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Beautiful people have so many problems. Not only do they have to worry about getting mobbed at parties and being given more free swag than they can carry home in a taxi but now they have to worry that their friends are spying on them on the Internet. No, this is not the usual Big Brother hysteria over being outed for one's political views, cross-dressing fetish or secret collection of Marie Osmond porcelain dolls. It turns out that if you are beautiful you have a lot more to be worried about than your drunk-face pictures going viral on Facebook. Like, say, your friends tattling on you for gaining weight.
Beautifulpeople.com, the dating site notorious for requiring people to pass a hotness panel before joining (death panels are so passe!), has recently made news again for kicking off over 5,000 members after other members ratted them out for getting fat. The newly unbeautiful were pushed off their sanctimonious pedestals after posting pictures of themselves enjoying holiday goodies and having the audacity to not barf them up immediately afterward. And as everyone knows, fat = ugly.
Site founder Robert Hintze explains the move saying, "As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld. Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded." While Hintze does not explain how calling customers "fatties" is good for potential business, he does say that if the ex-members whip themselves back into acceptable condition they can reapply and, if they pass the hotness panel, rejoin.
Why would people want to rejoin a group that found them so abhorrent they couldn't even tolerate looking at their pictures? Because, of course, it is an exclusive club and people like being special. It's easy to pick apart BeautifulPeople.com - after all their homepage is littered with superficial gems like "Do you want to guarantee your dates will always be beautiful? No more filtering through unattractive people on mainstream sites!" - but they are merely continuing a long-held human tradition: the middle school clique. Even the fossil record shows evidence of prehistoric pelt-wedgies.
BeautifulPeople.com certainly isn't the first social group to self select based entirely on one characteristic. While an IQ exam is slightly less subjective than a hotness rating, Mensa is equally exclusive in their membership. So I vote that rather than vilify the pretty people for wanting to keep their ranks pure, we make our own dating site. We may not be cool but we're a lot closer to cold fusion! Imagine the Mensa dating site: "Tired of meeting stupid people? Bored with dinner conversation that revolves solely around the unironic discussion of reality TV? No more sifting through people that don't get why prehistoric pelt wedgies are funny!"
The truth is that people have long allowed beauty to blind them to other more important issues, like aspirations of global domination. Just ask Mark Antony. (No, not Mark Anthony although J.Lo. may very well being trying to take over the world -one perfume at a time!) I actually feel for the dethroned beauties. If you have based your whole self image around one thing, especially when that thing is as ephemeral as "beauty", then it must be quite the blow to informed that you are one of the hoi polloi after all. I'd be interested to know what happens to the 5,000 ousted uglies. Will they move on to other things, eventually realizing their immense good luck in escaping such inanity? Or will they spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to reclaim what they lost? And, most importantly, will anyone realize that weight is not the defining characteristic of beauty?
Paris Hilton, always available for comment, spoke for all the beleaguered hawt people chiding, "Like I've always said - if you're not a hottie then you're a nottie!"*
*Paris Hilton did not actually say this. Despite my maiden name being Hilton, I hail from the side of the clan with the "panties on" gene and am therefore ostracized at all family functions. Still, I bet she was thinking it!
Anyone else kinda feel sorry for the not-hotties? Or did you crack a little smile and envision slapping a sticker on their rear that says "spanked by karma"??
