Luluvise: Nobody - male or female - comes out of this boyfriend-rating app looking good
Ever wanted to judge ex-boyfriends online? Here's your chance...
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Your support makes all the difference.Luluvise is a new app that integrates with Facebook to let you rate men you’ve dated and judge them by what other women say about them. Naturally, when you meet someone you fancy, the first thing you do is Google them. Luluvise is capitalising on that perfectly natural neurotic tendency. Basically, it’s normalising Facebook-stalking.
“The vast majority of reviews are positive — ex-girlfriends, sisters, and friends helping other girls discover the guys they believe are keepers... Lulu isn't a place to trash-talk: Lulu's review system makes it impossible for a vindictive ex to reveal the size of a guy's itty bitty friend,” says the blurb.
The app is littered with these coy euphemisms. It’s true, you can’t say he has a tiny, oh what’s that silly grown-up anatomically correct word for it? oh yes, a tiny PENIS. But you can tell other users about his “#Big.Feet.” And the reason it’s impossible to “trash-talk” about them is all the men in all the world can be rated with a choice of six simple multiple-choice answers. You just tick a box. Just like those little “how do you rate our service?” cards at the end of a meal. Which is fine. It’s not like men have feelings or anything. You can rate his earning power too, by saying if he’s likely to be wearing “dumpster clothes” in five years’ time or an “Italian suit”. And all the information a woman wants to know about a man before she dates him is if he is sexy, good in bed and rich.
Men have no right to reply to the gossip about them, because the app is just for girls. Now, some people might argue that if the gender-roles were reversed then the app might be a tiny bit sexist and objectifying the men it rates (except the site doesn’t call them just “men”. They are categorised as “#GrillMasters” and “#Trekkies” instead). But that’s fine, because they are just men. Just stupid cookie-cutter men who can’t feel or think and can be summarised in a few sassy phrases of cute girl-talk. Some of them “#Smell Amazeballs” - that’s all you really need to know in order to decide whether to embark on a relationship with them - isn’t it?
The only thing worse than an app that endorses rating men behind their back and making women sound like materialistic dolts would be a site that gets men to tell women how to behave in order to please them. It would make women second-guess themselves and have questions like, “when’s the right time to have sex with a guy you’re dating?” and then let men tell them they are sluts and won’t ever get a boyfriend if they have sex on the first date. Oh wait. The Lulu site has a blog, called “Dear Dude” that does exactly that.
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