What happened when I tried to join the internet’s ‘beautiful people’

16 January 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

The assessment process for new members is supposed to take 48 hours, but a day later I received an email telling me I could ‘monitor’ my ‘rating status’. I clicked on the link, but instead of showing me a bar chart it just took me to the site’s home page — and I now had unrestricted access. Naturally, I assumed this meant I had passed muster and decided to check out my fellow ‘beautiful people’.

I was shocked. Rarely have I seen such a motley collection of people. Buck-toothed men grinned into the camera while mousy-haired young women posed in long black dresses in the hope of concealing their distaff figures. A more suitable name for the site would be averagelookingpeople.com. They were also, judging from their messages to each other, breathtakingly stupid. ‘Simona in Lithuania — you are HOTTTT!!!!,’ wrote a beady-eyed man in Australia. Others confined themselves to personal statements. ‘Nothing better defines the human condition than the ability to love the animals,’ thinks Renatinha in Brazil. She didn’t elaborate on what loving the animals involves.

I have only had one experience of internet dating — this was in the Nineties when the phenomenon was in its infancy. No pictures in those days, just words. I arranged a date with a girl called Donna because in her profile she said she was a columnist for a magazine called Chest Monthly. Hello, I thought. That sounds promising. Imagine my surprise when I was greeted by a flat-chested wallflower. ‘So, er, what exactly do you write about in Chest Monthly?’ I said.

‘Not Chest Monthly — Chess monthly,’ she said. ‘I’m a chess geek.’

I clicked off beautifulpeople.com, never intending to darken its portal again, but the following day I received a second email. The subject was: ‘The voting process is over.’ Hardly any point in clicking on this one, I thought. Now I know what the standard is, the result’s a foregone conclusion.

‘Dear Toby,’ it began. ‘Unfortunately, your application to BeautifulPeople Network was not successful. The members of Beautiful-People did not find your profile attractive enough. Please note, only one in five applicants are currently accepted into Beautiful-People.com. BeautifulPeople welcomes you to apply again, perhaps with a better photo.’

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.