As a columnist, I’m often asked whether I deliberately place myself in embarrassing situations for the purpose of furnishing myself with comic material. The answer, regrettably, is no. My life is humiliating enough without me having to court embarrassment. However, when I read that a dating site called beautifulpeople.com had expelled over 5,000 members for letting themselves go over the festive period I felt compelled to submit a membership application. This involves uploading a photograph of yourself and then waiting for existing members to decide whether you’re attractive enough to join their exclusive ranks. They have a choice of four responses: ‘Yes, definitely’, ‘Hmm yes, OK’, ‘Hmm no, not really’ and ‘NO definitely NOT’.
Obviously, the point of doing this was in the hope of being rejected so I could get a ‘funny’ column out of it. But when the time came to upload a photo, vanity got the better of me. Instead of choosing a realistic likeness, I opted for a picture taken several decades ago when I still had a full head of hair. I realised, as I filled out the online application form, that the opinion of these attractive singletons actually mattered to me.
‘It’s funny,’ I said to Caroline later that day. ‘I was absolutely confident when I started out that I wouldn’t be accepted, but then I went and submitted the most attractive picture of me I could find.’
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ she said.
According to Robert Hintze, the founder of beautifulpeople.com, ‘vigilant’ members had insisted on the post-Christmas cull. ‘As a business, we mourn the loss of any member,’ he said. ‘But the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld.’ The whole process was clearly a publicity stunt. Members aren’t required to resubmit pictures of themselves on 1 January, so the site’s managers had no way of knowing who’d overindulged. Greg Hodge, the managing director, claimed the fate of the ‘chubby members’ was decided by a vote of the existing members, but who chose the people whose membership was reassessed in this way? Presumably, men like Greg.
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.
Comments