Beauty for the Internet Age
I feel like I barely, just barely, got the hang of online dating. It was frustrating, but then I hit my stride with it. Shoot, with all the ass that Myspace and PoF helped me to reign in I ought to personally walk up to Tom Anderson and Markus Frind and shake their hands, or at least give them some heavy petting. Thanks for empowering me to have sex off the internet, fellas. My right hand thanks you. However, no sooner do we settle in to trends of our much beloved internet dating than we began to see other forms of internet dating and it all boils down to this: Greater choices. There's sites for dating women with Uni-brows; there's Fitness-singles.net for those that like a little anabolic substance mixed in with their sexcapades; J-date, you name it and it probably exists.
The amount of choice and methods to connect to potential like-minded singles is staggering to me. The metrics of dating is rapidly evolving for sure. One of the great dating sites that likes to share how online dating is changing, with the facts to back it up is Okcupid.com. In one of those graphs, the OKC guys explain that the most attractive females receive up to 5 times as many messages as women rated “less attractive.”
Then, as most of us who write and follow the dating and relationship news would know, OKC recently began to change how users would see other users. More specifically, more attractive users would be shown other more attractive users and less of the users who were rated as less attractive. Initially, I didn't really see an issue with this since I was no longer single. Then I thought about it and internalized everything. WHAT IF I WAS CONSIDERED AN UGLY; TO BE SHOWN OTHER “UGLIES?” Would that be such a bad thing? No, of course not. However, it's kind of like a cyber dating caste system, which seems incredibly trite and otherwise lame to me. If I'd told my mother about this I'm sure she would have kicked the wunderkinds of OKC squarely in the cock! Go Mom!!
Oh but we're not done, kids. The brain trust at beautifulpeople.com are now offering a service to give you beautiful babies with their premium semen deliver service. Let's not forget that beautifulpeople.com are the same innovators of driving fatties off their site en masse.
I suppose I'd like to think that given better options we'd all make better choices, not shallow choices. Now before you go calling me a hypocrite, I understand what's going on. Sure, I've chosen the more attractive women over the women with their heads screwed on straight and were just “cool people.” I chalk that up to a particular phase in my life: Sex and destroy! Given all the options available to us, I think I'd just as soon take my chances with the random woman's phone number dug into the side of a bathroom stall that reads “For a good time, call your mom. 714-555-1212.”
What do you think about all these choices in dating online now? Is it right to separate those that that are ranked as attractive from those who are less attractive? Leave a comment below.
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You know what I LOVE about this post? The Google ads! "Free Christian Dating," anyone? "Brazil Girls for Dating"? (Angie, are you on that one? 😉
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Uh, I'm not a fan of the OKC philosophy either, but I've never been a fan of OKC at ALL, so it's no skin off my back what they do. After bumping into a couple of exes and a current professor (who still, by the way, can't look me straight in the eyes) I realized that OKC is one large mass of freaks who don't want to pay for dating, and then…the rest of us. And by the rest of us, I mean possibly your brother. *shudder* Never again. Well, maybe once again, just for the summer. And good blogging material.
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What was I saying? I'm no longer sure. Zaniest UD comment ever? Or perhaps zaniest UD comment this week?
By the way, when I type "UD," I think "IUD," and then "IOU," and then "ILU," and then … so on.
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Wait, do I get entered into the draw now?
Personally old fat guy with supermodel pic is a prize choice, and kinda made me throw up in my mouth a bit.
Yeah, I've had my share of bad dating website & my own little run in w/ OKC – http://ziazitella.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/afterm…
But classifying the "pretties" from the "uglies," can't see that going well for them. And what a let down it'll be when some "pretty" meets up with a photogenic troll.
Even though I still haven't gotten the hang of online dating, one thing I do know is that the sheer enormity of selection is overwhelming. I freak out when I must decide which brand of detergent to buy.
However, I don't want an algorithm to decide what I should find attractive and who I would likely want to have sex with. I'm notoriously irrational when it comes to this sort of thing, and everyone knows that the pretty profile pictures are often fronts for boring people. Or liars. Or really ugly people with great photoshopping skills.
Except for me of course. I'm fabulous.
man-shopper, girl, YOU ARE fabulous! =) I flip out when the waiter asks me what I want, I like to think I'm a "decider." Truth is that I am a putz when it comes to decision making.
I agree with man shopper. Some research came out recently about how there is "too much choice" in dating and our brains go on overdrive. Like choosing from 100 brands of laundry detergent—we go for the prettiest bottle, not what works the best. So when we date like that, we end up choosing based on hotness. Apparently, if there were only say, 3 single people in the U.S., we'd have a much easier time and choose one because they like math or they know how to make a killer roast beef sandwich. Anyway, online dating takes time and practice really. Process of elimination.
I agree with Kelly, whatever OKC does, doesn't bother me, (I ain't single!). Besides, whether we are caste beforehand by someone else, or we caste someone else afterward, the point is: we all judge one another by looks.
And we should. We might be making more babies by this same looker–