can somebody explain okcupid to me

[FoolofaTook]

GODDAMNIT DISCOUNT KING!!

[hnibos]

Originally Posted by D.

I used OKC in like '11. That shit was wack.

Summer '17 I used Grindr and had sex and dates with many dudes.

How was that summer of 17

[FoolofaTook]

As Telegraph Men's resident grooming correspondent, I regularly put myself in harm’s way in order to bring you the low-down on the latest face creams, aftershaves and grooming gadgets.

OK, so it’s not as dangerous as being a fireman or a bouncer in Leeds – but make no mistake about it, road-testing products like Remington’s Delicates & Body Hair Trimmer (essentially a brand new ball shaver) requires putting more than just my reputation on the line.

Given the gravity of the situation, before giving it a go I do something no self-respecting man ever does: I actually read the instructions first. Which is good because these instructions are, by turns, charming and hilarious, borrowing language from the worlds of soap powder advertising (a man’s bits become his "delicates") and innuendo (“use slow and even strokes for the best results”).

“For hair in around your delicates,” they state, “lift your delicate parts to get a clear view of the area you are trimming”, whilst advising that you need to pull the skin taught to ensure the hairs are well trimmed.

After road-testing the shaver, my own personal tip is to use it in the shower (the gadget is waterproof) and splash yourself liberally with plenty of cold water to, er, tighten things up a little. It makes a big difference, trust me.

Remington’s Delicates & Body Hair Trimmer becomes an essential ball shaver
Remington’s Delicates & Body Hair Trimmer
Plenty of patience and nerves of steel help too as, I suspect, would a supply of beta blockers to steady the hand.

The device itself comes with removable safety guards which allow you to merely trim your pubic hair or go in much closer by dispensing with them and using one of the two cutting edges, though I’d stick to using what’s described as the ‘detail blade’ rather than the main blade if you’re planning on having children.

The results aren’t as close as you get with a razor (yes, I’ve done this before) so think kiwi fruit rather than billiard ball. Still, it’s probably a better option for those afraid of an open blade.

If you’re reading this thinking, ”Please! What man in his right mind would ever do this?!” I should point out that the removal of body hair – including hair of the pubic variety – is both big business and bang on trend. Indeed, the Remington trimmer is not the first product on the market to help men rid themselves of their fur – Philips, Braun, Gillette and Wahl all have their own versions.

What sets the Remington trimmer apart, however, is how it’s blatantly aimed at men interested in downstairs hair management, even if Remington can’t quite bring themselves to use the word balls.

Where did this desire for a smooth set come from? Well, the trend for male hair removal has been gathering pace for a nearly decade now, ever since Philips kicked things off with the launch of their – at the time – revolutionary Bodygroom trimmer back in 2006. The trend pretty much ran parallel to the one for the body beautiful (if you’ve worked hard in the gym for a fine set of abs and pecs you‘re not going to want to hide them under a carpet of fur now are you?) and has been popularised by a raft of celebrities including the likes of Louis Smith (no fan of stomach hair), TOWIE’s Dan Osborne and, most recently, Aiden Turner of Poldark fame, who defied historical accuracy by appearing in the period drama with neatly clippered chest hair.

So men have been shaving more than just their chins for a while now – but it is only in recent years that the trend has headed south, with a recent Gillette survey revealing that 20pc of men like to be closely trimmed down below too.

Actor Aiden Turner appears to have his chest hair clipped for his role as Poldark
As with many trends, what was first popular in the gay community is now being adopted by straight men. When I recently asked a good friend whether he was a fan of manscaping he replied: “Oh, yes. I take it all off – there’s nothing there. Nada. My girlfriend loves it.” Surprisingly, it turned out that the girlfriend in question actually had more hair than he did. “She has a landing strip,” he said proudly, having clearly won the battle of the bush.

Of course, commerce plays a big part in the trend (the very fact that gadgets to trim body hair actually exist gives seed to the thought that we should be shaving our scrotums), but ultimately you'd be a fool to ignore the influence of pornography on men’s perceptions of what constitutes normal grooming down below.

Back in the Seventies you wouldn’t have been able to see the wood for the trees when it came to male pubic hair; but in 2015, with deforestation de riguer, the ‘wood’ is pretty much all you see. And whilst straight men often claim not to notice what’s going on man-wise when it comes to pornography, it would be simply disingenuous for you to claim you hadn’t noticed that virtually all male members are now immaculately manscaped.

“Both male and female bits are given the plucked turkey treatment in contemporary porn,” says cultural commentator Mark Simpson, author of Metrosexy: a 21st Century Self-Love Story. “This helps to 'show' as much 'sex' as possible – which is, after, all what porn is for. But because so many men today aspire to be, at least in their own bedrooms, porn stars themselves, they have started to shave their bits too – and discovered that they rather like the sensuality of smoothness."

But there’s another benefit from having a smooth sac, as I discovered when I interviewed British porn director Anna Span a few years ago. “Removing the hair makes a man’s bits look bigger and more impressive because, optically, anything that’s light tends to look larger,” she told me, adding that from a partner’s perspective they were preferable as there were no rogue hairs to act as dental floss.

However, as Ms Span pointed out, hair removal is a labour of love and once you start you have to maintain things with regular trims. “There’s nothing worse than bristly balls,” she pointed out in a manner so casual she might have been a diner complaining about a piece of overcooked steak.

Personally, I think the appeal of ball shaving is simpler: not only does it make you look better aesthetically (removing hair is supposed to add an extra ‘optical inch’ after all), it’s probably the only form of personal grooming which delivers a kinky thrill and one which you can do with a partner if you so wish. I mean, who gets excited about removing nostril hair or exfoliating their feet?

