Call it the "Guygle" of search engines.
The New York Times profiles a free new website that allows women to anonymously "pan men, in a sisterly spirit."
"Lulu" lets women rate their ex-boyfriends, hookups, crushes, friends and relatives who are also their friends on Facebook, explains the Times' Deborah Schoeneman.
Women add pink hashtags to a man's profile, from #TallDarkAnd Handsome and #KinkyInTheRightWays to #TemperTantrums and #WanderingEye. Lulu then tabulates a score for the dude, from 1 to 10.
Launched last year by Alexandra Chong, Lulu was introduced in sororities, its audience increasing by 600 per cent in the past six months, writes Schoeneman. The women she interviewed liked Lulu because of the sense of control it gave them, plus the security of "dating with a reference." Kind of like being introduced through a mutual friend, but in this case, it's a complete stranger online.
"The service has provided a sort of 'Take Back the Internet' moment for young women who have come of age in an era of revenge porn and anonymous, possibly ominous suitors," writes Schoeneman. (The owners go further, claiming that Lulu may even be modifying men's bad behaviour.)
A forerunner in this purportedly empowering genre was Don'tDateHimGirl.com. Launched in 2005, it was billed as a "dating credit report" for women, with members posting anonymous reviews and photographs of cheating men to the site. After a lawsuit and claims that some of the profiles were false and malicious – that this was in effect a "revenge site" – the company announced it would be shifting away from its "database of cads" to a dating-advice model.
On Lulu, men can chime in with their own hashtags, colour-coded blue, of course. And although rating men with positive and negative hashtags is a far cry from revenge porn sites – which let users post lengthy rants about exes, sometimes alongside intimate images and even contact information online – is it problematic nonetheless?
For one thing, the reviews are wholly subjective: One woman's #TemperTantrum is another woman's #Passionate. Another issue is the party providing the intelligence has vested interest: Post-breakup, does a person have the final word on a partner, or a jaded lens? If we all scanned potential partners by chatting up their exes, we'd all be single.