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

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

#31

Post by tokenadult »

petercooper wrote: post #7

That's because all the black men who don't want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection. There simply is no real white corollary. Stormfront excluded, there aren't many "WhiteSingles" websites or "EliteIvory" dating sites. There is no Caucasian Dating Network, because the broader world is the Caucasian Dating Network. [..] Disagree. The reason there are no popular whit…

they would be hounded or sued out of business

Evidence for this? What would be the legal basis for a lawsuit?

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

#32

Post by byrneseyeview »

randallsquared wrote: post #29
byrneseyeview wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we can keep on refining this. I know secular Jews who were raised by secular parents, who have jdate profiles. What if, e.g., you're Norwegian and she's Polish, and she joins PoleDate.com. She obviously wants to date white people, but she's also open-minded enough to date a strange Northern barbarian. If people who identify as various shades of not-white all have something in common, it would be unlikely for…

Er, stuffwhitepeoplelike is supposed to be funny precisely because there is no stereotype of what white people really like, isn't it?

I don't think so. In some conservative circles "SWPLs" is a shorthand for "White people who like sushi and NPR (and decry racism despite living in gated communities)".

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

#33

Post by natrius »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #23

There is another explanation of OkCupid's conclusions which is not discussed in that blog. The author of the blog even censored a comment pointing this fact out. 39% of black women are obese, compared to 23% of white women. Men prefer to date non-obese women. http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/content.aspx?ID=6456

If you take economic status into account, I'd bet that the difference is much smaller. I'd also bet that the distribution of economic status on OkCupid is more uniform among races than it is in society as a whole.

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

#34

Post by araneae »

nkurz wrote: post #28
pw0ncakes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not Jewish, so her willingness to date me would indicate that she's fairly open-minded. However, I think it's different when it's a "white people only" site because "white" isn't really an ethnicity or a single culture, so a person who would sign up for such a site is indicating an interest in skin color/race on its own, which is a bit crass. I don't have a problem with someone who is Jewish who wants to date onl…

Since we're vaguely on the topic of 'identity', and hopefully deeply enough in a thread not to be in anyone else's way, I'll toss in an offtopic reaction to 'pw0ncakes'. In this thread and others, your comments are solid and intelligent. I want to vote them up. But your username throws me: it's probably intended as parody, but for me it still signifies irreverent 'script-kiddie', whether ironic or not. So while you'r…

If he's trying to sell his start-up, then maybe he should pick a different name (and even then, it really wouldn't bother me)

But he hasn't got a link in his profile, nor is he self-posting, so why should he care what message he's sending?

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

#35

Post by astine »

danieldon wrote: post #19
thrdOriginal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought his article did a good job of logically asserting his point. What kind of data do you absolutely need that he didn't provide in order to believe that OKCupid is but a small part of a bigger picture when it comes to black women and (online) dating?

What kind of data do you absolutely need...? The kind of data that demonstrates that the OKCupid data doesn't reflect broader dating patterns.

I think that anyone who wants to use OkCupid's data as an example of the dating market as a whole, needs to show that OKCupid is representative of the dating market as a whole, not the other way around.

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

#36

Post by aristoxenus »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #26
aristoxenus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it takes a certain lack of humanity to use the word "hideous" to describe anybody's born appearance.

Is that because it's not nice, or it's not accurate?

Because by being so strong and unkind, it amplifies the recognition of a material or perceptual accident of nature into a needless conceptual flattening of a person's entire presence in the world. Depending on the self-esteem of the person it may be referring to, it's impolite at best, and cruel at worst.

What I think Chris forgets in his writeups is that actual individuals who may fall into those regions of his chart may at some point read it. Why be so abrasive about it?

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

#37

Post by scott_s »

danieldon wrote: post #19
thrdOriginal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought his article did a good job of logically asserting his point. What kind of data do you absolutely need that he didn't provide in order to believe that OKCupid is but a small part of a bigger picture when it comes to black women and (online) dating?

What kind of data do you absolutely need...? The kind of data that demonstrates that the OKCupid data doesn't reflect broader dating patterns.

The burden of proof generally relies on people making the unusual claim.

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

#38

Post by camccann »

tokenadult wrote: post #31
petercooper wrote: post #7

That's because all the black men who don't want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection. There simply is no real white corollary. Stormfront excluded, there aren't many "WhiteSingles" websites or "EliteIvory" dating sites. There is no Caucasian Dating Network, because the broader world is the Caucasian Dating Network. [..] Disagree. The reason there are no popular whit…

they would be hounded or sued out of business Evidence for this? What would be the legal basis for a lawsuit?

Who says you need a legal basis to sue someone? Winning is another matter, perhaps, but baseless litigation is a popular pass-time in the USA.

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

#39

Post by jorgeortiz85 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #23

There is another explanation of OkCupid's conclusions which is not discussed in that blog. The author of the blog even censored a comment pointing this fact out. 39% of black women are obese, compared to 23% of white women. Men prefer to date non-obese women. http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/content.aspx?ID=6456

The OkCupid blog post claims they were careful to control for attractiveness:

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.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affec...

So even though guys were rating these black women to be as "attractive" as the non-black women in the sample, the black women were getting fewer responses from guys.

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

#40

Post by danieldon »

scott_s wrote: post #37
danieldon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of data do you absolutely need...? The kind of data that demonstrates that the OKCupid data doesn't reflect broader dating patterns.

The burden of proof generally relies on people making the unusual claim.

How is it at all unusual? The OKCupid data reflects census data on interracial marriage pairings, which shows low numbers of marriages between black women and men of other races (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Uni...). If the OKCupid data showed that black women were both responsible for and recipients of the highest reply rates, that would be unusual.
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