Online Hating: OKCupid Says Your Race And Ethnicity Impact Who Writes You Back
13 October 2009, 12:00 PM. By Alex Alvarez
Online dating site OKCupid recently revealed some stats combed from their thousands of users regarding the role race and ethnicity play in determining who is responding to whose online profiles. The only thing really surprising about this info is that OKCupid published it and admitted that, yes, racial preferences do exist, and maybe some of this might have to do with racism and white standards of beauty or desirability, including the possible fetishizing of other races or ethnicities. Which is something we’ve written a lil’ about in the past.
The folks at OkCupid explained their decision to publish their findings, based on researching, extensively, people who take photos of themselves in dimly-lit bathrooms:
We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if the other major online dating players would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can’t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people paying them those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there.
In their study, OKCupid took a look at the message sending versus message response rate of heterosexual men and women (the numbers for same-sex couples will be out soon, they say) who self-identified on their online profiles as either black, white, Latin@, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, Native American, Pacific Islander, or Other. Ignore that the categories aren’t all consistent and that many overlap - these are self-identifying descriptors, after all.
Here are some response patterns the study showed:
Black women are sweethearts. Or just talkative. But either way, they are by far the most likely to reply to your first message. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and overall black women reply about a quarter more often. White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height. White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There’s more data on this towards the end of the post.
To see the charts they’re talking about, check out their blog.
When talk turns to preference or fetish among heterosexual daters, it’s often the man’s point of view that is discussed and analyzed, with the female assumed to be the victim / receptacle / object of his attention and/or affection. So it’s interesting to see the preferences of women spelled out and to know that we can also have controversial preferences.
Check out the charts on their blog and tell us, are you surprised by these findings at all? If you’ve tried online dating, did it match your own experience? Would this make you more or less inclined to date online?
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i don’t think it’s any different from the bar scene (for example). except this is documented behavior patterns. if you were to go into a bar and sit and just observe, i bet there would be similar findings as to who hits on whom, if that person accepts or denies, etc.
i wonder if the same sex statistics (say that 3x fast…) would be similar? or would it be a madonna effect as in she dates/screws brown boys but marries white ones. hmm.
I think this study is a bit exaggerated since these Latinas are a self selected group. The Latinas who are interested in dating other Latinos would have gone to a Latino dating site, not Okcupid which is known somewhat as a hipster site.
My boyfriend and I met on OKcupid a year ago. Since then many of our friends (mostlyLatinos) have joined and gone on dates with people they’ve met on the site. There is even one other couple in our group (gay men) who met through Okcupid and are still together! Where we live Latinos are nearly the majority, so it doesn’t surprise me that that’s who my friends are meeting. I think it would have been interesting if they broke the study down geographically. I’m sure that stats are different in places where minorities are a larger part of the population.
You know, I’d always liked OKCupid for their quizzes but I never gave serious thought to using it as a dating tool. Good to know it’s working for some people.
So . . . let me get this straight. When whites show a racial preference that favors other whites, we call it racism. When Latinas/Hispanics show a preference that also favors whites, we call it “controversial.”
Got it.
Since this is a valid question, I’ll choose to ignore the fact that the great bulk of your comments on this site have been negative and often express your animosity for Guanabee itself and its writers rather than the subject matter being discussed. I know someone (possibly you!) has expressed annoyance at me before for writing this, but racism is complicated.
Here’s how I see it:
While racism may (and likely does) play a part in what physical characteristics we as individuals find attractive, our preferences are not necessarily based on hate, but on conditioning we may not have analyzed or questioned. Comparing the preferences of Anglo, hetero men to those of Latinas of any race isn’t fair and it isn’t necessarily useful because their different life experiences and their varied roles in society aren’t comparable. Are Latinas influenced by patriarchy and racist, xenophobic dominant culture when expressing what they find attractive? Sure. But not always, not exclusively. There are ways to be influenced by racism without necessarily being racist or self-loathing. I also made sure to link back to the feature I did on the role ethnicity and fetish play in attraction to show that I don’t, personally, find the act of preferring people of a certain race to be inherently xenophobic or racist, and that love and lust will always have a component of subverting or enforcing different power plays that already exist in society. That doesn’t mean we should ever cease to analyze why we’re attracted to the people we are, but it does mean that I cut myself and others slack and don’t jump to the conclusion that someone is racist because they happen to prefer men and/or women of a race or ethnicity other than their own.
So, to answer your question: Yes. When a study shows that white men overwhelmingly shun the advances of black women, I do think there’s a component of racism at play. It comes with having white, hetero, male privilege that has not, historically and socially, been extended to black women. And when a study shows that Latinas overwhelmingly prefer white men, I’ll call it controversial, because Latinas do not necessarily have that privilege and their sexual motivation is the result of several factors, only one of which may be internalized racism. It comes down to privilege and who is more likely to hold, and have held, the dominant position in society and relationships.
