A dating site called Beautiful People, where current members rate your attractiveness to determine whether you’re allowed to join, recently purged 5,000 members for supposedly gaining weight over the holidays.

“Every year we see that some of our members from Western cultures eat and drink to excess over the holidays, and clearly their looks suffer,” George Hodge, managing director, said in a statement. “The U.S.A. has been grossly over-indulging since Thanksgiving. It’s no wonder that so many members have been expelled from the network. We hope they will be back after shedding the festive pounds.”

Before I get into the blatant ridiculousness of this website, first let me address the improbability that people are updating their ELITIST dating profiles with unflattering pictures of themselves eating a ham hock or whatever. That just doesn’t make sense, which leads me to believe the whole thing is a publicity stunt, aimed at getting people to look at and join the site.

Further evidence: I went to the site to try to view these supposedly beautiful people, but instead received this message:

The huge media coverage is currently generating so much traffic on our servers that we have had to limit some users from using the site. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Inconvenient indeed. If that’s not compelling enough, here’s a great, formulaic “controversial” quote from the site’s founder: ”Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model.” Why, Kanye West! How your poetry has improved since the MTV Video Music Awards.

I would be rather amazed if the site had 5,000 people to purge in the first place. Since I can’t know for sure, I guess I’ll just let my fattie imagination roam.