Reddit, a website where men may convene anonymously to slobber over surreptitiously taken photos of young women, is up in arms over a smartphone app that enables women to exchange information about men’s career prospects and penis sizes. Launched in the iTunes Store yesterday, Lulu allows Facebook-verified women to discover and review men privately and anonymously. DI Joe pointed us to the “Rage” subreddit, where Redditors are venting their frustration at a society that encourages women to objectify men so crassly.
“Women have no sense of honor. Not big news really.”
“Check out this. Not only did they build this piece of shit they treat it like a game.”
“The type of women who would use this are women you want to stay away from. Pathetic … “
“Wow. This is straight-up harassment. It invites women to make publish electronic slander about people. I wonder how society would react if I made an app that let men rate women they knew and gossip about how slutty they are.”
Of course, sites where men rate women and gossip about how slutty they are — sometimes without their knowledge or against their will — already exist. Notably, there’s “revenge porn kingpin” Hunter Moore’s site, but a quick but NSFW Google search reveals many similar sites where users can submit sexts from their exes (or current girlfriends) for public scrutiny and rating. Meanwhile, plenty of kids use Facebook to gossip about how slutty women are, occasionally driving them to suicide. And, now that we think about it, men never seemed to require anonymity or an app to tell us what they think about the way we look. They do it on the street and on the subway all the time!
When one Redditor politely noted the hypocrisy of men whining about Lulu — and on Reddit, the home of forums like Creep Shots, Gone Wild, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Stories, no less — the users mounted a noble defense of female objectification.
“Commenting on someones appearance on reddit is not the same as women publicly identifying and doxxing men with their penis size and level of income as a way to try to hurt them real life and discourage other women from dating them.”
“That’s completely different from strangers commenting on a pic of someone with no personal information. A lot of those sites you linked are also using stock photos of cam-whores or porn stars and those aren’t really anyones girlfriend.[…] also how do you know a lot of those women didnt give permission to a guy to post those pics or post them herself? many women get off on the attention or things like /r/gonewild wouldn’t even exist”
“[S]haming someone for something they can change is not = shaming someone for something they can’t change, if someone doesn’t like their body type they can lose weight, a guy can’t take magic pills and wake up the next morning a millionaire with a porno cock.”
Ah, yes. Love those magic overnight weight-loss pills. For the record — and to our mild disappointment — the Lulu app doesn’t say anything about penis sizes or career prospects specifically. You can rate a man’s “ambition,” and there’s a winking “Big. Feet.” hashtag, among dozens of tame ones, but that’s it. There’s not even an open-ended form where women could enter such information. Take what you will from that about Redditors’ insecurities. And if you’re thinking about using Lulu, remember: It’s only slander if it’s not true.
