From The Gloss:
Review Men Like Restaurants With New Lulu App, The Yelp Of Romance (For Girls!)
Someone once Tweeted, ”Yelp.com: explore where local illiterates have recently stopped eating.”
If you are one of the many people who find Yelp to be a source of valuable information (not in the social anthropology sense), however, you may be receptive to this new Lulu app, which is to men as Yelp is to restaurants. All you need is a Facebook profile confirming your femaleness and you can go on Lulu and review exes, crushes, hook-ups, current loves, friends and relatives. Like meat, but with abs.
According to founder Alexandra Chong, she “created Lulu because my girlfriends and I needed it.” But also because people will download and use such a service, seeing as how any technology that promotes and cultivates human vileness tends to be very popular.
Here is a description of Lulu for you, by Lulu:
Lulu is the smart girls’ app for private recommendations and reviews on guys.
Lulu takes its cues from the real world: we meet a guy and think he’s cute, but want to know if he’s the charmer he appears or really a wolf in sheep’s clothing. So we ask our girlfriends, and look him up on Facebook and Google. It’s a private, fun ritual we all indulge in, often complicated by the fact that we don’t want the guy to know we’re checking out his creds.
Enter Lulu—the first database of men, built by women, for women. Through Lulu, you can read and write reviews of guys, which are pulled from a variety of tools, questionnaires, and fun features. The reviews show numerical scores across a number of categories, putting the emphasis on collective wisdom.
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But there are obviously bigger and grosser aspects than the stupid hashtags. Namely, this whole thing is really objectifying. People aren’t movies. Or restaurants. They shouldn’t be reviewed and then ranked, publicly, according to their score. That’s what Maxim does.
It’s also impressive how poorly Lulu manages to reflect on both genders. Not every woman internet stalks dudes and then gabs with her “girlfriends” about it over lemon drops or half-caff beverages or fat free stuff because life isn’t the first act of a fucking romcom. Moreover still, not everybody’s straight (though Lulu is only concerned with them). Things just harken back to a simpler time with the Lulu app, a time when men were men (with lots of money and cars and love-believing!) and women were kind of sad and desperate with no real personality to speak of. Per the brand’s press release: Lulu aims “to create a discreet, private space for girls to talk about the most important issues in their lives: their relationships.” The worst.
Though we’re certainly more used to seeing stuff like this with women as the target, we’d like to emphasize this sucks when it’s done to anyone. Regardless of gender, we’re not in favor of anything that offers a space for people to say mean things about other people* under the guise of helping… though the glossy, airheaded faux female empowerment makes it even harder to swallow.
Read the rest here.
The homepage for the app is here.
Some enterprising young man has created an app that allows men access to the Lulu database (which they can't normally access) and see their own reviews, and reviews of their Facebook friends. Check it out here.