And, so that it’s plain, “we” are not calling it anything. The opinions I express in my posts are my own. If you prefer to assign different words or labels to these interactions then, by all means, do it. I understand your comment was cloaked in sarcasm and that you do not really believe I’m dictating or defining what racism is and isn’t for all people who choose to discuss it.
I agree with Alex, although Carola does have a point. Even though the study has a large sample size, it may nonetheless suffer from self-selection bias. Nonetheless, the fact that black women will and do answer your calls/sexts/emails makes me want to forever be surrounded by them.
Well to our “guest commentator” all I have to say, like Cindy so eloquently wrote and in a finger snap Z formation, racism is a commplicated thing with weird self inflicted rules. Like when a white man puts on black face its racist… but when a black man puts on white face its a wayans brothers movie… and when a black man puts on black face its Spike Lee movie (and yet still has a Wayan brother in it).
You meant Alex, no?
You meant Alex, no? * finger snaps entire alphabet *
Ooops… Freudian slip. Yes I meant Alex. *bows to the 26 snap formations
After I read the article, I wondered why the article was couched as yet another “Black women as the world’s worst victim” piece. Clearly, according to OKCupid’s own numbers, it is black men who come off as being in the worst dating situation, not black women. But then, they couldn’t grab headlines and the attention of black women if they were to say that could they? Or maybe the owners of the OKCupid website (and the editors and managers of American media) simply don’t give a sh*t enough about black men to even notice or care.
Let’s go back and do the numbers again, this time comparing OKCupid’s figures for the response rates black men and women achieve when sending messages to potential mates of various racial and ethnic groups:
BLACK WOMEN BLACK MEN
Native American - 41% / Black - 28%
Other - 41% / Native American - 27%
Middle Eastern - 40% / Pacific Islanders - 25%
Black - 37% / Other - 24%
Indian - 37% / Indian - 21%
Hispanic - 36% / Middle Eastern - 21%
Pacific Islanders - 32% / White - 21%
White - 32% / Hispanic - 19%
Asian - 31% / Asian - 17%
In other words, even the LOWEST response rate received by black women from various racial and ethnic groups (31% from Asian men) was STILL higher than the HIGHEST response rate received by black men (28% from black women). But apparently the dating plight of black men is of no interest to OKCupid. Or, even worse, they assumed that the dating plight of black men would be of no interest to their readers- white, black or whatever. AND THEY WOULD PROBABLY BE RIGHT IN THAT UNFORTUNATE ASSUMPTION. After all, what is the value of black men in American society? Our value is close to ZERO (except, of course, when it comes to sports and entertainment). We can’t even claim “worst position” even in situations that clearly demonstrate that we are in the “worst position.”
OKCupid engaged in what the magicians call “misdirection.” They suckered the public into looking in one direction when they should have been looking in another direction. American media does this all the time when it comes to the plight of black men as compared to that of black women. For example, based on the media stories to come out in past years about rates of HIV/AIDS you would be right to assume that black women suffer from higher rates of HIV/AIDS than black men– and you would be wrong. In fact, the rate for black women is 60.6 (cases per 100,000), while that of black men is 136.8 (see the CDC website and this page in particular: http://twurl.nl/b6qxvp).
Moreover, the folks at OKCupid even decided to point out that black women were not even valued by black men, when it comes to the responses they received from potential mates (”Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.”) Yet a perusal of OKCupid’s own numbers would show that when it comes to responding to potential mates, black men respond LEAST to black women AND black women respond LEAST to black men. The rate of response from black women to black men is higher than vice-versa, but black men and women are BOTH LAST on each other’s agendas. See for yourself:
BLACK WOMEN BLACK MEN
Pacific Islanders - 39% / Pacific Islander - 57%
White - 38% / Asian - 55%
Middle Eastern - 37% / Middle Eastern - 55%
Native American - 34% / Other - 52%
Asian - 34% / Indian - 51%
Indian - 34% / White - 51%
Other - 32% / Native American - 50%
Hispanic - 31% / Hispanic - 46%
Black - 28% / Black - 37%
That the folks at OKCupid could write an entire blog on the subject of race and dating and single out the plight of black women while ignoring that of black men is despicable. Sadly, it is also typical. Or perhaps the across-the-board stereotype of the “no good black man” is so profoundly and thoroughly ingrained that their pathetic response rate from potential mates is to be expected and is, therefore, of no consequence.
And that SUCKS.