After weeks of hearing about, reading about and trying desperately to download the latest “it” app of the American college student, I finally found myself the proud owner of a Lulu account early last week.
From the moment I first heard of this strange and scandalous dating app, I knew I had to become a part of Lulu’s world. Was I voyeuristically curious to see what my classmates had said about my guy friends? Was I crushing on a guy whose profile I wanted to peruse before taking things any further?
To these questions, dear readers, my answer is no. (Well…mostly no.) No, readers, I write humor for Her Campus, my two personal blogs, and a campus magazine. Voluntarily staying Lulu-free would be an act of irresponsibility to my comedy career something akin to turning down a movie deal with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. As comedy goes, Lulu is absolute gold – and I simply could not stay away.
Of course, there may somehow be a few of you out there in HerCampusLand wondering what exactly Lulu is. While I question how sincerely you can be interested in the average subject matter of this site without having acquired this knowledge at some point over the past month or so, I’ll help you out just this once.
According to Cosmo, Lulu is “Sex and the City meets Facebook.” According to Lulu, Lulu is “all about encouraging good, gentlemanly behaviour.”
According to me, neither of those definitions makes even the remotest sense, and Lulu could more accurately be described as the biggest, weirdest online Burn Book of all time. On Lulu, ladies (and only ladies) can post anonymous reviews of guys they’ve had relationships with – relationships whose pre-made titles range from “Together” to “Friend” to arguably the creepiest of Lulu’s categories, “Relative.”
I’ll say it now: if you are using Lulu to post reviews of your own brother, you need to seek the aid of a mental health professional as quickly as your little weirdo legs can get you to a clinic.
The reviews on Lulu, you see, are (unsurprisingly) rarely of a G-rated kind. A Lulu girl can create reviews only by using the pre-made hashtags and catchphrases that the app provides. While plenty of them are harmless – “#AlwaysPays,” the overly enthusiastic “NothingBadAboutHim” – many are the kinds of things you’d be embarrassed to say to your best friend, let alone the entire female half of the internet.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about the all-around very odd Lulu, though, is actually using it. I am not quite shameless or mentally unstable enough to have posted any reviews on Lulu, but I have used it for massive quantities of silent, guilty creeping – and it has shown me primarily that I am friends with the right kind of guys and there exists a stranger breed of girls than I ever imagined.
For the vast majority of my guy friends, the reviews contain basically the sorts of things I would say if I were describing them to potential suitors: nice, funny, #MomsLoveHim, #HasHotFriends (namely, me), etc. While this is reassuring in terms of my guy friends and their reputations, it is unsettling with regards to my girl friends. Which of you are writing these reviews? It is weird that you do this! I beg you to stop!
Because let’s look at the pre-made Hulu hashtags that are appearing in the reviews of guys whose reviewers are more “Hookup” than “BFF.” In these reviews – typified for my purposes by a guy friend of mine who very obviously wrote the review himself as a strange, strange joke – guys are described with such terms of endearment as “#SexualPanther,” “Big.Feet.,” and “#LeavesBeforeMorning.”
These are the kinds of people who truly use Lulu. Girls who rely on uncomfortably immature euphemisms to describe the illicit acts of guys who can be summed up with phrases that sound like Native American porn star names (#DancesWithSkanks, anyone?).
These are the people that Lulu is for, ladies of Notre Dame. It’s not for us. So step away from the Lulu, my friends – but let the guys I’m friends with write more reviews of themselves first, because that stuff is hilarious.