Sept. 29: Does beauty matter?
For a very brief time, I was a member of beautifulpeople.com, which
is a dating website for beautiful people. Not everyone can be a member.
What happens is you submit a photo and the beautiful people will decide
if you are beautiful enough to join.
I wanted to join the website for one reason alone.
I'm vain. I wanted to know if I was beautiful.
I submitted this picture:
I was rejected the next day. The beautiful people assured me I was not one of them. I imagined them sitting on a yacht in the Bahamas, drinking champagne from wine glasses with diamond bracelets wrapped around the stem. They would call to each other to come laugh at the ugly man from East Ontario who thought he could be one of them.
I started to hate the beautiful people. I hated them because I wanted to be beautiful but I didn't want to have their fascist attitude.
From the beautiful people website: "BeautifulPeople.com is the perfect way to meet beautiful men and women.Through our peer selection community - everyone is attractive. Online datersno longer need to filter through thousands of unattractive profiles. Everyone onBeautifulPeople.com is beautiful so members can concentrate on getting to knowthe character behind the beautiful appearance."
So now I'm really pissed off. I don't want these beautiful ditzes telling me I'm not handsome but I also don't want to be rejected over and over again. I could tell myself that the picture above was just a bad picture, that I might have better luck with another one, but it would become increasingly more difficult to convince myself of that with each subsequent rejection. And so I decided to cut to the chase and just use the best picture of me ever taken, which is this one here:
That picture is more than 20 years old. It is a studio shot of me when I was in theatre school. It was meant to be my publicity shot. My hair looked awesome that day.
Thanks to that picture, I was accepted into the fraternity of beautiful people. I didn't care that I no longer look like that. I had no intention of meeting any of these beautiful people. I just wanted to see if I could climb Mount Everest; I had no intention of living there.
Apparently, I am still a member of Beautiful People. I just logged in for the first time in I don't know how long and there are 250 women I have to rate. I give them all 'beautiful' ratings because I am not a prick.
-
Most of the members of Beautiful People are from Australia or Argentina. There's a lesson here. If you're hot, you probably live in a country that starts with A.
-
I made friends with exactly one person on Beautiful People. She was from British Columbia. Her profile picture showed her dancing on a roof. She was wearing a black bathing suit with gold trim. She told me she worked in real estate and that she was originally from South America. Spanish was her first language. She had a rowing machine in her living room and she used it for 60 minutes every night while she watched the news.
I asked her what she thought of the Beautiful People website and she said she thought it was a bit of a joke. She said she'd never met anyone off the site and didn't intend to. We marveled at an activity that was slated for Toronto. "Beautiful people only," the hostess announced. "No ugly people allowed."
-
In 1997, I became aware of the Spice Girls - a quintet of British twentysomethings who managed to belt out a few catchy tunes. They marketed themselves as "real girls." One of them was quoted as saying "We don't have eating disorders. We have fat bums and pimples. We're absolutely normal."
Sure...
Okay, so the Spice Girls weren't supermodels but they were far from being ugly. Had they been ugly, they would not have been Spice Girls. The group itself was put together in 1994 after talent scouts auditioned hundreds of other women. They asked them to dance. They asked them to sing. Mostly, they asked them to be pretty. The five girls who made up the Spice Girls were picked because they appealed to as wide a demographic as possible. It didn't matter if you were a tomboy or a princess, rich or poor, black or white - at least one of the Spice Girls could have been your idol.
-
Apparently, employers would rather hire an incompetent person who is attractive than a homely competent one.
This is bad and when I hear things like this, I almost have sympathy for the people at The National Enquirer who print those awful "stars without their makeup" packages. Yeah, we're supposed to beat up on Racquel Welch because some photographer snapped a shot of her checking her mailbox at six in the morning. Newsflash: Racquel has cellulite. Call the Marines.
-
I first became aware of Charlize Theron in 1997 when I saw her play Keanu Reeves's wife in The Devil's Advocate. She was one of two actresses in the film to do a full frontal nude scene (the other was by the Danish actress Connie Inge-Lise Nielsen, who used to be involved with Lars Ulrich.) At the time, I dismissed Charlize as just another pretty actress who was using her prettiness to get movie roles. I didn't really think of her as talented and the reason I didn't think that was that she was playing the wife of Keanu Reeves. No one thinks Keanu Reeves is a talented actor. People went to see The Devil's Advocate because Al Pacino is in it.
I'm taking him to acting class. I'll be right back.
I never forgot Charlize Theron but I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about her either. I didn't think she would have secured the role in The Devil's Advocate if she wasn't pretty. But then 1997 turned into 2003 and Charlize Theron was playing the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster and that changed everything about how everyone looks at Charlize Theron forever.
