein appearance becomes a shorthand for human worth. Indeed, on hiring platforms like LinkedIn, employers openly warn that “No law states that you can't hire a more attractive, less credentialed white male over a less attractive, more credentialed white male, but common sense should tell you that's not a smart thing to do.”

Despite widespread recognition that differential treatment based on appearance is unjust in areas like employment and education, these egalitarian principles are seldom applied to the realm of dating. Romantic selection often operates under the guise of “personal preference” and “chemistry,” concepts that remain largely unexamined. In an era where dating apps have transformed partner selection into rapid visual assessments, the ethical implications of desire warrant greater scrutiny

A 2025 study from the University of Amsterdam analyzed over 5,000 dating app decisions and found that a one standard deviation increase in physical attractiveness increased someone’s chances of being selected by 20%, compared to just 2% for the same increase in intelligence. These results may not surprise anyone who has used a dating app, but the study offers a rare and precise quantification of how much more appearance matters than everything else.

The values embedded in one’s social environment (family, culture, media) play a vital, albeit subtle, role in shaping their dating preferences. Namely, marginalized individuals are more likely to be considered less attractive than those with privilege. While beauty standards have varied across history and geography, contemporary mass media and global capitalism have intensified the convergence around certain dominant traits: whiteness, thinness, Eurocentric features, cisnormativity, and able-bodiedness.

The romantic rejection of marginalized individuals can accentuate already established norms. Moral philosopher Sophia Moreau argues that discrimination, such as that evident in determining physical attractiveness in others, is unjust when it socially subordinates specific individuals. Moreau notes that your choice to take A (white, conventionally attractive) on a date over B (minority) seems, on its own, unlikely to skew systems of oppression. However, if the same type of preference is widely replicated, the cumulative effects are subordinating, reinforcing B’s lower status in a broader socio-normative hierarchy. When you select A over B based on their features of privilege, you are accentuating already established norms dating back to historical colonization and its subsequent marginalization of minority groups.

Further, the rejection of marginalized individuals can set a precedent for future discrimination. Although your choice may seem inconsequential in isolation, it can influence the attitudes of peers and social networks, especially when these preferences are expressed casually or framed as “just not being into that.”

These cumulative acts entrench existing social hierarchies, but also, as political philosopher Chiara Cordelli further insists, deprive individuals of access to relational resources such as trust, support, and emotional stability. Such goods are cultivated through close relationships and are necessary for participation on equal social terms. When someone is repeatedly excluded from romantic consideration based on appearance, they are denied access to the very conditions that enable others to flourish, thus eroding their ability to imagine future stability and feel worthy of care.

At the very least, we should all try to give others a genuine chance, rather than mistaking our biases for instinct.

And yet, as I think back to my identity as a feminist and woman, I admit that this framework doesn’t sit easily with me. Moral paradigms shift depending on where you’re standing. I’ve had myriad female friends recount their “first date horror stories,” how they’ve felt pressure from men who think being “overlooked” makes them entitled to something; their discomfort matters.

So, to what extent do we have a moral duty to protect others when making our own dating choices? If we declare rejecting individuals based on their appearance impermissible, this choice may lead to the presumption that there is a right to intimacy. In turn, misogynistic men could claim they are being “discriminated against” based on subordination or the deprivation of relational resources, as an excuse to demand romantic or sexual acess from women. This rhetoric has been repeatedly co-opted by those who seek to pathologize or punish female refusal.

The harm in this presumption is twofold:

(1) It erodes the principle of bodily autonomy. Feminist ethics begins from the premise that no one is owed access to another person’s body, time, or affection. Individuals have the intrinsic right to refuse intimacy for any reason.

(2) It induces extreme discomfort and anxiety for women and others who disproportionately bear the burden of unwanted pursuit, like the queer community. The consequences are not hypothetical. Late in 2017, Reddit shut down its 40,000-member ‘Incel’ support group after repeated violations of a policy prohibiting content that “encourages, glories, incites or calls for violence” against women. What began as a space for the lonely and sexually isolated devolved into a community openly advocating rape, vilifying women, and expressing entitlement to sex as compensation for romantic rejection.

Clearly, looks-based dating should be reconsidered, and we should all strive to be more socially aware and responsible when selecting romantic partners. However, feminist concerns must also take precedence over the moral impulse to equalize desire.

This piece is not a call to enforce attraction, but to critically examine it.