Last week, for roughly 30 minutes, something unusual flicked across the tickers at the New York Stock Exchange. It wasn’t the rally of a newly public company or a market in turmoil. It was the rising and falling value of single men in the city.
Or at least it was the purported value of single men, as determined by the movie studio A24. To promote its buzzy film “Materialists,” which is being released this weekend, the studio created a website that invited single men to input their physical and personal attributes, like height, income, age, whether they owned or rented, whether they had hair on their heads, their turn-ons and their icks.
All that data was fed into an algorithm to create each user’s “romantic value” and then streamed in real time onto the ticker, rating the men in the middle of the mecca of finance. Over the course of this week, the ticker will also be displayed on a mobile billboard that is being parked around the city, making stops at the Wall Street bull, in Central Park, close to the Washington Square Park arch and near Rockefeller Center.
How genuine the entries are — or how inflated the income and height — is unclear, with one user listed as “Donald G.” having a reported income of $50 million. And unfortunately for anyone interested in the listed men, there isn’t a way to get in touch; their names — or pseudonyms — flash onto the screen in green or red for a second before disappearing.
In perhaps the greatest reflection of the current economy, very few of the men on the ticker report owning their living quarters. A24 did not share how many men had signed up to be listed, but the ticker seemed to display hundreds.