Lulu, a search engine created last year by women for women, enables them to publish their opinions about the men they know in much the same way Yelp allows diners to publicly dish about the restaurants they’ve visited.
The way it works is that women sign up for Lulu via Facebook and provide a list of all their male “friends.” The males don’t necessarily have to be guys the women have dated. They could be coworkers, casual acquaintances or, even, their Uncle Boris.
Then the women rate the men based on their looks, manners, spending habits and ambition. They do this by selecting from a list of hashtags.
“#SexualPanther,” for instance, would be a positive review; “#WearsEdHardy,” not so much. “#CleansUpGood” may not sound like much of a compliment, but it’s probably better than “#CheaperThanABigMac.”
When the questionnaire has been completed, scores are calculated by an unexplained — and probably unexplainable — algorithm. Anything close to a 10 would suggest that the guy is prime beef. Anything under a 5 would mean the guy probably is doomed to spend the rest of his evenings playing video games in his parents’ basement.
Cosmopolitan has referred to Lulu as “Sex and the City Marries Facebook” and hundreds of thousands of women reportedly are checking it before going out on a date, including an estimated one quarter of all college women.
“When you Google a guy, you don’t want to know if he voted Republican or what he wrote a paper about in college,” Lulu’s creator, 32-year-old Alexandra Chong, said in a New York Times interview. “You want to know if mothers like him. Does he have good manners? Is he sweet?” She calls Lulu, “A private network for girls to share insights on love and life.” A “guygle.”
Others call it “creepy.”
“Unwelcomed sexual commentary isn’t a compliment, it’s harassment,” insists Amanda Hess, who writes for Slate.
“If there was a man’s version of Lulu, women would absolutely not stand for it,” declared the Daily Barometer.
Which probably is true, although some men have been publicly sharing their opinions about women for as long as there have been restroom walls. Most of these begin with, “For a good time call …”
So maybe it only fair for guys who assume their hashtag would be “#TallDarkAndHandsome” to log on to Lulu and discover that it’s #ObsessedWithHisMom.”
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