Why waste time with all that silly getting-to-know-someone?

March 20, 2004 10:20 AM

The Internet's Little Black Book.HowWasShe.com "[provides] a fun way for you to get information about the sexual tendencies of your potential partners, comment on your own experiences, and other future services rendered." Areas of rating include hotness, easiness, and quality of blowjobs. (Probably NSFW)
posted by ferociouskitty (36 comments total)

This is an exploitation site. It is not exploiting women, it is exploiting the stupid men who believe it's real. Then send the guy who runs it money ($40 suggested). This is far from "the best of the web".
posted by stbalbach at 10:34 AM on March 20, 2004

Finally, the potential of the internet is utilized!
posted by crazy finger at 10:34 AM on March 20, 2004

Wow. That's vile.
posted by evac at 10:37 AM on March 20, 2004

My first shot! I check out a babe. She likes threesomes. How many guys has she fucked? one...Is my math off or what? O, ok. perhaps the third dick was really a pussy.
posted by Postroad at 10:41 AM on March 20, 2004

What, the mens room wall at the Texaco isn't good enough for you people? Some people are never satisfied.
posted by jonmc at 10:58 AM on March 20, 2004

postroad: I think it only counts how many gentlemen (right...) on the site that have claimed to have had sex with her.

And yeah. Shitty site.
posted by ODiV at 11:08 AM on March 20, 2004

This site needs some Perverted Justice!
posted by Slagman at 11:17 AM on March 20, 2004

I can't believe this site is still up. This was posted to another community I belong to a few months ago, and enough outraged people wrote the provider, and it was taken down. Ugh. Even if this is supposed to be "satire," it's from funny
posted by Zosia Blue at 11:48 AM on March 20, 2004

I can't believe this site is still up. This was posted to another community I belong to a few months ago, and enough outraged people wrote the provider, and it was taken down.

If everything that was stupid and/or tasteless on the web was taken down, there wouldn't be much left. Anything left. I think it's more tragic than offensive, but at least it keeps all those people posting "lol shez HOTT" messages locked up in their bedrooms, instead of out in public pestering women who actually exist. In that sense it's something of a public service.
posted by zygoticmynci at 12:06 PM on March 20, 2004

From the legal disclaimer:

All claims made by users on this site, or by this site are fictional and are unrelated to any real people or events. People depicted by photograph on this site are there for the purposes of entertainment, not for identification. The comments on any one woman's sexual history are not presented as fact, but as hypothetical concepts.
posted by Ljubljana at 12:27 PM on March 20, 2004

Ljubljana - I thought that was probably the most interesting part of the site - I'm reading it as CYA bull, because I'm thinking it would be hard to fake the idiocy of the user commentary. Either way, I find it hard to believe the site hasn't received a cease and desist from every woman pictured.
posted by ferociouskitty at 12:32 PM on March 20, 2004

Dang, the only woman in my state has chlamydia and herpes. So much for getting a date this weekend.
posted by fatbobsmith at 12:44 PM on March 20, 2004

I'm not trying to start a massive flame war, but if you visit this site more than once you are super duper dumb!
posted by mcsweetie at 1:20 PM on March 20, 2004

There is a whole lot of folks with a whole lot of free time dedicating their efforts to eradicating this website. The amazing thing is the sheer hated and anger they are working up about it.

For every extremist on the religeous right who thinks God wants them to control what you see and read, there is some politcally correct zealot on the left who wants to do the same thing.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/anti_howwasshe/

The angry thread at Ms. Magazine

A typical quote....

