SocietyJanuary 8, 2018

Summer reissue: I joined that dating app Attractive World and it’s even worse than you thought

Lucy Zee

Contributing writer

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Because dating isn’t already horrible enough, an app named Attractive World recently launched in New Zealand aiming to make it worse. Current members decide whether prospective members are hot enough to be allowed in. Lucy Zee went undercover to see if it was as shitty as it looked.

First published on August 22, 2017.

Last month, Attractive World was launched in New Zealand. It’s a dating service that only allows specially selected attractive people to join. Your fate is up to the members to decide whether you’re hot enough or not.

If you do happen to be one of the lucky ones chosen to join the “exclusive” site, you yourself then get the power to decide if any new applicants are attractive enough to join too.

Similar concepts such as Beautifulpeople.com and The League have caused outrage and disgust amongst the public, some angrily taking to comment sections to ask what kind of world we were living in where people judged other people on their appearances. Uh, how about this world?

And because I am a masochistic, self-flagellating husk of a human being, I signed myself up to the site. Fortunately, as a millennial, I have mastered the Catfish selfie and am able to take a pretty decent pic that looks nothing like my real life self. So with this skill in hand, I was ready to join the ranks of the beautiful people.

Step one on the site, you need to sign up with a username.

Next you answer the usual, boring questions like “what are your favourite films” “what are you looking for on here” “What’s your ideal date?”.

Rom coms. An attractive person. Food, drinks, sex.

Then comes the most important part of all – the photo. I decided on a photo I had taken in bed a few nights before, I combed my hair, wore makeup, angled out my chins and I was three days out before my period so my cleavage was healthily plump. I’ll also add here that no, I don’t think I am the most attractive person in the world but I also do not hate myself. Some days I really like myself. Attractiveness is subjective, like what you like, and never allow another person’s shitty opinion dictate your own self-esteem.

I finally submitted what I thought was perfect profile, one you couldn’t swipe ‘no’ on (unless you were racist). I received an email that told me I needed to wait three days for my profile to be judged by the current members of the Attractive World community.

Less than two days later I got an email congratulating me on making it in!

I was interested to see what kind of people were judging new members. I knew they wouldn’t be as attractive as the stock image models that are used to promote the app but I wasn’t expecting to see your dad’s weird friend he’s known for 10 years from the West Coast. Or your mum’s work frenemy who wears funky capri pants and cork wedges. Or that really sad guy everyone friendzoned at uni who decided to get ‘revenge body’ crazy gym buff because he thinks that’s all women are interested in. Yes all these people are on there and all of them are what I personally would not consider to be ‘conventionally attractive’. Without horribly outing anyone on this site, imagine these ugly Spongebob characters are literally how everyone looks on this ‘Attractive World’ site.

This is a very accurate depiction of what you will expect to see on Attractive World.

I was genuinely quite shocked that most of the people on here had really unflattering pictures and were all quite old. I couldn’t pick a single one I would have been interested in talking to. I could feel myself becoming more and more judgemental as I scrolled through the filthy masses of sad, lonely people – very aware that I was one of them as well.

I thought I would try my hand at voting new applicants into the club, but turns out I couldn’t bring myself to play the game right. I didn’t want to date any of them, but I was sure they would be attractive to someone else, so who was I to deny someone a chance at happiness?

I gave up after three people.

As an experiment I deleted my account and created another profile, one without make up, good angles or boobs and even used the ‘take a photo now’ option like a psychopath. I wanted to see if me at my most disgusting would make it in. So I submitted a profile, and got an email back.

The email said my photo breached their terms and conditions:

* Low quality photos (photo taken from too far away, too pixelated, blurry, retouched, too small, too dark, etc…)
* Group photos
* Photos containing either a cigarette, pack of cigarettes or a cigar
* Photo taken from your childhood
* Sexually explicit or indecent, offensive or otherwise inappropriate photos
* Copyrighted images
* Cartoons, drawings or pictures of animals…

I am 100% confident that I didn’t break any of these conditions. There was no condition that the photo couldn’t be ugly. I had my suspicions on what the problem might have been but I tried again anyway, and twice got the same email back.

My theory is that if the community rejects your image, Attractive World will then ask you to post another one by citing the T&C’s instead of telling you the real truth – that your real self is too ugly for love.

Signing up and browsing is free, but if you want to talk to anyone, or even read messages, you need to pay a hefty subscription price of $49.99 a month. Even if you’re serious about looking for love, look elsewhere. You can do so much more with that money. If you want to pay $49.99 to see trash, buy a Grabaseat to Palmerston North (I just a spent a week there OK). Go fedora shopping. Take a friend to a Tom Cruise movie.

The app isn’t really an app, it’s just a buggy website with terrible design and function that’s hard to navigate and slow to respond, and sometimes it’ll flip entirely to French. The account deletion process will also bug out and you’ll get a million emails every day reminding you that you’re still ugly and single.

The idea of creating a community where people are blatantly forced to make and feel judgement is so demeaning. Sure, this is technically the premise for most of the popular dating apps right now like Tinder and Grindr, but the difference is the exclusivity Attractive World is touting – it preys on people’s insecurity and money and offers a shitty service.

