Racism on online dating sites - Page 2

To be truthful, after you mentioned that I was like "oh, hey, I guess it does make sense they'd ask about kids."

Back in my day, we had to pick up drunk women at bars! You whippersnappers with your interwebs dating sites....

Harsh, dude. Harsh.

Me wanting to fuck black girls because they're black is as racist as whatever nonsense is seeping through my ignore-wall thanks to you fuckers quoting the ignoree.

Discuss.

Clearly you're just trying to re-assert your whiteness via your penis.

Just saying, no one seems up in arms about racism that ends in mutual orgasms.

Diva could you just take care of Phil? He's sending some pretty direct messages your way.

Wait, it sounds like you're agreeing with exactly what I said about the importance of basic spelling effort?

No, that by itself would be a kind of absurd step to take


I am not trying to obscure my reasons about anything. I thought I was being up front about it when I said in my first or second post that I am more attracted to some groups of people than others. I just didn't want to be mean or cause offense to any Chewers with a giant list of all the ethnic groups I was talking about.


TXTing is dumb, and most people who use it ARE the kind of people who type "u". I use AIM, which you can use on your phone. People who are on AIM generally type in complete sentences, I find. If I get a TXT from someone it is almost offputting, because most people I want to talk to would know to just IM me. Plus, IMs might cost less on my phone plan ( I am not sure about that last part though)

As a lad, I had crushes on ladies of many different racial and cultural backgrounds, but the only girls that ever seemed to show any interest back were of either an anglo-saxon or occasionally mediteranian persuasion - read into that what you will.

Once again tho I find my views spookily similair to our beloved Phil, in that if online dating had been popular when I was single back in the day I would have been very keen to see ladies from all round the globe while humming It's A Small World After All with a big 'ole smile in my dial.

You ever get that good Maori ass, RD?

Bah - I wish!

Pacific Islander girls in general can be gorgeous.

...but then I'm yet to find a racial type where I haven't seen ladies from it that make my jaw utterly drop.

Human beings are far more complex than you'd like to admit... there's a whole big bit of biology goin' on underneath our daily lives, choices and actions. Just outright refusing to ackonwledge nature reminds me of puritans.

There's a reason why certain people dislike the looks of other people. I think science can prove what it is, and I'll bet you all I have it's not about emotions ( hate ), but mankind's hardwired preferences - the same reason why ginger kids have a hard time in school.... or why albino africans are being brutally murdered by the dozen in Africa... by africans.

What we call races are in fact different stocks of the same species, separated for hundreds of generations, surviving in harsh conditions, choosing certain features of the phenotype as favourable - and we've had civilization just for the last 1% of that time - the civil rights movement just for a tiny fraction of that percent...

It's just nature being headstrong.

Just stay away from the cannibals if you enjoy oral pleasures.

Meh. I don't think it's "hardwired" - most studies have shown that, indeed, humans prefer the "us" to the "other" - but the group criteria for the "us" is HIGHLY mutable.

For me and my hands, it was Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale and Kim Basinger from MY STEPMOTHER'S AN ALIEN.

Prince weeps.

Right, assuming that the site is doing a good job of obtaining and using personal data from its users, cultural issues should be largely accounted for in the non-racial data collected. If this were a proper controlled experiment, they'd be considered controlled variables, with race the independent variable and response rates the dependent variable. That seems to be getting overlooked a bit here.

You are a pervert. But I would like subscribe to your newsletter.

On topic, what DaveB's said bears repeating. There also seems to be a sentiment here that it's not "really" racism if it's wrapped in some kind of cultural baggage or fear of the unknown or vague bio-evolutionary impulse. It's a (presumably sound) scientific study of preference, the results of which skew significantly along racial lines. That means those results are racist.

I honestly don't get why so many otherwise intelligent people can't seem to handle the concept something can be racist without stemming from some place of really pure, ideological hatred.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/racist

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/racial

Perhaps because something that is racial isn't necessarily racist

Because whining about that sort of thing is like complaining about gravity,
or about the existence of homosexuality.

