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posted by martyb on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the APPropriate-measures dept.

Andrew Marantz has an interesting read in The New Yorker about Lulu, a mobile app already downloaded five million times that allows female users of Facebook to make positive and negative evaluations of male users on the basis of their romantic, personal, and sexual appeal. Lulu is rigidly heteronormative—only women can rate men—and women tend to use Lulu the way someone investigating a potential mate a generation ago might have sought out the town busybody.

“It’s one of these rare products that evokes only strong reactions,” says Sam Altman. “No one feels ambivalent about it.” To rate a man on Lulu, a woman selects from a battery of pre-written hashtags—some positive (#LifeOfTheParty, #DoesDishes), some negative (#Boring, #DeathBreath), and some ambiguous (#DrivesMeCrazy, #CharmedMyPantsOff, #PlaysDidgeridoo). Those responses are distilled into a harshly precise numerical score. Alexandra Chong calls her startup “a community where women can talk honestly about what matters to them.” Others have called it Yelp for men. “Of course people on Lulu talk about sex,” says Chong. “Sex is part of what women talk about.”

A man must grant his permission for a Lulu profile to be created on his behalf, and, perhaps surprisingly, most men consent, says Chong. “We try to tell men, ‘Women on Lulu are building men up, not just tearing them down.'” Many women use Lulu for caveat-emptor purposes, such as managing expectations before a date. “One guy I went out with had a lot of hashtags like #OneTrackMind," says Sarah Burns, "so I dressed conservatively, didn’t drink too much—I tried to send the message, I’m not going home with you tonight. Which I didn’t.”

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:36PM (#176745)

    For some reason, I'm pretty sure a reverse of this app (where men and only men can rate women) would be lambasted as terribly sexist. I'd be surprised if any women would volunteer to have profiles created.

    I seem to recall that this was the initial premise of Facebook. Can anyone confirm this or is my memory faulty? But I do take your point: if an app were created today where men, and only men, could rate women the creator would be hounded off the interwebs for eternity. The mental gymnastics that women will need to go through to justify this are going to be astounding, I'm sure.