An ugly 'malfunction' on a dating website offers a parable about the misery and loneliness of beauty
The walls were breached, but not for long. It was reported today that due to a software malfunction nicknamed Shrek, 30,000 ugly people managed to join the dating website Beautiful People. Normally all applicants to Beautiful People are vetted by a panel of already Beautiful People and, if they are ugly, they are not allowed to join. But due to a "disgruntled former employee" the site broke ? like a toenail! ? and the ugly stormed in, in an angry ooze of big thighs and swastika-shaped eyebrows.
It must have been terrible for the Beautiful People, like watching their hero Cheryl Cole being inserted upside down in a Chernobyl bog. Now the ugly have been thrown out again because, as the managing director Greg Hodge says: "We can't just sweep 30,000 ugly people under the carpet." I suspect that Hodge is a psychopath, because they are being offered counselling instead.
This is a parable about the misery and the loneliness of beauty. It reminds me of the famous ad from the 1980s in which Birds Eye attempted to sell frozen vegetables using, of all things, snobbery. It featured a country club based on the old American country clubs ? no blacks, Jews, dogs or Marx brothers ? that left the old, ugly frozen vegetables weeping at the gates while the younger, prettier frozen vegetables bounced happily towards the freezers of the working classes. They were soon to be consumed, while the ugly ones escaped. It was a concentration camp for vegetables and the metaphor was clear. Society feasts on beauty. It may have been a tasteless cartoon with a jolly song ? "You just can't join our club!" ? played out against the demise of apartheid, which made it all the more horrific, but the irony stayed with me for years.
I am certain that Shrek is a stunt, although Beautiful People deny it. Golden Goose PR looks after Beautiful People, and in 2009 they arranged for Beautiful People to expel 5,000 members for getting fat over Christmas. The campaign was called Festive Fatties. The result of Festive Fatties was that 48,000 idiots applied to Beautiful People within 24 hours, and Golden Goose won best global public relations campaign at the CIPR Excellence Awards in 2010, all for making 5,000 formerly Beautiful People rip out their hair extensions and commit mass GBH on chihuahuas. It was a terrible act of cruelty, even towards consumers, but Beautiful People did it anyway ? and to their own clients, because this is the beautiful jungle. And then there is the quotation about Shrek from a Beautiful People employee: it was planted "like an evil Easter egg". That is surely a quotation told down a telephone by someone trying not to laugh.
But whether Shrek exists or not, the existence of Beautiful People exposes the pain and paranoia of the professional narcissist, defined only by its separate features ? eye, nose, hair, nose-hair. When I log on to Beautiful People and watch the symmetrical faces and good haircuts ? many of them from Luton ? seeking to mate with equally symmetrical faces and equally good haircuts, I feel only pity. They do not seem to know or care that sexual attractiveness and small, photogenic features are entirely unrelated.
Would Orson Welles make it on to Beautiful People? When he made Jane Eyre he was so fat he had to wear a corset. Would Gerard Depardieu, whose nose looks like all of the vegetables banned from the Birds Eye country club, and in just one face? The Beautiful People have locked themselves in a cage containing only nightmare images of themselves. How dull.
The pity runs both ways. I still remember a tiny Russian model who stared at her reflection throughout our interview and seemed genuinely baffled because I look normal but have forgotten to commit suicide. (Fashion is possibly the greatest crime the beautiful commit against the ugly ? until now.)
She will get her comeuppance on the dot of 35, I trust, and have surgery until she looks deformed, but in that moment we were playing Graham McClintoch and Jenny Bunn in Kingsley Amis's novel Take a Girl Like You. "There is one barrier which no amount of progress or tolerance or legislation can ever diminish," says ugly Graham (me) to Jenny Bunn (beautiful Russian model). "I'm talking about the barrier between the attractive and the unattractive."
But Shrek is dead, and the gates are locked again. We can return to the status quo of mutual incomprehension ? and hate.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/20/shrek-virus-beautiful-people
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