"Hot List" Author Delivers Creepy Woman-Hating Rant

Yet another Facebook “hot list” recently made the rounds at a high school — and its author’s scary rantings show the connection between such lists and outright woman-hating.

According to MyFoxChicago, a male student made a list “ranking” 50 girls at Oak Park River Forest High School in Illinois, then posted the list on Facebook and distributed it in school Friday. The list apparently included numerical evaluations of girls’ faces and bodies, nicknames like “The Designated Drunk” or “The Amazing Bisexual,” and (as though the numbers weren’t commodifying enough) “a notation indicating whether their ‘stock’ has gone up or down.” The creator of the list, a junior and football player, could face expulsion — but this isn’t his first offense. He also created similar lists in his eighth-grade and freshman years. And lest you think his listing habits are just a bit of harmless fun, there’s this:

After distributing the fliers to other male students Friday afternoon, the author walked to the student center, where he addressed an impromptu gathering, student sources said.

In a loud voice he railed against women, accusing them of “trying to take over the world.” He is captured on one cell phone video hollering, “Women are the future, unless we stop them now,” as he danced around to a cheering crowd of students.

As we’ve written before, the stakes of girl-listing have gotten higher with the advent of Facebook — now gross ranking systems like the one at Oak Park can get a lot more public a lot faster than ever before. But with more publicity can come jadedness — it’s easy to feel like getting rated on the internet is just a rite of passage for adolescents (immortalized, as Oak Park officials themselves pointed out, in The Social Network). However, these lists aren’t just a part of growing up — as the Oak Park lister showed, they’re a way of putting girls down. Now that he’s made the connection between girl-ranking and misogyny incredibly explicit, maybe we can all recognize that we need to take his list and others like it seriously. Two students at Oak Park are already doing so — they’ve started their own Facebook page to protest against the list, and the mentality that produced it, which they say is “so much bigger” than just one bad kid:

Oak Park River Forest High School Investigates List Ranking Girls on Facebook [MyFoxChicago]
Sexual Ranking List Upsets OPRF Parents, Students [Oak Leaves]
Oak Park Student Suspended Over List Of Girls [CBS Chicago]