"Sometimes there's so much
beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to
cave in." – Ricky Fitts, American Beauty
(1999)
The person who created the website
beautifulpeople.com may have felt the same way as Ricky Fitts. And what better
way to appreciate the innate and omnipresent beauty of our world (plastic bags
blowing in the wind notwithstanding) than by creating an exclusive online club in
which only beautiful people are allowed? Depending on your point of view, the greatest
virtue of the internet - anonymity - also has the potential to be its biggest downfall. The anonymous nature of the internet is great for criminals
and nerds with strange fetishes but not so great for those people whose jawlines look like they’ve
been chiselled by George Clooney’s teeth. How are these beautiful people meant
to get the recognition from the internet that their looks deserve when, most of the time, others
can interact with them yet not even see them? Welcome to beautifulpeople.com.
Beautifulpeople.com is essentially
a dating site with a twist – before becoming a member, potential inductees supply a picture and brief profile of themselves and are
voted on by current members on their level of beauty with the all-encompassing
and exhaustive options ranging from ‘Absolutely not’ to ‘No’ to ‘Hmm, ok’ to ‘Beautiful’. As a brief aside, the purpose of ‘absolutely not’ seems to exist solely to destroy self-esteem –
surely simply ‘no’ would suffice? Anyway, the point is that only those that are ‘aesthetically
blessed’ get in – a selective and exclusive process that the
creators say ‘removes the first hurdle of online dating’, i.e. separating the
wheat from the chaff.
Once the chaff has been
unceremoniously turned away to become cowfeed, the wheat is allowed to be kneaded
lovingly into a loaf of bread/full online profile and connect with other beautiful people/baked
goods. I didn’t have the inclination, courage or crystal clear skin to try to
set up a profile but then the inner workings of the site are probably not that
interesting (no I’m not bitter, jealous or UGLY, okay?). What is interesting,
however, are the implications of such a site and its philosophy of 'beauty above
all else'. Who has the right to define what ‘beautiful’ is? Is it moral to rate
people on their beauty? Is this sort of rating system only tolerated because it’s online? What would
happen if this occurred at a physical institution?
Firstly, the site acknowledges that
it is not trying to define what beauty is – that’s for the members to decide.
The site defends its position by arguing that beauty is in the eye of the
beholder, but then having thousands of people voting on someone’s
attractiveness kind of defeats that notion, don’t you think? The ‘eye of the
beholder’ concept means one person making a judgement on another person
and basing their decision on their own thoughts and opinions, whereas
beautifulpeople.com is not individuals rating individuals but rather a group
rating an individual. History has demonstrated that when a group of people
congregate en masse to vote on the merits of a single person, things can sometimes go wrong.
However, despite all that, I don’t
really have a moral problem with the site because of its ‘opt in’ nature. If
you’re game enough to create a profile and throw yourself at the feet of the
most beautiful/potentially shallow people the internet has to offer then go
right ahead. Any subsequent increase or decrease in your self-esteem is your
own fault. The site clearly and unashamedly states that entry is based on physical
attractiveness. This honesty is perhaps a better way to deal with our society’s
inevitable preference for good-looking people rather than the underhanded way
that it often happens in real life. Consider, for example, a recent case in Hobart in which a woman was turned away from a nightclub, ostensibly because
she didn’t meet the dress code but fairly obviously because she wasn’t
considered attractive enough (by the way, I have been admitted to said nightclub in the past, therefore definitively PROVING MY ATTRACTIVENESS).
The Hobart case is morally troubling
because while going to the club is certainly an ‘opt in’ decision for the woman,
being ranked on your physical appearance by the door crew at that club is not. But
imagine the outcry if the club in question categorically came out and stated
that it would only allow beautiful people in, ranked by the patrons already inside
the club. Beautifulpeople.com gets some leeway in this regard because it’s
online, whereas in real life the ‘beauty’ policy is always hidden behind the
smoke and mirrors of ‘dress codes’ or similar.
The leeway beautifulpeople.com
receives is due to a couple of factors – the first is the ‘opt in’ clause that
I mentioned above, and the fact that it exists online certainly helps, but more importantly, there is no
personal interaction on the part of the members voting on the attractiveness of
the inductees. Rather, the process is done anonymously through a profile
picture and a mouse-click, often from the other side of the world. For both the
ranker and the rankee, this is infinitely easier and less morally troubling to
do than to stand face to face with someone and make a decision on the level of
their attractiveness.
Having first heard of the site I
expected to be appalled and outraged by the shallow and exclusive nature of it,
but the more I explored the issues surrounding it I came to the conclusion that
the site and its central premise is, for the most part, benign. Nobody is being
forced to do anything they don’t want to, honesty and democracy are encouraged and,
finally, all of us who are not ‘aesthetically blessed’ finally have an online space
where we can send all the attractive people to fawn over each other while we
get on with our lives.