... some studies show that african american women have higher testosterone levels.
Even with porn, people tend to like more delicate looking women.

True, but...
The study in question is, quite clearly, about discrimination based on race.

No, it isn't. And even if it were, it's helpful to understand phenomena like gravity or homosexuality and be able to discuss how they affect our lives intelligently. The problem with writing off any racism that isn't violently overt is that it preempts talking about all the smaller, thornier, but for most of us (that being Westerners with reliable internet access) ultimately more impactful ways racism affects our day to day lives. Such as disproportionate access to holes in which to flesh-spelunk.

What 'people' exactly, Mr.Epic-Dodgy-Projection???

'Some studies' show that random tools post nonsense about 'some studies' on the internet to back up outragously generalised bullshit - what's your point?

I'd really like someone to tell me how to objectively state the reasons for developing a sexual attraction for someone else, because at 35 I really have no idea. I literally have no type of woman to which I can say I'm attracted more or less than others, save for obviously extreme cases. I cannot find a single shared defining characteristic to the women I've either had a relationship with or wanted to. Not anything that I'm consciously aware of, anyway.

More to the point of the thread, I actually thought I wasn't attracted to black women, until some day I saw one in the bus that literally made get off early because I couldn't stop staring at her. I never was attracted to a blonde in real life too, until I met this woman I sometimes work with now. I even can't stop flirting with her which used to be a big no no for me since she's married. And it's not like she's great looking either, just rather average.

So I really have no idea what makes me attracted to a woman or what makes me not attracted. I find the concept of choosing not to approach someone because of something like their race or being attracted to someone solely because of it weird.

I guess it will vary. I understand the reality of being Asian in America is that its pretty easy to live in an area where there's not going to be other Asians around and it can be more practical to date outside your own race. It's not who's dating who that bothers me but rather why a person would refuse to date someone of their same ethnic background sight unseen.

In this country, you're going to be raised in a culture where Asian men and women are often portrayed in entertainment as one-note. And with Asian men, it won't be flattering if he's not doing kung-fu. Forget about being considered desirable. When I see Asian women who've unconsciously absorbed that sentiment and how it affects their view of Asian men, I can't help but think how warped that is.

And, no shit, the last Western film I saw in which an Asian guy got the chick was Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus. When I saw Debbie Gibson was going to get it on with a Japanese guy played by a Chinese guy, my jaw dropped and I said "Holy shit, they're going there!"

Wow. What?

Bitches be butch?

And when I chose that particular example, I didn't take into consideration the possibility that women with kids would be filtered out before things even made it that far.

Mo'nique knows that you did nto just etc etc etc

Probably shit wording on my part, because that's not at all what I'm saying. I should have ended the initial sentence with racist, not racial. Some cultural differences have racist roots causes. If a certain subsection of some black culture doesn't value a college education, that might well have a racist root cause, i.e. a history of white people in power making it difficult for a whole lot of years for black people to get into college in the first place.

Somewhat true. I never had any problems, then again I'm a tall white dude. Who turned out to be gay. Still didn't stop me from dating women of color back in the day.

Wait, is someone here black? I couldn't tell.

Not that I would reply to posts in the LOST thread 40% less often or anything...

On the scientific side, the only way to really know if the cause of the numbers was racism would be to check response rates when race was either unknown or mislabeled (like if you randomized photos). The statistics provided do not prove a racial bias because they cannot eliminate other biases. The article is inferring things that aren't actually indicated by the statistics.

For example:

Odd inference. Let's say I get 5 messages, and I write back to 4 of them. Now let's say I get 100 messages. Am I automatically going to write back to 80? Maybe I only have time to write to 4 people, no matter how many messages I get.

