I joined the online-dating world at the end of 2007, and started this blog to keep track of my experiences. I wrote about the good, the bad, and the ugly of online dating. I'm now engaged—to the wonderful man I met online—and this blog has come to an end. Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Online Dating Experiment
A friend and reader of this blog sent me a link to an online dating experiment conducted by a girl in DC. Her blog's called "Hi. My Name is Kia." Rather than spoil it for you, I'm going to encourage you to check it out here.
Whoa. That is deeply disturbing. People make such a big deal about how looks don't really matter that much, and there are so many people who say that they are totally not racist, but then you see something like this and you realize that pretty much all of us are lying to ourselves. That girl Kia is gorgeous and I can't understand why she gets so many fewer responses, and of so much lower quality!
"It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders, because as we saw above they get the most replies. That has apparently made them very self-absorbed."
Har, har...seriously though...according to OKcupid, "White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively."
I'm sitting here trying to comprehend this and I don't get it at all. There are plenty of ugly white dudes and hot guys of other races. And two random white people are so unlikely to share any kind of cultural heritage. Also interesting are the comments to that post with a lot of people yelling that they're not racist. I thought this comment, by a "nonwhite male", might explain some part of it:
After all, the richest, most powerful nation in the world (and also the entertainment media capital of the world) is predominately white, and thus white males have become the symbol of strength, virtue, and status/celebrity all the world over.
Ily - I just read the article you linked to and it is actually a little bit horrifying. How do you address that sort of deep, internalized racism that individuals themselves are unwilling to acknowledge? As white person who has only ever dated white people I suppose I am as guilty as the folks on that site, but in my defense, I came from an area that was pretty exclusively white. Still, there were non-white people around to date if that had been my desire.
Yeah, it's interesting what people say when they think no one is witnessing. I think what surprised me most was the statistic that only 7% of white people thought interracial marriage was a bad idea, but 45% of white people only wanted to date within their race. I think it's a step forward if people can admit that no, we're not actually at the "we don't notice race!" point yet.
I think part of it is that a lot of people have the assumption that race maps on to your "scene" or your interests. I recently saw this movie, "Medicine for Melancholy", about 2 black hipsters in San Francisco, and they talked about that topic in the movie. The guy was talking about how most "indie" people were white, so he felt like he had to choose between a more racially diverse group of friends and a group of friends that shared his interests.
I would think that indie people *stay* white because few people would want to be the only person of their race in a room.
Not to ignore racism-- I think negative stereotypes of black women (the least responded-to group on the site) and eurocentric notions of beauty are definitely a factor. There's even a beauty hierarchy within white people. Okay, I'll stop before I write my dissertation here...
Race is the proverbial elephant in the room. Maybe people think that if you are a white person and you are dating a non-white person then there is this whole race question that will come up all the time and it seems just "easier" to stick to someone who checks the same box as you when they fill out census forms or whatever.
The term "white" has not always meant the same thing. At the beginning of the last century, people of Irish ancestry were not considered "white," neither were Jews, but people from India were. Now people from India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka are considered their own group that is separate from white but also separate from Asian.
Perhaps some racial tags have outlived their usefulness. "African American" or "Black American," though, I think are still relevant categories in the sense that as a group those are the people who get discriminated against the most, both men and women, straight and gay.
I think the dating world (especially the anonymous online dating world) would be one of the last outposts for racism. Online dating as a format makes it much easier, important even, to judge based on surface values because suddenly there are so many options nicely categorized by searchable surface values. Online dating sites even encourage racially selecting by allowing people to search by race and to check certain races they don't want as matches. It's still socially acceptable as an idea that attraction is physical and some people are simply attracted to some races and not others. If we as a society are even pretending we don't notice race it shouldn't be one of the first things to select when filling our your online dating profile.
7 comments:
Whoa. That is deeply disturbing. People make such a big deal about how looks don't really matter that much, and there are so many people who say that they are totally not racist, but then you see something like this and you realize that pretty much all of us are lying to ourselves. That girl Kia is gorgeous and I can't understand why she gets so many fewer responses, and of so much lower quality!
Thanks for sharing, I thought this was an interesting experiment. Did you see this article from OKCupid that Kia posted?
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/
"It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders, because as we saw above they get the most replies. That has apparently made them very self-absorbed."
Har, har...seriously though...according to OKcupid, "White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively."
I'm sitting here trying to comprehend this and I don't get it at all. There are plenty of ugly white dudes and hot guys of other races. And two random white people are so unlikely to share any kind of cultural heritage. Also interesting are the comments to that post with a lot of people yelling that they're not racist. I thought this comment, by a "nonwhite male", might explain some part of it:
After all, the richest, most powerful nation in the world (and also the entertainment media capital of the world) is predominately white, and thus white males have become the symbol of strength, virtue, and status/celebrity all the world over.
A lot of food for thought, I think...
Ily - I just read the article you linked to and it is actually a little bit horrifying. How do you address that sort of deep, internalized racism that individuals themselves are unwilling to acknowledge? As white person who has only ever dated white people I suppose I am as guilty as the folks on that site, but in my defense, I came from an area that was pretty exclusively white. Still, there were non-white people around to date if that had been my desire.
Yeah, it's interesting what people say when they think no one is witnessing. I think what surprised me most was the statistic that only 7% of white people thought interracial marriage was a bad idea, but 45% of white people only wanted to date within their race. I think it's a step forward if people can admit that no, we're not actually at the "we don't notice race!" point yet.
I think part of it is that a lot of people have the assumption that race maps on to your "scene" or your interests. I recently saw this movie, "Medicine for Melancholy", about 2 black hipsters in San Francisco, and they talked about that topic in the movie. The guy was talking about how most "indie" people were white, so he felt like he had to choose between a more racially diverse group of friends and a group of friends that shared his interests.
I would think that indie people *stay* white because few people would want to be the only person of their race in a room.
Not to ignore racism-- I think negative stereotypes of black women (the least responded-to group on the site) and eurocentric notions of beauty are definitely a factor. There's even a beauty hierarchy within white people. Okay, I'll stop before I write my dissertation here...
Race is the proverbial elephant in the room. Maybe people think that if you are a white person and you are dating a non-white person then there is this whole race question that will come up all the time and it seems just "easier" to stick to someone who checks the same box as you when they fill out census forms or whatever.
The term "white" has not always meant the same thing. At the beginning of the last century, people of Irish ancestry were not considered "white," neither were Jews, but people from India were. Now people from India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka are considered their own group that is separate from white but also separate from Asian.
Perhaps some racial tags have outlived their usefulness. "African American" or "Black American," though, I think are still relevant categories in the sense that as a group those are the people who get discriminated against the most, both men and women, straight and gay.
Now I'm off on dissertation . . .
I think the dating world (especially the anonymous online dating world) would be one of the last outposts for racism. Online dating as a format makes it much easier, important even, to judge based on surface values because suddenly there are so many options nicely categorized by searchable surface values. Online dating sites even encourage racially selecting by allowing people to search by race and to check certain races they don't want as matches. It's still socially acceptable as an idea that attraction is physical and some people are simply attracted to some races and not others. If we as a society are even pretending we don't notice race it shouldn't be one of the first things to select when filling our your online dating profile.
very nice post.
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