Charlize, who People Magazine listed as one of the most beautiful women in the world, won an Academy Award for Monster. The kicker is that she had to make herself really ugly in order to play that role. She gained 30 pounds, wore prosthetic teeth and let makeup artists do unspeakable things to her skin. If the media hadn't made such a big deal out of things, no one would have even recognized her in the role. Charlize Theron rose to fame by being pretty but she reached the pinnacle by voluntarily - nay, happily - throwing her prettiness away.
Underneath this makeup, I'm actually really hot.
-
And now it's time to talk about Yanni.
Yanni is probably the most beautiful man alive. This is a picture of Yanni from 2013:
That picture was taken when Yanni was 58. He looks younger than me in that picture. Even so, Yanni is almost able to get a 10 per cent discount everytime he eats at Denny's.
Despite Yanni's status as an almost geriatric keyboard player from Kalamata, he is insufferably beautiful and this is why I hate him. On Yanni's worst day, he will be twice as handsome as I am on my best day. Yanni needs to die.
If I looked like Yanni, I would spend all my time walking around shopping malls. My crotch would be a babe magnet. Seriously, some hot 19-year-old would be buying an orange julius or wondering if she's too old to buy clothes at Ardene's and suddenly, she would go flying through the air until our crotches smacked together. It would be an awful yet wonderful thing. This is a fact of life when you are hot like Yanni. Women fall in love with you .03 seconds after they meet you. In fact, lesbianism didn't exist before Yanni was born. Lesbianism is evolution's way of ensuring that women don't become extinct. Every year, thousands of women commit suicide because Yanni doesn't love them. Yanni needs to die.
Yanni should probably get married to Charlize Theron. That's not just because they are both beautiful, it's because they understand each other. Yanni, like Charlize, knows that beauty is an asset for artists, but it is not necessary. As I already mentioned, Charlize abandoned her beauty in order to win an Academy Award but Yanni abandoned his FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES so he could make weird music for New Age people to listen to while they're getting hot stone massages in California.
And how did Yanni do that? Simple. He grew a dorky mustache. Now he looked like this:
So stoked! Just won first prize in the Doug Henning lookalike contest
That mustache reduced his hotness factor by 99%. But although he was only one per cent as beautiful as he could be, he will still much more handsome than almost any other man on planet Earth (including everyone who has ever played professional basketball.) This can be demonstrated by the fact that Yanni sells out concerts wherever he goes and the audience almost always consists of women. I interviewed one of those women when Yanni came to Calgary. Here is a snippet from that interview:
Shteevie; What's your favourite Yanni song?
Woman: I don't know. I'm deaf.
Shteevie: Are you reading my lips?
Woman: Yes.
Shteevie: Well if you're deaf, why would you go to a Yanni concert?
Woman: BECAUSE I GET TO SEE YANNEEEEEE!!!!!!
I guess what this means is that I hate Yanni because he's better looking than I am, but I respect him for not letting his beauty interfere with his art.
-
Shania Twain may be the most beautiful woman in the world. That is not opinion, it could be scientific fact. Apparently, some Canadian and American researchers have discovered the golden ratio regarding the ideal proportions for a woman's eyes, nose, mouth and chin. Shania comes closest to meeting these proportions. She is also Canadian and this makes sense.
This is bad news for women who want their husbands to be faithful. For seven years, Shania Twain was married to Mutt Lange, a record producer who helped Def Leppard, Bryan Adams, and the Cars make hit albums before he started working with his wife. He helped garner her worldwide fame, helped write a whole bunch of country-rock songs that dominated country radio for pretty much all the 1990s, and then he started having an affair with Shania's best friend.
This is really hard to take. Like most Canadians, I have a hard time imagining Shania Twain being grumpy at all. Of course, I've never met the lady. She could be impossibly picky or suffer from OCD or maybe she gets really mean when her shipment of Bag Balm (made in the Eastern Townships) doesn't show up. I have no way of knowing.
What I do know is that Mutt Lange, like most men, have hard times with fidelity. And if he won't be faithful to the most beautiful woman in the world then I don't have much hope for the most beautiful woman in the world's best friend.
But I do have hope for Yanni and I do have hope for Charlize Theron and I do have hope for Ginger Spice and Baby Spice and Sporty (though not much for Posh and Scary, who now makes a living as a judge on America's Got Talent.)
In Purple Rain, Prince sang a song called The Beautiful Ones, which was subsequently wrecked by both Mariah Carey and Beyonce Knowles. In it, he croons that the beautiful ones will hurt you everytime.
He's talking about external beauty, of course. I have met lots of people who are pretty on the outside but on the inside, they are vapid and/or mean-spirited jerks. The most boring people in the world are young narcissistic pretty women. "I was at the club last night and at least five guys were hitting on me," one of them told me once. "I'm going to an even bigger club tonight and I'll bet have twice as many."
I smiled politely and went back to my book. But I'm older now. Today, I'd say "Well, I bet they won't be interested in you for much longer after they discover how boring you are."
