A dating website has come under attack for discriminating against its calorically challenged members.
According to the NY Post, the website owner abruptly canceled the accounts of over 5,000 members who committed the sin of gaining extra pounds over the holidays.
Beautifulpeople.com — a meet-up site with a strict “no ugly people policy” — announced that it has had to trim the fat to the bone for 2010 by banning 5,000 members who packed on too much weight during the holidays.
“We were getting a lot of complaints from members who were meeting with people who gained a lot of weight or who gained weight in their photo albums,” said the Denmark-based free site’s managing director, Greg Hodge.
Beautifulpeople.com has about 500,000 members from around the world. Each has to go through a rigorous entry process, only getting voted in if their fellow members find them sexy enough.
The site now only lets members of the opposite sex vote members out because, Hodge noted, lots of women were voting other women out to simply cut down on the competition.