The Black Damsel In Dating Distress: A Response to OkCupid's Conclusions

The Black Damsel In Dating Distress: A Response to OkCupid's Conclusions
theatlantic.com

It seems like, for black girls, that there is not an equal subgroup; there aren't enough guys that find them interesting for all of them. So the girls desperately respond to every message, and the guys don't seem interested -- there is a large supply of girls they like, and a small supply of guys. Furthermore, this subgroup is easy to measure, because your gender and your race are in your profile. It is easy to count the number of messages that black girls write, because the database has an "is black" field in addition to a "number of messages written" field.

But... I think there are other subgroups that don't do too well on OkCupid like the, "hi u ar so hawt" group of guys. There just aren't many women on the site that like that, but there are a ton of guys like that. So OkCupid ends up being pretty bad for these guys. They send messages (if you can call them that) like crazy, but they never get any responses. This is harder to quantify, though, because there is no "sends thoughtless messages to anything that seems female" field in the database. Buy it's exactly the same effect; one group is in high supply, and the thing that group wants is in low supply. So the group in high supply gets a lot of rejected messages.

It's not about race, it's about supply and demand.

(And oh yeah, this is all from the perspective of a straight guy. I imagine the dynamics in the gay/lesbian communities are a little different, since in theory, everyone in the pool is equally attracted to everyone else.)

Disagree. The reason there are no popular white-focused dating sites is because they would be hounded or sued out of business! It's "racist" for white people to congregate on a race-dependent basis, but acceptable for people of other races. I guess it's our payback for our ancestors being idiots in the distant past.

That said, I think racial segregation is a "problem" (though it's not always "racist", per se). The existence of dating sites exclusively for certain races is the issue here.

We need to go one way or the other. We ignore race and discourage its use as a demographic tool, or we celebrate it and allow people to silo as they see fit. Our society seems to have mostly chosen to ignore race and consider it a non-issue, so "Blacksinglesconnection" or "EliteNoire" (Are you shitting me? This really exists?) should be as distasteful to our society as a hypothetical "Whitesinglesconnection" would be.