There’s a story on the BBC website this morning claiming that BeautifulPeople.com is deregistering 5,000 members after complaints that they’ve put on weight over Xmas.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that this is just a funny lightweight (forgive the pun) piece of fluff to lighten the post holiday gloom.
In the past 24 hours, I’ve also picked up a Twitter follow from @seamountain, a destination which describes itself as “naked and nude sea mountain inn the best of the usa”.
Now like any bloke, the word ‘naked’ instantly appeals to me and so I visited their charming website, seamountaininn.com.
I was further strangely drawn to their gallery page which contains a Flash slide show of beautiful people sans culottes (actually sans everything) lounging around a tiny pool.
Now, I may be being cynical here, but I reckon that in reality their clientele isn’t half as attractive as that. Indeed, my third-hand experience of nudist resorts and centres is that they are filled with lots of people in a state of undress who are the least suited to be so.
Okay, I still harbour thoughts of a naked holiday with my best beloved — whose body I still adore — but I reckon if we ever put such fantasies into reality it would be in the middle of the Mediterranean on a private yacht where we could keep ourselves to ourselves.
I fear we are probably in a minority here: we have a sense of our own inadequacies. The gym-bunnies and nip-tuck junkies who frequent Sea Mountain Inn and register with BeautifulPeople.com probably don’t share such candid self-assessment.
It just reminds me of the Eugenics Movement or the Nazis’ Strength Through Joy organisation, which led to baby farms in the Bavarian hillsides where perfect Aryan women were coupled with the SS’s finest in an attempt to produce a master race of beautiful people and others were put to death in gas chambers because they were “less than human”.
There is nothing wrong in physical beauty: I am an avowed fan of female topography. The problem comes when people start to attach ultimate importance to one aspect of being, be it the perfect figure, the strongest muscles or the smartest brain.
This may be a radical thought but perhaps the reason humanity has been the most successful species on the planet is precisely because we are a supreme mixture of abilities, talents and attributes.