An experiment with a group of women was carried out where they ware asked to go into a job interview — the purpose of which was to find out whether people with facial disfigurements would face discrimination.

A make-up artist put scars on their face and let the women look at themselves with the scars in the mirror. As the experimenters led them out of the room they told them they were going to ‘touch up’ the scars a little bit to make them a bit more realistic. In actual fact all they did was to remove the scars altogether.

So the women went into the interview thinking they were scarred, when in fact they were their normal selves.

The result of the experiment was that when the woman came out of the interview, they reported massive levels of discrimination. In fact many of them came back with comments the interviewer had made that they thought were referencing their facial disfigurement.

This is an example of why I think that the whole ideology of ‘victimhood’ is dangerous, because if you constantly tell people that they are oppressed, that primes them to look for that and feel that they are being oppressed, when in fact they are not.