There are assumptions being made here that aren't supported by numbers as much as they are by our own generalizations. I'm not saying all of these assumptions are false, just that the quoted statistics do not represent proof.

Which is more or less what I was doing an apparently terrible job of conveying.

Totally agree.
Have you tried to explain it to a (engaged) girl who might be flirting with you? I found it almost impossible. :P

Yeah, this.

CREEEEPY

Also, this too. My general rule of thumb so far has been "no women with a penis or kids", because a) duh, and b) I generally can't stand kids and don't want any myself (trying to get a vasectomy in your early 20s with no medical necessity is fucking hard, I'm almost on the verge of taking a wood chisel and a hammer, getting super-drunk, and going at it DIY-style), but what's to say that I wouldn't meet some mind-blowingly awesome woman who happens to have a kid who's also not a screaming psychotic little terror?

As I did in my last post, I'm probably just emphasizing what Diva's already covered, so I hope she doesn't mind me highlighting some things.

I'm not sure what good randomizing photos would do, since the matching respondents automatically will have qualities desired by the other online dater - they should all be relatively similar; the pools are basically pre-randomized. If there's a link between race and culture that would prevent someone from appearing on another online dater's list of potential candidates, that someone will be pre-excluded via the regular matching process on the basis of factors other than race. This should theoretically render each group of potentials a relatively blank slate when it comes to cultural factors.

But you do raise a possible limitation in that photos do contain non-racial data that might have an impact on response rates. Still, one would assume that the predominant photographic features shared by black women is their blackness and their gender. Other photographic features, like clothing, photo quality, and physical background might have some link to racial background, but those are pretty minor details compared to the written data on interests, background, etc. that presumably comprise the profile, don't you think?

Let's be clear here first - no social science experiment can eliminate all extraneous biases. So if you're looking for "proof" in social science, you aren't going to find it. But this study draws pretty solid, supportable conclusions. A better version of this might be a controlled experiment rather than a study of a pre-existing dataset, but this certainly doesn't seem poorly designed enough that we can easily dismiss the findings.

Anyway, the other parameters presumably do a lot to eliminate non-racial biases. Maybe not all, but many of the most significant ones (interests, culture, occupation, income, etc.).

If you get a big enough pool of data, these concerns about individual low response rates shouldn't matter. If everyone responds to the first four responses, race should technically be a non-issue, since it wasn't used in matching (i.e., if you're a white guy, there's nothing that says your first four hits couldn't be black women - and if you're selectively responding to four respondents, then you're exercising choice, which is exactly what the research is about).

I was looking at this entirely from an angle of whether or not statistically a specific racial group might bring with them on average more things that would be deemed a negative in terms of generating a response. I used being a single parent for an example earlier. However, that becomes a non-factor if the system used by these dating sites filters out or equalizes those negatives in advance.

Your giant, pulsating brain is always welcome, Dave.

Poor wording on my part. I got off the bus early, because I couldn't stop staring at her and didn't want to creep her out.

Om nom nom.

That makes two assumptions:
1) That all other things are equal
2) That the service in question has a perfect selection process

The point of a control group would be to eliminate the need for either assumption.

I have no idea how effective that dating site is at making exact matches, or how similar the respondents will seem in every area other than race. Without that information, or the elimination of it as a factor, the statistics are weak evidence of anything.

I was using it as an example of the blog writer twisting the statistics to match their pre-existing theories. He uses the 40.5% reply rate of white males as proof that "White guys are shitty, but fairly even-handed about it."... yet that reply rate is higher than the reply rate of any female racial group, including the black female reply rate of 34%, which he interprets to mean that, "Black women are sweethearts". So either all women are even shittier, or there's another explanation, like as people get more responses, their ability to reply to them all decreases.

So we have a data set with a large number of unknown factors and a writer prone to unsupported interpretations. Combined, it's an amusing conversation starter, but not particularly useful otherwise.

From this data set, I am seeing a distressingly high response rate to Daves.

