In “Super Sad True Love Story,” Gary Shteyngart’s novel set in a social-media dystopia, each person is publicly assigned a “fuckability” score, determined by various algorithms. Lulu, an app founded in 2013, is the closest anyone has come, so far, to making Shteyngart’s vision come true. “We look up everything these days,” Alexandra Chong, Lulu’s founder, said recently. “Before we go out for a drink, we look up bars. Why should we not also have references when it comes to the most important thing?” Chong calls her startup “a community where women can talk honestly about what matters to them.” Others have called it Yelp for men.
Lulu is often called a dating app, but it is actually a rating app. (You can use it to prowl for potential dates—it’s a free country—but the app will not do it for you.) To rate a man on Lulu, you select from a battery of pre-written hashtags—some positive (#LifeOfTheParty, #DoesDishes), some negative (#Boring, #DeathBreath), and some ambiguous (#DrivesMeCrazy, #CharmedMyPantsOff, #PlaysDidgeridoo). Those responses are distilled into a harshly precise numerical score. Lulu is not exclusively about fuckability—#MothersLoveHim, #OwnsCrocs, #SmellsAmazeballs, and #Belieber are also popular hashtags—but it’s not not about fuckability, either. “Of course people on Lulu talk about sex,” Chong said. “Sex is part of what women talk about, in general. I’m always making investors blush, because we rarely have a meeting where dick size or anal sex doesn’t come up.”
Lulu is rigidly heteronormative—only women can rate men—and it is built around a traditional gender binary. On Facebook, you can mark your gender as male, female, or “custom,” which opens a text box into which you can type "bi-gender," "genderqueer," or whatever you want. Chong has shown no interest in allowing users such freedom; Lulu is an app for straight women. This homogeneity may help account for the app’s success—more than five million people have downloaded it—but the idea remains polarizing.
“It’s one of these rare products that evokes only strong reactions,” Sam Altman told me. “No one feels ambivalent about it.” Altman is the president of Y Combinator, the foremost startup incubator in the country. “In the world of straight online dating, women seem to have almost all of the power,” he continued. Why, then, has Lulu not exploited its advantage by becoming a dating service? “The pessimistic case is that they don’t know how—they just got lucky with their first thing and they’re riding that out,” Altman said. “The more bullish case would be, what they have is so successful that they have no incentive to do anything else—at least not yet.” And there’s a third possible reason: plausible deniability. “Facebook, in the early days, was very much used as a dating service—you could always claim you were using it for something else, even though virtually no one did. With this, if you market it as a service to help women or whatever, maybe more people are comfortable using it.”
Women tend to use Lulu for advice about the things that most of us aren’t eager to talk about, the way someone investigating a potential mate a generation ago might have sought out the town busybody. During a recent user-testing session at Lulu’s sunny office in the Flatiron District, Sarah Burns, a twenty-four-year-old dancer and event planner, said that she uses Lulu mostly for caveat-emptor purposes, such as managing expectations before a date. “One guy I went out with had a lot of hashtags like #OneTrackMind, so I dressed conservatively, didn't drink too much—I tried to send the message, I’m not going home with you tonight. Which I didn’t.” Other people use the app to avoid unpromising one-night stands. “A friend and I got back from the bars one night, and we were on Lulu,” Burns said. “She’d been texting with this guy all night, so I’m, like, ‘Look him up.’ He had a 3.1”—out of 10—“which is, like, really not good. No one who had dated him gave him a good rating, and no one who had hooked up with him gave him a good rating. So it was sort of, like, what’s the point? She texted him some excuse and went to sleep.”
Taylor Morgan, also twenty-four, lives in Monmouth County, New Jersey. On her phone, she searched for a guy she knew, then pulled up his profile photo (biceps, hair gel). “He has a 6.1, which seems fair, although, granted, I’ve never hooked up with him,” she said. “But the hashtags are incredibly spot-on.” The ones in red—chosen by the women who had rated him—told a cogent story: #AddictedToMirrors, #ShouldComeWithAWarning. The hashtags in blue—the ones he had chosen for himself—told more or less the same story: #Cocky, #PerfectStubble, #SexPanther. This was all fascinating, in a trainwreck sort of way, but it was also useful cautionary information. It’s one thing to meet someone who has perfect stubble; it’s another thing to learn that he is willing to apply that description to himself. “If a girl wants to go there, she will at least know what she’s getting into,” Morgan said.
“Also, I’m sorry, but he gave himself #Doesn’tKissAndTell?” Burns said. “How can you give yourself that and #SexPanther at the same time?”
A man must grant his permission for a Lulu profile to be created on his behalf, and, perhaps surprisingly, most men consent, Chong said. Five per cent deactivate their profiles at some point, but, within a week, one-third of those men come back. “We try to tell men, ‘Women on Lulu are building men up, not just tearing them down,’ ” Chong added, and it’s true that plenty of profiles, perhaps those created by a man’s current partner or an amicable ex, are 9.5s rife with compliments. When they aren’t, though, is it really the company’s responsibility to protect men’s feelings? Women who write controversial video-game reviews might be deluged with rape threats; is it such a big deal if a few men are accused of having #NoEdge?
Chong did not embrace this retributive logic. She did not even go so far as to call Lulu a feminist enterprise. She did, however, say this: “Twitter can be really scary for women. Reddit is for men. Pinterest ended up being majority-female, but only by accident. I’m glad that Lulu is a place that is, intentionally, for women.”
Recently, the app introduced a feature called Truth Bombs. It allows anonymous users to solicit insights from the rest of the community—like Cosmo Confessions, but unedited and in real time. Most of these discussions do not come close to passing the Bechdel test, and many are puerile or worse. Recent threads include “Do you like sex” and “FAV IF YOU THINK CHRIS BROWN IS HOT AF.” Other threads, though, seem like sincere requests for advice, by and for straight women: “After how many months do guys say ‘I love you’?” Recently, amid all of this, there was a desperate young woman in Wisconsin threatening self-harm: “I just wanna cut again.” Several users responded swiftly—“That is definitely the wrong choice sweetheart”—and offered to talk her down in a private thread. She agreed.
