BeautifulPeople.com expels 5,000 members deemed too fat to be beautiful

My good friend, BeautifulPeople.com is back on my radar! A huge spike in my blog stats brought to  my attention that I am the third hit when one searched for “Beautiful People Rejection” – wonderful! Narcissistic Googling aside, the exercise lead me to this:

BeautifulPeople.com axes 5,000 members for gaining weight (from The Daily Telegraph)

I was skeptical at first, glimpsing the headline from the corner of my eye. Was this from The Onion? It seemed to bizarre to be real. I started reading. The quotes made me double check. No way this was real.

It’s real. Read these quotes from the company’s founder, Robert Hinze:

“Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

Did the owner of a worldwide dating site really just use the word fatties? It gets worse. The managing director, Greg Hodge said:

“We responded to complaints by moving the newly chubby members back to the rating stage. This is the same as having them re-apply. Their re-applications were reviewed by existing members and only a few hundred were voted back in. Over 5,000 were rejected. Every year we see that some of our members from western cultures eat and drink to excess over the holidays and clearly their looks suffer. The USA has been grossly over-indulging since Thanksgiving – it’s no wonder that so many members have been expelled from the network. We hope they will be back after shedding the festive pounds.”

Bolding mine. Really? REALLY? I have no words, but to say that this reaffirms everything I said about BeautifulPeople originally. You can hardly take BeautifulPeople.com worth a grain of salt, but the language used by company officials is just appalling. Do they even HAVE a publicist? A sane PR department? Whomever allowed them to use the word “fatties” in a press release should be fired. Or force fed until they’re a size 16. Whichever works.

And, of course, they (and their members) are clearly contending that beauty = thin and not fat. Nice. Age old question: how does one define beauty? Current answer: thin, surgically altered, and dressed like a stripper. *Insert rant on young women, eating disorders and low self-esteem here.*

Fail, BeautifulPeople.com, EXTREME FAIL. Corporate fail, especially.

2011 ETA: it turned out this was a marketing stunt… however just goes to show what disgusting people run this site that this was the marketing ploy they went for. Gross. (and their latest involves a “Shrek” virus. Total BS)