Emily Vine discusses the recent backlash from the controversial website, Ratemash, which takes your Facebook profile picture and asks others to rate it.
I imagine the ‘brains’ behind Ratemash.com have got exactly what they wanted: numerous hits as people succumb to the overwhelming curiosity of whether they or their friends / acquaintances / archenemies have ‘made the top 50’. The wave of bad publicity for the site which claims to help students identify ‘the most good looking guys and girls on campus’ has undeniably played right into the maniacally clapping hands of those who created it. It’s been the main topic of conversation, both on campus and online for a good few days as students (quite rightly) discuss how awful a concept it is and also, more worryingly, dispute how highly placed their fellow students are.
Photo Credit: B Rosen via Compfight cc
Much has already been said about the intrinsically disturbing nature of the site. An unsettling and unwanted invasion of privacy, a green light for the strange folk of the internet to crawl out of their lairs and actively peruse photos of ‘hot’ young people, and an acknowledgement that it’s considered acceptable to publically judge and compare people based solely on their appearance; this project is immoral for so many reasons, and I don’t doubt it will be shut down in the not so distant future.
Put aside the inherent creepiness of the whole enterprise for a moment and it’s apparent that the site itself is just plain odd. It appears to be a randomly generated selection of profiles (whether human or otherwise) which have some connection with the university; a quick look on the Exeter Leaderboard will show you that ‘Bronze Angelz Exeter’ and ‘Wildsoc’ are currently doing pretty well considering neither of them have faces.
The scoring system seems equally dubious, as many entries all seem to have the same number of ‘points’, and male students appear on the girls’ ‘leaderboard’ and vice versa. You could say I’m a little skeptical about how democratic this site is in its allocation of the label ‘attractive’.
I don’t actually know how the ‘rating’ system works; when I attempted to access the ‘rate guys/girls’ section of the site it promptly tried to sync with my Facebook account and I equally hastily aborted that particular mission, already sick with guilt that I was adding to the site’s hits through my attempts to dismantle it. So regardless of how it works and whether the photos which appear on the ‘leaderboard’ are ranked by a computer or actually represent the views of those lovely charitable people who have taken the time to ‘vote’, the main issue here is that people are actually responding to the results. If you’ve been part of or merely overheard a conversation about Ratemash.com in the last few days it will in all probability have included variations of “Why is he ranked above him?!” or “How did she even get into the top 50?!”
Like many others, I was only aware that my picture had appeared on the site because a Facebook friend contacted me and thought I should know about it. When I’ve mentioned this to friends, comments have ranged from “Nice one” to “I think someone put you on there as a joke.” For me, people’s reactions to the site are the main problem here: rather than an acknowledgement that it is either a load of artificial crap or a worrying reflection of how we categorize others based on their appearance, many seem to be taking these leaderboards at literal ‘face value’ as a measurable guide of relative attractiveness. Finding yourself on this site is not a compliment, neither is being omitted a damning indictment.
There are several articles currently floating round the internet which are propagating how unpleasant Ratemash.com is, and many of them include quotes from those students affected alongside the name of their respective university and ‘rank’, and, almost without fail, a helpful picture of the student in question so that people can indeed judge for themselves whether he or she is attractive enough to deserve the rank that they have ‘achieved.’ This is what I find most disquieting about the whole situation – Ratemash.com has succeeded in getting the publicity it wanted, but more sadly, has succeeded in encouraging us to question whether we agree with the findings of the leaderboard, and consequently to actively judge and compare others purely on the basis of publically sanctioned notions of ‘attractiveness.’
Emily Vine
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