The central premise of The List, in which anonymous students at Mount Washington High publicly rank their female classmates as “prettiest” and “ugliest,” is rooted in real-world practices that have persisted in American schools for decades. Siobhan Vivian drew inspiration from real events she experienced while attending school in Rutherford, New Jersey, a Bergen County town whose high school she credits as a major source for her fiction (“Siobhan Vivian.” Book Series in Order). While Vivian hasn’t publicly identified a single incident as the novel’s catalyst, the phenomenon of students creating lists that sort peers by physical attractiveness is well documented across American school culture.

One prominent precursor was Hot or Not, a website launched in October 2000 by engineers James Hong and Jim Young that allowed users to rate submitted photos on a scale of 1 to 10. The site reportedly attracted nearly 2 million page views daily within its first week. As Time magazine later characterized it, the site pioneered the “gamification of attractiveness,” normalizing the idea of quantifying human beauty for a generation of internet users (Dockterman, Eliana. “How ‘Hot or Not’ Created the Internet We Know Today.” Time, 18 June 2014). In October 2003, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, the future creator of Facebook, created FaceMash, a campus-specific imitation that scraped student ID photos without consent and invited users to choose who was “hotter” between paired images. The site drew over 22,000 votes in a single day before being shut down amid protests from student organizations and a university disciplinary hearing (Kaplan, Katharine. “Facemash Creator Survives Ad Board.” The Harvard Crimson, 19 Nov. 2003).

Together, Hot or Not and FaceMash illustrate how ranking peers by appearance had migrated from hallway gossip to digital platforms well before Vivian began writing. By grounding its fiction in a tradition with deep real-world roots, The List interrogates a broader cultural practice of reducing girls to their appearance, one that long predates social media and persists alongside it.