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"Lulu Just Transformed From A Dating App Into A Cyberbullying App"
Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2014-06-09 01:13
Article here. Excerpt:
'Let’s all agree—just for the sake of argument—that men are a lesser, subspecies of human, possessing below-average abilities in nearly all areas of life unrelated to bench-pressing or competitive eating. Agreed? OK, great.
The outsized recognition given their inferior intelligence has led them to believe, foolishly, that they are in fact the superior sex: more rational, better at explaining things, cleverer, and in possession of inherently correct opinions. It’s delightful, somewhat twisted amusement to watch them confronted with a little peek or window into their true position in the world; to cut down a man’s ego is like watching a dog try to open a door, or kicking up the dirt of an anthill and watching the ants scurry about, disoriented and scared.
That vague male fear is what made the app Lulu seem fun at first. Men were not allowed to use the app; if they tried to log on (which the app does through Facebook), they’d be coldly denied. Lulu was an app for women, and it allowed them to rate their male Facebook friends based on a variety of personality traits, physical feats, and sex skills, all, ostensibly, in service of warning fellow women about prospective dates’ red flags, and cheering on the good guys. Lulu was like writing “For a good time, call …” on the ladies’ room wall. It felt like wink-y, good old-fashioned misandry; while not especially effective in righting institutional and cultural wrongs, it let us saddle dudes with weird little negs like “OnlyWearsFratTanks” and cackle about it with each other. It was funny and seemingly lighthearted.
Today, that fun ended. The latest update to the app will now allow men to see an overview of their rating, the number of women who have rated him, and a summary of the hashtags used to describe him. The update may have been intended to improve transparency, but instead it shifts what seemed like harmless, insider fun to more overt cyberbullying.
...
Gone from the “male-friendly” version is that private, girl-gossip feel; what remains is merely a lazy and passive way to shame, hurt, or exact revenge on people who can log in and see it. An app that allows you to see what your Facebook friends are anonymously saying about you is not a force for good, or misandry. It’s just mean.
UPDATE
A previous update to Lulu made it so that guys can’t be reviewed unless they have signed up for the app. They can also delete their profile.'
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Comments
Just "mean" now?
It's been "mean" all along. The authors are just coming to this conclusion now?
And they say
And they say men objectify women. And women complain about that. And then women come up with an app like this? Is there a similar app for men?
And then there's the real question: Who created the app? A man or a woman?
We do know a man created the smart phone. And the coding necessary to make it work.
Men are foolish that way. They create great technology and then allow it to fall into the wrong hands. But to use male-created technology to claim men are not so smart is, well, both stupid and mean.
It was created by two women
The app, not the smartphone.
The cell phone by itself as a distinct invention was also invented by a man (Martin Cooper), though it had a long history prior to that of predecessors, all invented by men (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones), and the concept of the smartphone (camera, computer, etc.) was invented/developed by men working together (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones). Arguably, the whole idea for carrying around sophisticated hand-held devices that did any number of things you needed them to do was invented by a man: Gene Roddenberry. That is, if you don't count the "Sonic Screwdriver" of Doctor Who fame (a TV show created by three men) which preceded Star Trek's tricorder. But prior to seeing Dr. McCoy diagnose someone using a tricorder or a scanner on the ship, literally no one had ever seen the concept of non-invasive medical diagnostic equipment capable of doing so much in action even in the abstract. Inventors of such modern, real equipment today (the CAT scanner, the MRI, etc.) have said in interviews that they saw those devices on TV when they were kids and that lit a fire in them-- to make them real. And they did. And guess what gender they were?
But as for the notion that people would take to carrying small devices around being proven out, it was by the advent of the Sony Walkman. That was a concept from the mind of a Japanese Sony executive who was of course male.
Nearly all the enabling technology underlying all of these inventions was invented by men or discovered by men. Likewise for pretty much everything else around us.
Amazing how feminists seem to utterly overlook the collective ingenuity of men as they make sweeping pronouncements of how much smarter, better, etc. women are categorically than men. The degree to which feminists are ignorant/dumb as posts is revealed by the breadth of their ignorance of the world around them and how it came to be so hospitable for them. Take all the things men created for them to live in and around from them for one day and trust me, they would be singing a very different tune. Or, maybe not. After all, ideologues are known for denying reality even after no sane person would.
It took two?
I'm joking, of course, but at least these two did learn to program an app. For a machine invented by a man. So the women could say how dumb men are. Classy.
And there were recent developments that suggest teleportation might be possible. Star Trek lives on!
Why Do men need to join this?
Dudes, quit joining these kinds of websites. I cannot understand why do men need to join these sites and then crib about it!