Who's upset about RateBU.com?

Ok, ok, ok.  It's old hat, right? We're all over it.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, girls being objectified and judged without consent or control.  Yeah, yeah, nice rack on number 7.  Who cares?

I really, really do.

Ladies (and I mean all of my fellow BU alumni) -- imagine if this list existed when you were in college. Do you know what that would do to the Comm Ave walk of shame? It would be the Comm Ave break down of horrors. The Comm Ave writhing pit of of self-consciousness. The Comm Ave holy shit have these people all seen me?  And only given me a 68 out of a hundred?

I don't know if you guys remember this, but a lot BU girls are seriously, seriously shallow. Many of them are nearly impossible to hang out with (often too distracted wearing heels and mini skirts, walking across the 3-inch sheets of ice Allston calls "roads" in below-zero winds). The creator of RateBU has basically taken a campus that suffered from the crippling effects of vain self-centeredness and turned into the official University of Judging Women's Looks, now giving out degrees in all major academic areas, including Are My Tits Out? and This Bag is a Fendi. 

Being a graduate of Boston University, and therefore totally vain and self-centered, I haven't read much about the reaction to RateBU. I just signed up using my old school email address to check out how many of the girls were hotter than me. (Newsflash: it's all of them.)

I'm not going to read into it---pish posh, who has time for their alma mater these days anyway?---but I do know this: There are currently "2,472,162 votes cast on 1389 students!" according to the site. When I discovered RateBU on Tuesday, thanks to the beautiful Irena Eaves, who I would totally score a 98.5, there were only "750,526 votes cast on 387 girls!" Basically, shit is blowing up, and any kind of press, good or bad, is only going to fan the fire.

Oh hey-- "researching" for this story (totally unecessary) and I just realized there are some hot, barely legal BU Boys up there now. Time to start flinging panties ladies! Yeahyuh! (Just kidding, this is all totally disgusting.)

Let's just cut to the chase and talk about what every one wants to know. Take a look at our top ranked man and woman, basking in the glory that is sure to be Prom King and Queen times... 2,472,162.

Meet Lyla and Adam...

They're going to make so many Justin Beiber babies. Am I right? Huh? Huh? 

Another finding in my (highly scientific) research: you don't actually rate anyone by numbers. It's a simple comparison model based unapologetically on Zuckerberg's original drunken concoction in Harvard.

(Haven't heard the history?  click this little picture to get the quick run down:




Justin Doody, RateBU's creator, who, based on name alone, will never make it on the top rankings of the site, nor jumpstart a career like Zuckerberg, set up a system where two BU students' pictures pop up next to each other, along with a prompt asking you to pick "Who's Hotter."  (I kind of wish the phrasing was more retro, a la "Who's the Bigger Hottie?" or "2hot4u69"... but I digress.)

Sometimes the pairs are wildly divergent -- totally normal girl eating ice cream on the street, next to Miss Va-Va-Voom Snookie Poof McGee?  How can you compare? 

Other times, they're uncannily similar:

Black and white chick in a bikini vs. black and white chick in a bikini? Now that's a comparison I can handle!

(By the way, did I mention how much I hate myself through all of this?)

Jumping over to the guys, we are reminded how silly girls can look in their pictures when compared to their unassuming male counterparts who get ranked wearing chicken hats* and candidly cooking.

 

(That guy's chopping pineapple off a Sleeper Hall desk, and he's totally getting my kudos vote.)

What it comes down to (kind of) is that girls already have a ton of pictures of themselves up on Facebook being all like "Omigod doesn't the dress make my ass look GREAT?!" and "I love curling my hair before I go out to parties!" while guys are just saying "Heh, heh. Chicken hats are funny" and "Sometimes I cut pineapple in my room."

If RateBU was, for some inexplicable reason, just guys, it wouldn't really be that offensive. It would just be a bunch of dudes on a site, and I bet they wouldn't even care about walking down Comm Ave one bit. (Oh, but could you imagine the bro high fives amongst the top rated? It's barfable.)

Like I said, I haven't read anything about the reaction, so maybe this is all a bunch of irrelevant crap, but RateBU seems to be a feminist's dream scenario---proof that women objectify themselves, and then get upset about people objectifying them. It's all "Don't you call my momma fat; only I call my momma fat!" 

I never took Women's Studies, so I'm kind of out of my league here in terms of current philosophies on the subject, but it seems like if women just stopped giving a rat's ass about their hair and their teeth and their nail beds, sites like this could be simple (albeit slightly judgmental) fun.

None of those guys are crying in their twin-sized dorm bed over poor rankings, but I bet more than a handful of girls are fretting, and therein lies the problem.

Am I getting somewhere with this or am I crazy? Maybe no one actually cares about the site, and it is all simple fun. Maybe I'm just a big sensationalist muckraker. I'm projecting, right? I should just shut my mouth and stop worrying about my nail beds.

*I'm totally up for discussion if someone thinks that hat might be a penguin.