"Job, it looks like we're going to have to do some independent research on this. I really want to get the bastards shut down. I've replaced the entire first page of the sexual diary with my own versions of the sexual pranks guys have described (some of the most heinous, offensive crap you've ever seen) and I've sent e-mails to everyone I can think of for now, but I'll have to look into the law and other places I can report this to when i have time."
posted by soulhuntre at 1:20 PM on March 20, 2004

I can't believe this site is still up. This was posted to another community I belong to a few months ago, and enough outraged people wrote the provider, and it was taken down. Ugh. Even if this is supposed to be "satire," it's from funny

from the site:

HowWasShe.com is back up and running! Our previous webhosts, who were really cool, but prefer not to be named, had to shut us down because we were bad for their business. Our new webhosts don't care, we don't think. Please be patient with us, as this was not a planned transfer, so everything isn't exactly in order. If you notice any errors, or problems with the site, please email us at [e-mail]. This includes things like profiles being rejected that you know were legit, site failures, error messages.
Unfortunately, with new hosting comes new costs. We had a deal with our old providers, where we advertised for them and they gave us space, and the new ones aren't willing to let us host for free. That means that our expenses are going to go up, and, to that end, we'd like to ask our users to consider donating money to us to allow us to keep the site up. While we enjoy hosting the site, and are happy to do so, we aren't rich.

Anyhoo. Quite a few of you are pretty damn elitest, it seems. Lighten up.
posted by delmoi at 1:23 PM on March 20, 2004

You know, all a couple of ladies out there have to do is look up the guys who participate on this site, register the domain name www.HowBigIsHisPenisReally.com, and let them know that they'll be doing a joint venture.

Site'll be gone by Monday.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 1:27 PM on March 20, 2004

a joint venture

heh.

XQUZYPHYR I was just going to post the same idea but you beat me to it and with a better pun than I had thought up.
posted by CunningLinguist at 1:55 PM on March 20, 2004

also from anti-howwasshe,

The two most alarming aspects of this site are that women's personal contact information is given out so that other men may contact them anonymously via the site - and that MINORS are pictured and described in pornographic ways, with their names, ages, and high schools listed.

if that's true, then the site, or at least the offending entries are bad news. go, lefty zealots, go.
posted by mcsweetie at 1:57 PM on March 20, 2004

Wow, my ex in on their frontpage!

Oh wait, that's Denise Richards.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 2:30 PM on March 20, 2004

WTF?:

The boys say:
What a worthless pile of flesh. Shes hot but what a worhtless fuck. I m jesus make some fucking noise. felt like punching her during the act just to get a reaction or a noise of some kind. Took five minutes to weasel it in the snatchbox and then crap. Not to mention shes total pillhead and does lots of coke.

Yup, pretty vile.
posted by Shane at 2:31 PM on March 20, 2004

Well at least he used proper capitalization and punctuation.

Come to think of it, it must be fake, then.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 2:50 PM on March 20, 2004

if that's true, then the site, or at least the offending entries are bad news. go, lefty zealots, go.

The claims that some of these women have STDs present a lawsuit waiting to happen as well. I think some news program got sued once for doing a voiceover that said something like "1 out of 5 people have herpes" while showing some unwitting people walking down the street, and they didn't even directly say that any of those people had herpes. I can't imagine what hosting provider would want to be involved with this.
posted by transona5 at 3:05 PM on March 20, 2004

There is a whole lot of folks with a whole lot of free time dedicating their efforts to eradicating this website. The amazing thing is the sheer hated and anger they are working up about it.

For every extremist on the religeous right who thinks God wants them to control what you see and read, there is some politcally correct zealot on the left who wants to do the same thing.

The difference being, of course, that the women featured on that site actually, um, exist. And now have to explain to their bosses and grandparents why some creepy weirdo has posted about them on the web.

Do regular publishing laws cover this type of thing?
posted by maggie at 3:10 PM on March 20, 2004

Do regular publishing laws cover this type of thing?

yes. and virtually every high school has such "laws".
posted by quonsar at 5:07 PM on March 20, 2004

"The difference being, of course, that the women featured on that site actually, um, exist."

I have no problem with someone who is hurt by the site taking any and all action there is to take legally to get compensated. Sue away.

I have no problem with anyone who wants to protest by writing letters do so. If the site is putting people in danger then those people should certainly take action.

But it would be totally false to say that the real issue for many of those on the more extreme edges is contact information. That are just the levers they will use to achieve their goal. Even if it was moderated so that the entries were anonymous and the images all pixellated they don't like the concept so strongly they would go to any lengths to get it or anything like it taken down.