You wouldn’t line up for three days outside a club that had a few ugly people, shoddy architecture and a $49.99 entry fee would you? No you would be smart and go to the popular bar that has no line or door charge and also has solid walls with easy fire exits.

Attractive World does not live up to its name in any sense.

But don’t give up. If you really want to experience an attractive world, just open your eyes. You’re living in one right now, my friend.

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Women sunbathing topless on a beach in Barcelona. (Photo: Carton828 / CC BY-SA 3.0)

SocietyJanuary 8, 2018

When will New Zealand finally grow up about boobs?

Kristin Hall

Contributing writer

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Women sunbathing topless on a beach in Barcelona. (Photo: Carton828 / CC BY-SA 3.0)

The groping of a topless woman at a music festival last year highlights just how retrograde our attitudes to public nudity remain. But, writes Kristin Hall, there is a better way – just look at any European beach.

It was a lazy day on a white hot strip of Italian beach and I was caught in an elaborate tangle of singlet strap, bra strap and bikini strap like some sort of discount Houdini who couldn’t get untied without assistance, forcing everyone to ask for their money back.

Over the tops of their dewy cans of Desperado, the bronzed goddesses the next umbrella over shot mocking glances my way, and probably said something like “silly bitch”, but it was in Italian so it sounded much nicer.

Italian women would not put themselves through such public humiliation, instead they just took their shirts and bras off and left them that way, allowing their chests to experience the full benefit of the afternoon sun. This was of course the sensible thing to do, but I am from New Zealand, a place where cow tits and their by-products are a national obsession but human tits are like fleshy social pariahs.

Until I began travelling across Europe in April last year, I had no idea that countries outside of New Zealand weren’t equally scandalised by boobs. You can imagine my shock when in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, and pretty much every other country that’s warm enough to warrant it, there were mammaries dangling uninhibited as far as the eye could see.

And not just youthful and flawless ones. There were stretchmarked boobs, withered raisin boobs, boobs that looked like two grapefruits in a pair of pantyhose, gargantuan plastic boobs, and mastectomy scars where boobs used to be. The boobs were in the water, on the beach and playing volleyball, which frankly looked pretty uncomfortable, but at least they were free. Twelve year old girls frolicked topless next to their equally topless brothers, and it made me think about twelve year old me, sitting in my boyfriend’s spa pool in knee length board shorts and my dad’s t-shirt, trying to guess what temperature the human brain cooks at.

As we are so often reminded by baby boomers and people who host shows on Newstalk ZB, the country is thriving. This much GDP, this many millions of tourists buying those funny key rings where you can make a sheep do a poo and so on. What never gets a mention is that as well as being really bad at a whole bunch of important things like building affordable houses and matching strangers for reality TV shows, New Zealand is languishing in the lowest possible percentile when it comes to the important international issue of Being Grown Up About Boobs.

You might think I’m being dramatic. Whipping your tits out on the beach, in the park or even in your local Bunnings isn’t actually illegal, but try telling that to anyone who’s actually done it at a so-called ‘family friendly bathing spot’.

What kind of monster would call the cops on a pair of tits? People in Opunake, that’s who, in the summer of 2012. There were two whole articles written about it.

Just last summer my old flat mate Lucy indulged in a casual topless sunbathe at Mount Maunganui. She’s from Amsterdam, a place that is definitely well up there on the Being Grown Up About Boobs scale. But the New Zealanders at the Mount that day were not so keen on minding their own damn business, and vicious side-eyes were being thrown at her and her innocent breasts from all angles.

“They looked at me like I’d lost my mind so I put my top back on real fast…..I just felt uncomfortable.”

“I think overall New Zealand is a little but more conservative [than the Netherlands] and maybe girls don’t feel very comfortable in their own skin.”

And then there’s the issue of harassment, given the frequency with which Kiwi lad-bros yell “TITS OUT FOR THE BOYS” from the windows of passing cars, imagine the frenzy of slack-jawed witticisms if the tits were actually out.

In Malaga, Spain, I witnessed a teenage girl, who had been sitting with her friends, run over to a group of boys to ask for a lighter. She wore only bikini bottoms, and the young boys lit her cigarette, looked at her face, smiled and proceeded to not call her a whore, a slut or any other clever permutations of the word. It was a beautiful moment.

Will New Zealand ever reach such levels of emotional maturity? It’s hard to say. Lucy hopes so.

“Maybe all it takes is a couple of girls to do it and it will be super normal next summer, free the nipple!”

So if you are reading this thinking that it would be nice to go to your cousin’s summer wedding without having pasty tiger stripes darting all across your back and chest, please do take this as your sign. Let the girls hang out, let them bob around in the sea, or at least try it, and if you don’t like it you can put them back in their sweaty polyurethane prisons.

Blokes, think about how it feels to have a warm February breeze on your nips – you take that feeling for granted. Why not take a pillow with you on holiday so you can scream ” NICE RACK” into it anytime you are tempted to say it to an actual person.

And finally, Prudes of New Zealand, if you see a bare breast at your local swimming hole, think of it as a beautiful canary enjoying a brief spell of freedom. And if you can’t do that, look down, do a Sudoku or make a sandcastle in the shape of the Holy Cross. Just don’t call the cops.