These are essentially the same issue, because a "perfect" selection process would ensure that all things, or at least all things perceptible in the data given, are equal.

As for the quality of the service, of course it's an issue. I addressed this above.

So yes, we are assuming that the information captured is thorough and accurate. It's not even close to a perfect design, but it's definitely not flawed enough to outright dismiss the results.

As I saw it, people in this thread were arguing that respondents might make assumptions based on race because racial difference can imply a difference in interests, income, culture, etc. Hypothetically, these sites match on the basis of how people answer questions about these things; if you're a white guy, and you're matched with a black woman on the basis of how she answered the questionnaire and still don't write back because "black women won't have the same interests as me," that's capital R racism, because you're also making assumptions about her honesty.

I agree that a controlled experiment would have advantages, but I fail to see how randomizing photos would do a thing. Race is presumably accounted for not only visually in photos, but in the text of the questionnaire. Ideally, a controlled experiment could be conducted with completely falsified questionnaires (e.g., identical questionnaires in which only the race was changed) rather than altered ones in which race wasn't present at all.

As I said before, the bigger the pool of information, the better chances that patterns emerge and suggest things. OKCupid is apparently a fairly popular site and they're conducting the research themselves, so it's probably a pretty big pool they're using. It could absolutely be better documented, but it seems like there are some fundamental misunderstandings about what data is, at least hypothetically, already accounted for in the matching process.

This is true. The reply rate will be affected by number of responses received.

Well, this is a conversation, isn't it? I'm not about to cite OKTrends in a paper on race relations.

Daves are known for garnering high response rates.

I don't want to get into a conversation about negative racial stereotypes, but here's food for thought...

You could presume that a status like "Has Kids" might be weeded out in pre-requisites. That's a pretty big one. But what about others? Career, education, physical fitness, music, food, etc?

Are there any statistics based on the race and its correlation to other categories? Hypotherical example: The majority of Black Woman who participate in online dating services indicate that their favorite color is YELLOW. The majority of White Woman who participate in online dating services indicate that their favorite color is PINK. The Majority of Men (Black or White) who participate in online dating indicate that their favorite color is RED. Red is closer to Pink than it is to Yellow.

Favorite color isn't all that important granted.

Let's take it a step further (try not to get offended)... Hypothetical example: The majority of Black Woman who participate in online dating services have an average BMI (body mass index) of X+1. The majority of White Woman who participate in online dating services have an average BMI (body mass index) of X. Because of superficial societal conditioning, the majority of Men (white or black) subconciously prefer their partners to have a BMI of X-1 upon viewing profile pictures and then rating them. X-1 is closer to X than X+1.

If the numbers indicate... Most Men prefer skinny women to overweight women = Most Men prefer white woman to black women. There's a correlation, but not necessarily causation. What if that BMI preference is subconsiously more important than race? Then the race statistic looks guilty by association.

What about Levels of completed education? Religion? Geographical regions?

There may be other factors than just skin color. Do people of all ages and gender use the internet the same ways and for the same amounts? Is it possible that there are cultural or racial statistics related to internet usage? Or specifically cultural or racial statistics related to Online Dating Service usage? Is it possible that culturally, white people in general may see Online Dating as a (hypothetically) positive thing, therefore you have a certain mix of personalities available in that white pool? And that culturally, black people in general may see Online Dating as a (hypothetically) negative thing, therefore you have a certain mix of personalities available in that black pool? Is it possible that culturally, white people in general may see Online Dating as (hypothetically) a tool to look for more casual relationships where black people in general may see Online Dating as (hypothetically) a tool to look for longterm relationships? The "oil and water" unmixing may have more to do with subtler things than strictly skin color.

Unless we can assume all races have the same POV about all aspects of our shared culture.

I'm spit-balling here. I am no way claiming (nor do I have any statistics to back up) that Black Woman are fatter, more desperate, or like Yellow over Pink. Nor have I ever used an Online Dating Service.