Just a thought, draw your own conclusions.
posted by soulhuntre at 5:41 PM on March 20, 2004

Eh. Perhaps I'm just not enough of a zealot in my leftiness, but I think that one of the things about freedom of speech is that sometimes people will say things you don't like and you have to let them. This site falls squarely in that category.

It's sleazy and distasteful, but there's far, far worse stuff all over the internet. (Even assuming the site is real: it claims not to be and a brief browse suggests that it's fake. FWIW, the LJ community has posted some links to entries for underage girls, but the ones I followed have been changed; they now refer to adult women. If they'd actually been deleted they would probably not re-use the ID number... Also the URLs of the images look suspiciously non-autogenerated...)

I'm curious why people find this site worse than, say, Joe Fratboy posting about the sex he did/didn't have on his blog.
posted by hattifattener at 5:48 PM on March 20, 2004

If these are real girls, then this is pretty obviously libel material. Libel is not protected free speech and the burden of proof for a civil suit is pretty low when you're dealing with non-public figures. (PS, IANAL)
posted by Skwirl at 8:54 PM on March 20, 2004

Real or not, it was pretty fascinating to read the comments left. If the site is faked then the writer should be doing something more useful with his talents.

Though posting nude photos of someone without their consent is a pretty clear no no.
posted by fenriq at 12:51 AM on March 21, 2004

If these are real girls, then this is pretty obviously libel material.

Only if the information posted is false.
posted by kindall at 3:30 AM on March 21, 2004

I don't think I could use truth as a defense to libel, if, say, I put up a Web site accurately chronicling how Susie, from my high school, blew the entire football team.

Wikipedia has a useful entry on libel.

Many nations have various civil and criminal penalties for libel and slander, and different conditions for determining whether an offense has occurred. Some legal systems, including some in the United States, require in some situations that the subject of the communication prove, in a civil court, that the defendant made statement with "malice", meaning either believing it was false or with "reckless disregard" for whether it was. There are four categories of statement, however, that are defamatory per se, which means they are so inherently derogatory that a plaintiff need prove only that they were made: Those are statements accusing a person of:
having committed a crime
having a loathsome disease (such as leprosy long ago or AIDS now)
being unchaste
posted by inksyndicate at 10:30 AM on March 21, 2004

If libel doesn't work, some states have a common law tort of invasion of privacy. I'd imagine that posting nekkid pictures on the internet probably fit the bill.
posted by PrinceValium at 10:37 AM on March 21, 2004

Well, you need permission to disseminate photographs of people; there are exceptions made for journalists and such, but in general the law is pretty clear about this. This is why it's so important for budding photographers to make sure their models have signed their contracts.

Even journalists are pretty good about simply asking a man-on-the-street interviewee, "Do you mind if I ask you some questions," and why there's a difference between on the record and off.

As far as I know, posting information about someone is legal provided it's truthful, and that it meets whatever the ruling judge's criteria may be for the safety of the individual (so SSN #'s would be a no-no). I know of at least a couple of recent (past couple of years) cases where the line has been pushed back, particularly with websites posting names and addresses of doctors that perform abortions. In those cases, the judges ruled that the intent of posting the information was malicious, but that first amendment principles were more important than the potential threat doctors might receive. More info at this MeFi thread.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:52 AM on March 21, 2004

I just like the corrupted pics and erratic PHP.

Now that's hot...
posted by Samizdata at 12:07 PM on March 21, 2004

There must be people who've uploaded their own conquests - therefore surely SOME of the girls are real. I dunno, the disclaimer's pretty "bangbus"-like, unless it's just to cover their own backs...
posted by wibbler at 2:46 PM on March 21, 2004

As far as I know, posting information about someone is legal provided it's truthful

Releasing medical information about people can't possibly be legal.
posted by maggie at 3:54 PM on March 21, 2004

"Those are statements accusing a person of: having committed a crime"
So all those letters these protesters are writing to the law school he applied to accusing him of being an accessory to rape and a child pronographer, sent specifically "with malice" to ruin his life... Thats libel?

If there is a god with a sense of humor the webmaster will sue those people :)
posted by soulhuntre at 2:08 AM on March 22, 2004