The sheen of their luscious hair catches your eye from across the dining hall. Their slim jeans outline their rounded hips, their brow furrowed in adorable thought, their lips pursed. Your eyes meet for a tantalizing instant. You look away. As you walk to class, you wonder: was it coincidence or connection?
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The latest procrastination website to hit Claremont, the innocuously named LikeALittle.com, hopes to answer those questions. Undoubtedly drawing inspiration from Craigslist’s Missed Connections, LikeALittle is part gossip forum, part dating site, and part stalking tool. The site claims to be a “flirting-facilitator platform,” allowing students to post about and discuss hotties around them, their secret crushes, and the ones that got away. Students are asked to provide the gender (girl/guy), hair color, and location of their target, along with a flirt, which usually includes additional descriptors such as clothing and a playful invitation to hang out. If students recognize themselves in a post, they can message the poster and arrange a meeting.
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When it works, LikeALittle works like a catalyst, lowering the activation energy to a successful reaction. This has happened at Claremont at least a couple times, e.g. “Tomato” in the Honnold Café in early March. When it doesn’t, it’s just another excuse not to approach someone in person. Somewhat perplexingly, a lot of activity on the site comes from other users attempting to identify the subject of the post. Part of the creepy fun of the site presumably comes from looking up these names on Facebook. The instant chat feature is an even weirder element of the site, particularly for those who remember the days of anonymous AIM chatrooms.
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Much lively dining table debate will surely erupt over whether LikeALittle is sinister and Gossip Girl-esque, escapist, or just cute. Those attracted to personalities over appearances will surely be up in arms. Moving beyond these larger questions, I immediately jumped at all the freely available survey data right at my fingertips. Who’s interested in whom demographically?
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Some of the best national analysis of this topic actually comes from a dating site: OKCupid (blog.okcupid.com). Their enormous data set allows them to look at the effects of characteristics such as race on dating success. For better or for worse, LikeALittle and its users generally refrain from mentioning race or ethnicity. Is it out of discomfort or irrelevance? Or are all the users white? It’s hard to tell, even after crunching the data.
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The data (going back three weeks, with a sample size of 290) does definitively reject the hypothesis that “there are only like four hot people at the 5Cs,” even though it’s difficult to shake the impression that users keep writing about the same people (brunette Sarah in a striped shirt?). The hair color data is difficult to evaluate without knowing the regular distribution among the student body. Suffice it to say, blonds are not dominating, and the “other” hair color category (white? grey? purple? green?) has quite a following.
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Men are disproportionately posted about on the website, which coupled with anecdotal observations suggests that women use the site more. Only Pomona had a higher proportion of postings than the normal distribution would predict, whereas Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and CMC have lower proportions (PO 31%, PZ 19%, CMC 19%, SC 17%, HMC 14%). This can be attributed to posting at the library and postings without location.
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Before you draw any conclusions, keep in mind the completely unscientific sampling of this study, plus the fact that LikeALittle only records the campus the individual is spotted at, which is only a moderate indicator of what college the individual attends. These results should not be taken seriously. That said, eat it CMS!
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If you’re looking to get creeped on or want to do some creeping yourself, the library is your home. Honnold-Mudd plus the café made up 9% of all posts. Clearly the musk of books has aphrodisiac qualities. Pomona dining establishments combined are the location for 13% of posts. However, a full 36% of creeping goes on away from obvious locations such as dining halls. You can’t escape.
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Lastly, who is the Claremont Adonis or Venus? In large part because there’s a lot of them, brunette Pomona guys had the largest slice with 12.8%, followed by brunette CMC guys (6.9%), brunette Pomona girls (5.5%), brunette Scripps girls (4.5%), and blond Pomona guys / blond CMC girls (3.8%). However, nearly half of the postings could not be identified down to hair color and college.
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Personally, I don’t feel compelled to post on LikeALittle. If you’re that enamored, why not say something in person? Crippling shyness and fear of rejection are only half of it—telling someone outright that we like them is just something we don’t do. I think we should aspire to being a community where face-to-face interactions between strangers are commonplace, and Tomato can go on up to Cucumber and lay it all out on the table. LikeALittle is a testament to the fact that such interactions are rare or taboo, and they shouldn’t be. Get on out there and like someone a little, the old-fashioned way!
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Or, at least, write something witty.