"I'm ugly, but that's OK because I have a beautiful soul," says Lynn Romer, 36, America's first pioneer for the rights of the "appearance-impaired."

In a country already battling racism, sexism, ageism and heterosexism, Romer has added another exotic "ism" to the list - "looks-ism."

From the remote Utah house she shares with her married sister, she is embarking on an extraordinary national crusade. It may sound like the latest wheeze dreamed up by the gauleiters of political correctness, but it's no joke.

Instead, Romer has opened a debate that not only touches on popular culture - from Disney to the 1996 presidential election - but also on universal questions of equality, evolution and lust. She is daring to challenge nothing less than the way people look at each other.

For Romer, it's a personal battle. As a child she was so ashamed of her looks that she hid in a cupboard when visited at home by strangers. In adolescence she spent long nights at home while her peers were out dating. Once she stood at a bus stop when a man told his attractive young son, "You're the beauty," before turning to her to add, "And you're the beast."

"If all your life you've had taunts and insults behind your back and to your face, you'd have to be pretty foolish to believe you're as attractive as average people," she explains.

For a while she thought things were improving. She fell in love, but the man - a devout Seventh-day Adventist - eventually broke off their relationship, telling her that "in all Christian honesty" he couldn't marry a woman with a "defect." The defect was her ugliness.

Romer recounts this unemotionally and winces only when you try to suggest that she might not in fact be ugly. Of course, she is, she says. Her point is that it shouldn't matter.

That's why she's formed a group called the "Pinocchio Plot," whose mission is to roll back what might be the last acceptable prejudice: judging people by their looks.

Pinocchio, says Romer, is a classic product of a culture that equates beauty with moral goodness and ugliness with evil. Because the little boy lied, his nose grew long; his face literally became as ugly as sin.

Romer's group wants children to read new fairy stories - "Sleeping Ugly" is on their recommended list of reading material - in which princes can be short and bald, and wicked stepmothers aren't always pocked with warts and bent features.

Nor is there much patience for tales in which the unattractive triumph, such as "Beauty and the Beast" or "The Ugly Duckling." After all, says Romer, the characters are only redeemed when they change their looks; they should be accepted just the way they are.

"Ugly ducklings don't have to become beautiful swans," she explains. "And why can't the Beast stay ugly?"

The problem is as great now as it has ever been, says the anti-looks-ist movement. Just look at Disney's "Pocahontas." The Indian girl and her English lover John Smith are painted as impossible lovelies: she with a narrow waist, endless legs and a full bosom, he with a chiselled torso and blue eyes.

Yet historical accounts suggest Smith was plain, if not cosmetically challenged. But in the movie the only ugly character is the wicked English colonist, Gov. John Radcliffe - his chin pockmarked with moles.

"The Lion King" irritated Romer even more. Not only was the good lion shown with a healthy golden mane, while his evil brother was bony and dark - the villain was actually named after a physical blemish: Scar.

"I felt like I was Scar," says Romer, who fears children are being raised to believe that a facial flaw indicates a bad character and that "what is beautiful is good."

What has boosted Romer's movement is a flurry of fresh evidence that goes to show that looks-ism is not confined to fairy tales or even romance.

On the contrary, the latest research suggests that looks-based discrimination affects every aspect of our lives, from employment to politics to the courts, with handsome men and pretty women getting more jobs, earning more money, even getting an easier ride in court.

Studies show that when identically qualified candidates apply for the same job, the better-looking one always wins. Studies of job applications where photographs are attached tell the same story.

Once they have the job, lookers fare better too. A 1993 study by the University of Texas and Michigan State University found that good-looking people earned 12 percent more than their less comely colleagues; intriguingly, the difference was larger for men than women.

"It's a nonconscious process," says psychologist Tom Cash, who has studied the power of beauty. He believes bosses aren't even aware of their own bias. "They assume that more attractive people have an array of valued characteristics."

Researchers have found similar thinking even in acts of charity. If a good-looking woman needs help on the roadside, motorists stop in seconds, some screeching to a halt and plunging into reverse. A plain or fat woman can wait for hours. When volunteers are shaking collection boxes for charity, the attractive ones bring in up to 50 percent more.

This is serious business. Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) said his run for the White House earlier this year represented a challenge: "Can an ugly man be elected president?" The voters swiftly delivered their verdict: Gramm was knocked out in the first round, losing to the rugged and permanently tanned Bob Dole.

Indeed, statistics show that in presidential contests of recent times, the taller man has won.

Lawyers, too, know there is no tougher obstacle than a physically unattractive defendant. Boston trial attorney Harry Manion says overweight or unappealing clients start with a disadvantage, but when the accused is attractive, a trial can be a breeze: "Juries find it hard to believe that such a nice-looking person could do such a heinous crime."

Witness O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, says Manion - handsome men whom jurors pronounced not guilty.

Even children are victims - and perpetrators - of looks-ism. Researchers have found mothers pay more attention to babies when they look nice and can be inattentive when the child is plain.

But it's a two-way street: toddlers prefer pretty teachers to plain, believing they are kinder and cleverer. Babies as young as three months linger much longer on photographs of beautiful people and show signs of distress when are faced with less attractive images.

That evidence cuts straight to the argument Romer faces every day: preference for the beautiful is a basic, unavoidable human instinct.

Evolutionary science has recently buttressed that view, revealing that all cultures at all times have valued certain key physical traits, all of them indicators of biological health. Men look for women with a good waist-hip ratio because that's a sign of fertility. Women covet men with symmetrical features; they're more likely to be strong, athletic and a good bet for fatherhood.

None of this interests Romer. She doesn't care if it's nature - genetic impulses telling us to shun the ugly - or nurture - Hollywood and the glamour magazines - that's to blame. If it's inbuilt, we should overcome it, she says, just as we try to curb the urge for violence and other Darwinian leftovers. If it's learned behavior, we should unlearn it.

And so Romer and her Pinocchio Plotters, some of them fat, one with a cleft palate, are hard at work sending out newsletters, addressing Girl Scouts, scolding women's magazines. They have big dreams for America and for anybody who ever felt worried about how they look.

But Romer still has time for her own dreams. Among letters coming to her home have been a few from single men. Who knows?

"Now that would be a happy fairy-tale ending," she says with a beautiful laugh.

The Pinocchio Plot's address is P.O. Box 10116, Ogden, UT 84409.