Rate-Your-Men App: Creepy, Sexist

Author's Note: It's good to be back! I had a wonderful wedding and honeymoon! Thank you all for being so patient and continuing to visit the site and blog while I've been gone. Wedding article coming soon!

Today I came across this news story about an app called "Lulu." It is a "girls-only" free app on which you can rate your male Facebook friends, including ex-boyfriends. You give them a number between 0 and 10 and then can leave descriptions, as well as positive and negative hashtags about them for other girls to see. The Lulu app is supposed to use "the power of collective wisdom to offer insights on life and love, and everything in between," according to its description on the App Store.

To write this piece with appropriate research, I downloaded the app. It might be one of the creepiest apps I've ever had! Every guy on your Facebook friends list is imported into this collage called a "dashboard." You can see their average score from all the girls who have rated them. When you click on a guy's photo, you see who has rated them: "friend," "hookup," "together," or "crush" and what hashtags they've used to describe them.

The screenshot to the right shows a guy who has had two hookups in a month. What happens when he wants a serious relationship? Are girls going to be scared off because of his "ratings?"

In this other screenshot I took, it shows the hashtags that girls have given him. What on earth does #QuestionableSearchHistory mean? The "best" hashtags include things like #RespectsWomen and #4.0GPA. What happened to the first date?! Why can't we find these things out on our own like we used to? And just because there's a hashtag on a guy, does that mean it's true? Is this now a digital way to pass up potential guys based on a hashtag, much like we used to dismiss guys based on their looks?

The other creepy thing about this app is that it has a "Last Seen" section to let all the ladies out there know where this eligible (or not eligible) man was seen. This seems a little too close to stalking. The guys are not providing this information--the girls are!

Now that we've explored the general creepiness of this act, there's something a little more morally questionable about the Lulu app: if guys had an app like this to rate the girls they know, there would be a lawsuit in less than 24 hours and it would get shut down. There is no way our society would support guys "objectifying women" and "pigeon-holing them with things such as hashtags." I am willing to bet that the same girls running around rating all the guys on Lulu would be horrified if there were guys rating photos of them in their bikinis and talking about their last "hookup."

Our society is in a habit of calling out sexism when men do it to women, but calling it "women's empowerment" and "collective wisdom" when women do it to men. This is a really good example of this blatantly obvious double standard.

This app was created by women, for women. Ladies, let's have a little self-respect. Women still struggle every day to get real, tangible equality. Do you really think teaching girls that it's okay to stalk the men they're interested in and that it's okay to say mean (oh--I mean "wise") things about guys because "they'll never see it" has any integrity? Is it good for girls to be used to objectifying men and then be massively offended when a guy makes an offhand comment about their looks because they feel that they are "only wanted for their looks?"

Lulu is an app that is, in my opinion, more destructive than helpful. It is extremely creepy and sexist. This is the kind of app that we need to speak out against and not allow to take hold in our already struggling society.

"Be the change you wish to see in the world." --Gandhi