As the Northern Pikes once said, she ain't pretty she just looks that way.
I wanted to join the website for one reason alone.
I'm vain. I wanted to know if I was beautiful.
I submitted this picture:
I was rejected the next day. The beautiful people assured me I was not one of them. I imagined them sitting on a yacht in the Bahamas, drinking champagne from wine glasses with diamond bracelets wrapped around the stem. They would call to each other to come laugh at the ugly man from East Ontario who thought he could be one of them.
I started to hate the beautiful people. I hated them because I wanted to be beautiful but I didn't want to have their fascist attitude.
From the beautiful people website: "BeautifulPeople.com is the perfect way to meet beautiful men and women.Through our peer selection community - everyone is attractive. Online datersno longer need to filter through thousands of unattractive profiles. Everyone onBeautifulPeople.com is beautiful so members can concentrate on getting to knowthe character behind the beautiful appearance."
So now I'm really pissed off. I don't want these beautiful ditzes telling me I'm not handsome but I also don't want to be rejected over and over again. I could tell myself that the picture above was just a bad picture, that I might have better luck with another one, but it would become increasingly more difficult to convince myself of that with each subsequent rejection. And so I decided to cut to the chase and just use the best picture of me ever taken, which is this one here:
That picture is more than 20 years old. It is a studio shot of me when I was in theatre school. It was meant to be my publicity shot. My hair looked awesome that day.
Thanks to that picture, I was accepted into the fraternity of beautiful people. I didn't care that I no longer look like that. I had no intention of meeting any of these beautiful people. I just wanted to see if I could climb Mount Everest; I had no intention of living there.
Apparently, I am still a member of Beautiful People. I just logged in for the first time in I don't know how long and there are 250 women I have to rate. I give them all 'beautiful' ratings because I am not a prick.
-
Most of the members of Beautiful People are from Australia or Argentina. There's a lesson here. If you're hot, you probably live in a country that starts with A.
-
I made friends with exactly one person on Beautiful People. She was from British Columbia. Her profile picture showed her dancing on a roof. She was wearing a black bathing suit with gold trim. She told me she worked in real estate and that she was originally from South America. Spanish was her first language. She had a rowing machine in her living room and she used it for 60 minutes every night while she watched the news.
I asked her what she thought of the Beautiful People website and she said she thought it was a bit of a joke. She said she'd never met anyone off the site and didn't intend to. We marveled at an activity that was slated for Toronto. "Beautiful people only," the hostess announced. "No ugly people allowed."
-
In 1997, I became aware of the Spice Girls - a quintet of British twentysomethings who managed to belt out a few catchy tunes. They marketed themselves as "real girls." One of them was quoted as saying "We don't have eating disorders. We have fat bums and pimples. We're absolutely normal."
Sure...
Okay, so the Spice Girls weren't supermodels but they were far from being ugly. Had they been ugly, they would not have been Spice Girls. The group itself was put together in 1994 after talent scouts auditioned hundreds of other women. They asked them to dance. They asked them to sing. Mostly, they asked them to be pretty. The five girls who made up the Spice Girls were picked because they appealed to as wide a demographic as possible. It didn't matter if you were a tomboy or a princess, rich or poor, black or white - at least one of the Spice Girls could have been your idol.
-
Apparently, employers would rather hire an incompetent person who is attractive than a homely competent one.
This is bad and when I hear things like this, I almost have sympathy for the people at The National Enquirer who print those awful "stars without their makeup" packages. Yeah, we're supposed to beat up on Racquel Welch because some photographer snapped a shot of her checking her mailbox at six in the morning. Newsflash: Racquel has cellulite. Call the Marines.
-
I first became aware of Charlize Theron in 1997 when I saw her play Keanu Reeves's wife in The Devil's Advocate. She was one of two actresses in the film to do a full frontal nude scene (the other was by the Danish actress Connie Inge-Lise Nielsen, who used to be involved with Lars Ulrich.) At the time, I dismissed Charlize as just another pretty actress who was using her prettiness to get movie roles. I didn't really think of her as talented and the reason I didn't think that was that she was playing the wife of Keanu Reeves. No one thinks Keanu Reeves is a talented actor. People went to see The Devil's Advocate because Al Pacino is in it.
I'm taking him to acting class. I'll be right back.
I never forgot Charlize Theron but I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about her either. I didn't think she would have secured the role in The Devil's Advocate if she wasn't pretty. But then 1997 turned into 2003 and Charlize Theron was playing the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster and that changed everything about how everyone looks at Charlize Theron forever.
Charlize, who People Magazine listed as one of the most beautiful women in the world, won an Academy Award for Monster. The kicker is that she had to make herself really ugly in order to play that role. She gained 30 pounds, wore prosthetic teeth and let makeup artists do unspeakable things to her skin. If the media hadn't made such a big deal out of things, no one would have even recognized her in the role. Charlize Theron rose to fame by being pretty but she reached the pinnacle by voluntarily - nay, happily - throwing her prettiness away.