It could just be racial, and not racist. Liking someone as a person and liking someone as a potential partner are not the same (not when chemical reactions are involved... admittedly, there are no pheromones over the net).

What about hair-color preference? Some men prefer (consciously OR subconsciously) redheads to brunettes. I'd wager that the majority of Black Women are brunettes. Could that be categorized as racism? What about attire? I like lowcut tops and cleavage (I'm a boob man). I probably will not find that on the majority of Islamic women who wear burqas (not to mention potential religious issues).

Or maybe it IS just RACISM and I'm clueless.

I think the service attempts to match on all of those factors, though, and presumably the inferences on racial data were made with that in mind.

In other words, if a white man listed his favorite color as blue, he would be matched with women who listed their favorite color as blue (no idea of the matching process is based on criteria this minor, but with a big enough pool of potential daters, it just might be, as silly as it seems).

So if black women had a predilection for liking yellow, they'd be underrepresented in his matching pool, thus wouldn't figure into the percentages we're talking about, because we're only talking about suggested matches.

Now, the other potential scenario could be "color isn't addressed in the questionnaire, but the white man has found that black women tend to like yellow rather than blue, thus he doesn't answer the responses from the black women he's matched with, based on this past experience." That's still essentially racism, since he's associating a stereotype with women on the basis of race.

Again, I strongly doubt that body type, height, weight, etc. are unaccounted for in the matching process, thus they're essentially moot in this study. Matches are matches.

DEFINITELY addressed in the matching process. Nearly inconceivable that they wouldn't be.

We can't, but you're bringing in factors that are, at least hypothetically, addressed in the questionnaire. As long as these factors are used in the matching process and we're focusing on race, these are non-issues.

We could just as easily study any other factor, incidentally. You could check matches and see if there are anomalies with regard to color preference, religion, etc., but they all require that you view the other data used in making the matches as relatively stable (in other words, these people have tons in common, at least on paper - if this info seems relatively stable, we can make inferences about variations we witness).

Could be, and this is a fine, subjective hair to split. But the idea that "other factors" besides race are behind the lack of white men's responses to black women doesn't really hold up - hypothetically, at least, "other factors" are largely accounted for in the questionnaires.

Some interesting ideas, and some of them may have some merit, though I can't really see any of those factors causing a significant shift in the statistics of the study. I think we tend to underestimate the cultural baggage we all bring to the table when it comes to opinions about race. Aside from this study/survey, there are loads of studies that complement the okcupid findings, whether they deal directly with dating attitudes or more general social attitudes.

Personally, I just can't understand someone who would exclude a whole ethnicity from their potential dating pool. For whatever reason. In terms of attractiveness, the spectrum of features within any given ethnicity should reject the notion that it's ok to exclude an ethnicity based on specific feature preferences. And for any particular ethnicity, there have been numerous examples of men and women who have been widely deemed attractive. If you look at the fashion world, or Hollywood, you can find men and women of just about every nationality and ethnicity that have been included in lists of Most Attractive This or Hottest That, with their admirers spanning the spectrum of ethnicities themselves. Granted their celebrity status tends to add to their "attractiveness" if you ask most people, but I doubt that if Halle Berry was an unknown paralegal from New Mexico that many guys would reject an offer of a date with her because of looks.

Lastly, I think there's a difference between having preferences when it comes to particular features (I myself like taller women, rounder noses, dark eyes and hair, etc), and outright refusing to consider a person because of particular features. I'd date a 5' blond girl with a straight, narrow nose if her profile matched up well with mine. Ethnicity just doesn't bother me whether it's because I have generally been exposed to and surrounded by a multitude of ethnicities, or because I place that much more importance on emotional and character compatibility than physical compatibility. Besides, my mama always told me she didn't care what color I dated, as long as she had a good head on her shoulders. Still haven't told her about that hot-ass mental patient I once dated...