5 People Punished for Looking Too Good

5 The Handsome Men Banned By Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Arabian government has an authority named the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices. Clearly, that’s a terrible department, if for no reason other than its name is too long. Tellingly, if you check out the department’s Wikipedia page, they ask you if you’re actually looking for a terrorist offshoot of the Taliban that has approximately the same name. 

In 2013, officers from the CPVPV were patrolling a cultural festival held outside of Riyadh. They spotted a crowd forming around a group of three men, one of whom was model Omar Borkan Al Gala. Some attendees recognized the guys from their modeling careers, others swept in to see what other people were looking at, and this rang the officers’ alarm bells (the CPVPVABs). Here’s a pic of Al Gala, though we’re told he was wearing clothes at the festival:

The CPVPV asked the three men to leave the festival. Then UAE media reported that the country had kicked them out of the country altogether, for fear that women would be unable to resist them. Saudi reps and Al Gala would later say that part didn’t happen, and the world got that wrong. 

No, it turned out that while the world was entranced by this story of Saudi Arabia banning these men for being handsome, the real story was that the CPVPV had taken greater effort to expel a beautiful woman:

This singer, named Aryam, had also come visiting from the UAE, entered the Emirati pavilion, and had the CPVPV worried she was going to start singing. The CPVPV stormed the pavilion to apprehend her, and then the separate national guards at the festival fought with the CPVPV and forced them out. The reason the Al Gala incident captured more headlines than this one is this was Saudi Arabia, and suppressing women is considered routine. 

4 Aussie Jesus

Let’s not think, however, that this sort of thing only happens in conservative Arab kingdoms. We’re talking here about the practice of expelling festivalgoers who are guilty of nothing but attracting attention. Just look to the 2012 World Darts Championship in London. Spectators there noticed that one guy in the crowd, Nathan Grindal, reminded them of Jesus Christ. “Je-sus!” they started chanting. “Je-sus!”

During amateur darts competitions, the proper response to rowdy behavior is to smash a bottle on the bar and yell, “Be quiet now, all of you!” This was instead a professional darts competition, so organizers decided the correct course of action was to expel Grindal. Not to expel the other people chanting but to expel Grindal. 

The real injustice came the following year, when Grindal came again and the tournament refused to admit him at all, fearing a repeat of the previous year’s spectacle. We’re pretty sure even Jesus himself was never persecuted like this, but we haven’t finished reading the book yet, so don’t spoil it for us.

3 A Woman on LinkedIn Got Bounced from the Platform Because She Didn’t Look Like An Engineer

When you see an ad, the person pictured there might not be an actual user of the product. Today, they might not be a person at all, but are generated by A.I. In the old days (2013), though, they might have been just a model. So, when LinkedIn users saw the following ad pop up...

...a bunch of them reported the ad for having an unrepresentative image. “The ad’s offering to recruit engineers,” said these complainers, “but that’s clearly some unrelated photo of a woman that you included to seduce us! I don’t come to LinkedIn to get turned on. I come here for inspirational, completely true anecdotes about the importance of grinding.”

LinkedIn disabled the ad, then when the recruiting company (named TopTal) disputed the move, LinkedIn shut down their entire account. But while LinkedIn said the ads erred because the company should use images “related to the product advertised,” the engineer pictured was an actual engineer, Florencia Antara, not a model they’d hired or a stock photo they’d bought.

Though, also, even if they had used a model or stock photo, would that have been so wrong? People in ads usually are just actors. TopTal weren’t claiming to send you the specific woman being pictured. They were just illustrating the general concept of “engineer.” How bitter must those LinkedIn users have been to take the time to report this ad for being too hot? 

2 The Man Who Died of Stares

And now, for something completely different, let’s look at third-century China.

During Jin dynasty, there was a court official named Wei Jei, who was famous for his great beauty. We have no photos of him, of course, or even any contemporary paintings, but here’s a drawing someone made of him based on the description that “this guy was really pretty”: 

As one story puts it, he “was recognized to be pretty as early as age five, when his grandfather said he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to see Wei as a grown-up,” which sounds like a weird misinterpretation of a comment that any grandfather might say about any grandkid. But anyway, by the time he did grew up, people said Wei looked like a jade statue. 

Then he fled the court to avoid being killed in an invasion, and he found himself in a new city, were he was a huge celebrity. Crowds surrounded him every day. He couldn’t take the stress, and he died at the age of 27. They didn’t have any name for the condition that killed him, so they said that he had died of being stared at. And centuries afterward, when people talked of the downsides of celebrity, they had an idiom they could use: “Killing Wei Jie with a stare.”

1 Brad Pitt

In 2002, Pitt did an ad for Toyota in Malaysia, an ad that went to TV and to print. Posters went up on public walls, and people liked them so much, they pulled them down and put them up in their own bedrooms. 

Then the government ordered the ads pulled. Viewing them could “plant a sense of inferiority among Asians,” said the government. Why couldn’t Malaysians see ads with Asians in them rather than white people, they demanded? Of course, if anyone felt inferior after seeing those ads, it wasn’t because the ads featured a white person. It was because they featured Brad Pitt. 

Aside from that specific incident, it’s also possible that good looks ruined Brad Pitt’s life by making him an A-list actor. Pitt is great when he plays weirdos and nuts — the sort of roles normally given to what we call “character actors” — but his looks landed him a bunch of higher-profile parts as the leading man. These can’t be nearly as interesting for him. They’re certainly not as interesting for us, since it’s more fun to see him as a mental patient than whatever standard hero role he got in World War Z. 

With Pitt entering his 60s now, you’d think that might be a good excuse for him to hand off lead roles to younger actors and embrace weirder parts. But he’s currently working on a $300-million movie about Formula One, with him as the lead, so for now, there’s no such luck.

Oh, and one final thing — Pitt suffers from face blindness. He has trouble telling faces apart, and we can only assume this is because he finds almost everyone around him to be not nearly attractive enough to remember. Take some encouragement from this, though. The next time you find yourself struggling to recognize someone you met earlier, it’s probably because you’re so much more attractive that your brain tried to delete them as irrelevant. 

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