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Love e Montrealcanada elasearcho Love searchahsearchn Montrealcanada We did a little investigating as to whether a person's stated income had any real effect on his or her online dating experience. Unsurprisingly, we found that it matters a lot, particularly for men. This is a by-age messaging distribution:
These bold colors contain a subtle message: if you're a young guy and don't make much money, cool. If you're 23 or older and don't make much money, go die in a fire. It's not hard to see where the incentive to exaggerate comes from.
The above picture, for example, was over two years old when it was uploaded. How do we know? Most modern cameras append text tags to the jpgs they take. These tags, called EXIF metadata, specify things like the exposure and f-stop settings, gps information if your camera has it, and, of course, the time and date the photo was taken. This is how programs like iPhoto know when (and sometimes where) you've taken your pictures.
Analyzing this stuff, we found that most of the pictures on OkCupid were of recent vintage; site-wide the median photo age at upload was just 92 days. However, hotter photos were much more likely to be outdated than normal ones. Here's a comparison (the age of a picture below is how old it was when it was uploaded to our site):
As you can see, over a third of the hottest photos on the site are a year old or more. And more than twice as many hot photos are over three years old (12%) as average-looking ones (5%), which makes sense because people are more inclined to cling to the pics that make them look their best
Another useful (if somewhat unorthodox) way to take in this graph is to follow the horizontal gridlines. If you trace out from "20%", for example, you can see that 1 in 5 average-looking photos is at least a year old, meanwhile, among the hot photos, nearly 1 in 5 is at least two years old.
It also turns out that older people also upload older photos:
The upshot here is, if you see a good-looking picture of a man over 30, that photo is very likely to be out-of-date. Not to get personal again, but my own OkCupid photo shows a Burberry-dressed 27 year-old, strumming away on his guitar. Meanwhile, I turn 35 in a couple months and am writing this post in the same shorts and tee-shirt I've been wearing for a week. Time waits for no man, unless that man doesn't update his personal information.
OkCupid is a gay- and bi-friendly place and it's not our intention here to call into question anyone's sexual identity. But when we looked into messaging trends by sexuality, we were very surprised at what we found. People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect. Site-wide, here's how it breaks out:
This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches. You can actually see these trends in action in the chart below.
Again, this is just the data we've collected. We'd be very interested in our bisexual users' thoughts on this single-sex-messaging phenomenon, so if you'd like to weigh-in please use the comments section. Please note, everybody, that we don’t assume that bis should be “into both genders equally.” We only assume that they should be into both genders at all. The swaths of red and blue that you see in these sexuality charts represent people who message only one gender. The purple areas are people who send any messages, in whatever proportion, to both men and women.
In this chart, throughout the teens and twenties, the male bisexual population is mostly observably gay men. By the mid-thirties, it seems, most of these men are more comfortable self-identifying as gay and have left the bi population. By the end of our chart, 3 of every 4 bi males on OkCupid are observably straight. Meanwhile, the proportion of men who message both women and other men holds fairly steady.
The proportions for women are more consistent over time:
12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general, I'd wager) self-identify as bi. However, as you can see above, only about 1 in 4 of those women is actually into both guys and girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi men, most bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi. The primacy of America's most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is safe.
In gathering data for this last section on sexuality, we found so much interesting stuff that we're making it the topic of our next post. We'll look at the messaging, searching, and stalking (!) patterns of gay, bi, and straight people and see what else we can learn about the sexual continuum. Until then, no lie: thanks for reading.
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I’m not really sure how Okcupid can say they’re not being judgmental of our orientation, but then they list “I’m bisexual” as one of the “lies people tell” on dating sites. Um, yeah, you’re being judgmental.
I’ll just echo what others have already said: The straight people who make up the Okcupid staff may not know this, but the same-sex dating scene is small. I live in a large, very gay city, and it’s small FOR ME. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people in less popular, less queer-friendly areas. It makes sense statistically, since only 10% of the population is interested in the same sex. So there are a lot of bi people, including myself, who signed up to use Okcupid specifically to find dateable people of the same sex. If you’re a straight person and you have difficulty finding someone you like who also likes you, imagine how much harder that would be if your dating pool was 10 times smaller than it is.
On the opposite end, part of that may be because if you’re looking for both sexes, since there are more straights than queers out there the vast majority of your matches will be people of the opposite sex. So bi people who mostly message opposite-sex matches may only be doing that because that’s what the site is giving them. It’s why I have myself looking just for “girls who like girls,” even though I’m open to guys as well, because girls are why I signed up for the site and I don’t get that many if I’m looking for both guys AND girls. And as others have mentioned, there’s the problem with people in the gay community who are biphobic and refuse to date bisexuals, further reducing the already-small same-sex dating pool. I know this is a huge problem for bi girls looking to date lesbians, but from what I’ve heard many gay men won’t date bi men either. By contrast, less straight people, especially straight men, are opposed to dating bisexuals, and even if there were some, because straight people make up 90% of the population it’s a lot easier to find someone who isn’t bigoted on this issue.
Also, if Okcupid wants to be more queer-friendly, along with adding “pansexual” and “asexual” as well as non-binary gender options, it would also be nice for us queers if you had a drop-down box for “butch” or “femme.” Or at the very LEAST, add a question about it. That’s another problem I’ve heard for a lot of bisexual women; so many of the girls on here, especially bi girls but also many of the lesbians, skew femme. That’s not an issue for me since I prefer femme girls (and lesbian spaces IRL are usually predominantly butch, so OKC is a nice change in that sense), but I know it’s a huge problem for bi women who prefer butches and I’ve heard that for some of them, that’s why they tend to message men way more than women.
I will have to say, though, that the “hide yourself from straight people” button is a nice step. I’m not using it since I’m open to dating men. But pretty much every lesbian I know who has used okcupid has gotten awful messages from straight men who can’t accept that there are women out there who aren’t interested in cock. There are also bisexuals who are really only on there for the same sex, and it’s good that they have the option of hiding themselves from straight people’s results.
I list myself as bisexual on okcupid for exactly the same reasons that Andy Manchester does. I’m a woman, about 80% into men and 20% into women. I am sexually attracted to women, and I’ve had sex with women, but I’ve never had a relationship with a woman and am not sure whether or not I want to. So basically, I date men, I have sex with men and women, I’m open to the idea that I could be sexually attracted to or fall in love with just about anyone. I use okcupid primarily to meet men, but I’m not opposed to the idea of meeting women on it; I’m just too shy and unsure about it to actually seek it out. I initially had myself listed as heterosexual, because I mainly message men, but it felt dishonest, because I am also attracted to women.
In general, I feel that the idea that there are three distinct sexual orientations, straight, bi, and gay, is a gross oversimplification that tries to make a complex and subtle issue, influenced by culture, societal pressure, and who knows how many other variables, into something cut-and-dried. To force people into choosing one of these categories is bad enough, but to then say that they are lying because the outcome doesn’t match what one person (who I’m assuming is not bisexual) would expect based on their understanding is just plain insulting.
That said, thanks for your work and your research. It’s always interesting!