"But I'm beautiful INside!"
Your ethics quiz today involves the dating site beautifulpeople.com, which is in the news for culling 30,000 applicants from its rolls because they were just too darn ugly for a site that promises qualified members that they can…
- “Connect with beautiful men and women in your local area and from around the world!”
- “Chat live with other beautiful men and women!”
- “Meet REAL beautiful people who actually look in real life as they do online!”
- “Attend exclusive parties and events!”
- “Be discovered!”
- “Be part of the largest most exclusively beautiful community in the world!”
- “Browse beautiful profiles of men and women without sifting through all the riff raff!”
Last month, Beautifulpeople.com suffered a cyber attack in which the Shrek virus, named after the popular animated troll, disabled the software that screens applicants, allowing an invasion of new, troll-like members, or at least members not up to Beautiful People standards. The pug uglies have now been dropped, causing some people such anguish that the site has set up a counseling helpline to ease the pain of rejection.
“We have to stick to our founding principles of only accepting beautiful people — that’s what our members have paid for,” BeautifulPeople.com’s Greg Hodge explained to the the press, doubtlessly having to raise his voice to be heard over the anguished, sub-human howls of rage from the mob of disappointed troglodytes outside the site’s headquarters. “We can’t just sweep 30,000 ugly people under the carpet.” No, clearly not…even if the carpet was big enough, it would be way too lumpy. So…
Your Ethics Quiz question: Is this website unethical?
Oh, it’s ethical. The site may be shallow, obnoxious, offensive, biased, stupid, egotistical, arrogant, and driven by narcissism and warped priorities, but it’s ethical. And Mr. Hodge, jerk that he must be to work for such a revolting organization, is quite right: if his members pay to have to share cyber-space only with bona fide beautiful people, then the ugly people just have to go, just as a dating site devoted to tall people would have to dump all the jockeys who got admitted after an attack by the Mickey Rooney virus.
The site actually deserves ethics bonus points for keeping the lovely creeps it caters to away the people they revile—as “riff raff” yet!— and are likely to treat badly, since these appearance addicts are eugenics obsessed and probably have photos of Josef Mengele in their wallets. This kind of exclusive club is ethically objectionable when it uses unfair and disrespectful criteria to stop others from enjoying a benefit that they can’t acquire anywhere else. But finding an asshole to date who ends up making you curse the day you were born is still all too easy, and those beautiful assholes who think they are God’s gift to humanity are especially dangerous. Let’s give thanks that they have voluntarily isolated themselves in kind of a virtual leper colony for gorgeous jerks, creeps and snots, keeping the ugly rot inside away from the DNA of the rest of us.
Ethics Alarms 
Beauty is as beauty does, and this site ain’t pretty.
I thought that’s what Hollywood was for!
I think there is more going on here than is apparent. I’ve known beautiful people, and for the most part, they don’t NEED dating sites. They’ll just find someone to date. This means that the people who use this site are beautiful people who, for some reason, STILL cannot make it work. It could be that they’re intensely hostile, a drug addict, emotionally abusive or just can’t settle for anyone but physical perfection.
So this site is full of people who, despite their pulchritude, STILL have to resort to the miserable dustbin of online dating, only to find thousands of candidates with the same or similar problems. It’s like a neon sign that says, “Avoid this place.”
I agree with Jeff. I obviously would qualify to join the site. And, I might, as my generally unfriendly attitude and hermit-like lifestyle keeps me from meeting similarly beautiful people in person.
By the way, if my Facebook photo shows up here, it’s not really me.
If only they’d had something like this 40 years ago. I’d have qualified easily! My God, I hate being old and ugly!!
Maybe there is a silver lining to this website, and this community. Remember what Samuel Butler wrote in an 1884 letter:
“It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable instead of four.”
I think this is indeed emerging as a consensus. A place where beautiful, self-obsessed, shallow jerks can meet soul mates. Good luck to them.
I see the movie “Shrek” listed under tagged, but do not see any coments about it. I just recently watched Shrek 3. Not nearly as good as rhe first one. I saw all the queens and was trying to identify them There was Sleeping beauty, Reponsil (long hair) the one with the glass slippers and wicked sisters….BUT! there was one who quite clearly was a man in drag…Can anyone answere was that really a “Drag Queen” or did I miss something???.
ooops I found the Shrek article lol not what I thought it was but my question still stands, was that supposed to be a drag queen in the Shrek 3 movie???
Yes. At least, that’s what I assumed the joke was.