Underneath this makeup, I'm actually really hot.
-
And now it's time to talk about Yanni.
Yanni is probably the most beautiful man alive. This is a picture of Yanni from 2013:
That picture was taken when Yanni was 58. He looks younger than me in that picture. Even so, Yanni is almost able to get a 10 per cent discount everytime he eats at Denny's.
Despite Yanni's status as an almost geriatric keyboard player from Kalamata, he is insufferably beautiful and this is why I hate him. On Yanni's worst day, he will be twice as handsome as I am on my best day. Yanni needs to die.
If I looked like Yanni, I would spend all my time walking around shopping malls. My crotch would be a babe magnet. Seriously, some hot 19-year-old would be buying an orange julius or wondering if she's too old to buy clothes at Ardene's and suddenly, she would go flying through the air until our crotches smacked together. It would be an awful yet wonderful thing. This is a fact of life when you are hot like Yanni. Women fall in love with you .03 seconds after they meet you. In fact, lesbianism didn't exist before Yanni was born. Lesbianism is evolution's way of ensuring that women don't become extinct. Every year, thousands of women commit suicide because Yanni doesn't love them. Yanni needs to die.
Yanni should probably get married to Charlize Theron. That's not just because they are both beautiful, it's because they understand each other. Yanni, like Charlize, knows that beauty is an asset for artists, but it is not necessary. As I already mentioned, Charlize abandoned her beauty in order to win an Academy Award but Yanni abandoned his FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES so he could make weird music for New Age people to listen to while they're getting hot stone massages in California.
And how did Yanni do that? Simple. He grew a dorky mustache. Now he looked like this:
So stoked! Just won first prize in the Doug Henning lookalike contestThat mustache reduced his hotness factor by 99%. But although he was only one per cent as beautiful as he could be, he will still much more handsome than almost any other man on planet Earth (including everyone who has ever played professional basketball.) This can be demonstrated by the fact that Yanni sells out concerts wherever he goes and the audience almost always consists of women. I interviewed one of those women when Yanni came to Calgary. Here is a snippet from that interview:
Shteevie; What's your favourite Yanni song?
Woman: I don't know. I'm deaf.
Shteevie: Are you reading my lips?
Woman: Yes.
Shteevie: Well if you're deaf, why would you go to a Yanni concert?
Woman: BECAUSE I GET TO SEE YANNEEEEEE!!!!!!
I guess what this means is that I hate Yanni because he's better looking than I am, but I respect him for not letting his beauty interfere with his art.
-
Shania Twain may be the most beautiful woman in the world. That is not opinion, it could be scientific fact. Apparently, some Canadian and American researchers have discovered the golden ratio regarding the ideal proportions for a woman's eyes, nose, mouth and chin. Shania comes closest to meeting these proportions. She is also Canadian and this makes sense.
This is bad news for women who want their husbands to be faithful. For seven years, Shania Twain was married to Mutt Lange, a record producer who helped Def Leppard, Bryan Adams, and the Cars make hit albums before he started working with his wife. He helped garner her worldwide fame, helped write a whole bunch of country-rock songs that dominated country radio for pretty much all the 1990s, and then he started having an affair with Shania's best friend.
This is really hard to take. Like most Canadians, I have a hard time imagining Shania Twain being grumpy at all. Of course, I've never met the lady. She could be impossibly picky or suffer from OCD or maybe she gets really mean when her shipment of Bag Balm (made in the Eastern Townships) doesn't show up. I have no way of knowing.
What I do know is that Mutt Lange, like most men, have hard times with fidelity. And if he won't be faithful to the most beautiful woman in the world then I don't have much hope for the most beautiful woman in the world's best friend.
But I do have hope for Yanni and I do have hope for Charlize Theron and I do have hope for Ginger Spice and Baby Spice and Sporty (though not much for Posh and Scary, who now makes a living as a judge on America's Got Talent.)
In Purple Rain, Prince sang a song called The Beautiful Ones, which was subsequently wrecked by both Mariah Carey and Beyonce Knowles. In it, he croons that the beautiful ones will hurt you everytime.
He's talking about external beauty, of course. I have met lots of people who are pretty on the outside but on the inside, they are vapid and/or mean-spirited jerks. The most boring people in the world are young narcissistic pretty women. "I was at the club last night and at least five guys were hitting on me," one of them told me once. "I'm going to an even bigger club tonight and I'll bet have twice as many."
I smiled politely and went back to my book. But I'm older now. Today, I'd say "Well, I bet they won't be interested in you for much longer after they discover how boring you are."
As the Northern Pikes once said, she ain't pretty she just looks that way.
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