But whatever the reason, as the launch of the Remington trimmer proves, pubic topiary is here to stay. And before you pooh-pooh it, you might want to know that in the Gillette survey, an overwhelming 92pc of women said they preferred a guy who was neat and tidy down below.

[MyOneAndOnly]

i am using OKC and Tinder a lot lately.

dating sites are kind of a giant time suck, tho. And I"m constantly getting PM'd my straight men with no game. yuck

[MyOneAndOnly]

it's kind of pathetic how bad men are with online dating.

i feel bad for straight girls. except at least they have 90% of one gender to potentially date. So maybe in the volume of yucky men there's probably someone who is tolerable to every straight woman

[MyOneAndOnly]

also this 2014 thread is trash fire!!!

[MyOneAndOnly]

let the past die

kill it!!

[Disco King]

Originally Posted by MyOneAndOnly

it's kind of pathetic how bad men are with online dating.

i feel bad for straight girls. except at least they have 90% of one gender to potentially date. So maybe in the volume of yucky men there's probably someone who is tolerable to every straight woman

I guess you either die of thirst in the desert, or you die of thirst in the ocean.

[buzzard]

The ocean is a notorious thirst tease.

[slunken]

Originally Posted by MyOneAndOnly

it's kind of pathetic how bad men are with online dating.

Originally Posted by MyOneAndOnly

also this 2014 thread is trash fire!!!

Originally Posted by MyOneAndOnly

let the past die

kill it!!

https://i.imgur.com/DMtMfBh.gif

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

i've had a lot of incredibly bad dates because of OK Cupid and every single one of them were unbalanced women with some kind of chip on their shoulder because they get a lot of attention on ok cupid even though they are average looking fat people at best

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

and yes i am very bitter

Trots was basically an INCEL

[yo soy el mejor]

Originally Posted by Disco King

Look at the post dates again. It was Smasher of Vajajays who bumped the thread. All praise goes to him.

YSEM wins nothing this year.

promise i will peruse the archives and bump something good, okay?

[Mals Marola]

you got 365 whole days now, expectations are soaring

[toase]

let us know

[Disco King]

Anybody ever see the statistics OkCupid used to post on its blog? The conveniently removed them from their website, so the only place they are still online is in web archives.

So essentially, men tend to rate women on a normal distribution on dating sites, rating half of women as above average, and half of women as below average.

Women, however, rate 20% of men as "above average," and 80% of men as "below average."

https://web.archive.org/web/20091121...online-dating/

Combine that with the common knowledge about how many matches the average woman gets on an online dating site vs. how many matches the average man does, and I have no idea why any male would ever bother with online dating.

[redbreegull]

I am not especially beautiful and I have had a decent amount of success with dating apps

[LaBelle]

I thought most people had already figured out statistics are largely bullshit.

[Disco King]

The iron law of statistics is that people will go "statistics lie and can prove anything" when statistics don't align with their views, and then will go "look at these statistics, they support my point" when they do align with their views. Statistics can be misused, but it's generally a much more interesting discussion when people taking umbrage with a statistical claim actually point out methodological errors, instead of just going "those are probably wrong because I don't like them."

A great wealth of research has shown that it's generally much easier for women to attain male romantic and sexual interest than it is for men to attain female romantic or sexual interest. The findings are pretty robust, and a lot of the studies have been replicated many times over.

[FoolofaTook]

My dad's pretty robust.




Sorry.

[Disco King]

Another study:
https://www.businessinsider.com/onli...tistics-2013-7

This one looks at the inequality of how men's likes are distributed amongst women, and how women's likes are distributed amongst men on the dating app Hinge. A small percentage of men get most of the likes, while likes are distributed more evenly amongst women. Comparing likes to income, women face a market with a Gini coefficient close to something like Germany's, while men face a market with a Gini coefficient more unequal than most of the world's economies.
https://qz.com/1051462/these-statist...n-dating-apps/

Q. How does this inequality compare to the inequality women face on dating apps? Is there an analogy you can use to better explain it?

A. I recently saw a post on Medium that considered incoming likes as a sort of currency. Every nation in the world has a currency, but that currency is not equally distributed amongst the citizens of every country. These economic inequalities are described using what is called the Gini index.

In our context, the closer the Gini index is to 0, the more equally likes are distributed across all of our users; a higher Gini index rating means more likes are being concentrated into fewer recipients.

The guy that wrote that post only had a couple dozen data points, but since I have access to many orders of magnitude more, reading his write-up made me curious as to what would happen if I reproduced his work using our data.

It turns out that, as it pertains to incoming likes, straight females on Hinge show a Gini index of 0.376, and for straight males it’s 0.542. On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average — think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war — think South Africa).

https://hingeirl.com/hinge-reports/w...owth-engineer/

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by FoolofaTook

My dad's pretty robust.

I know.

[FoolofaTook]

[redbreegull]

I don't doubt that romantic attention is easier for women to get from men than the other way around, but I also don't think that means regular looking men have no chance with online dating. If all women were really that picky and hard on men, dating by meeting in real life should be just as hopeless as dating online.

I'm sure I already said this in this thread and every other time we've ever talked about online dating, but one key is to be persistent and invest time in matching/talking to a lot of people. In fact, in a dating app scenario I feel like you already have a leg up on approaching someone in real life because the fact that you swiped on each other probably means there is a baseline standard being met for both parties in terms of compatibility, whether it's from your pics alone or your info as well.

[LaBelle]

Is this how that horseshit about "black pill" begins?

[redbreegull]

mah zeh black pill

[yo soy el mejor]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

I don't doubt that romantic attention is easier for women to get from men than the other way around, but I also don't think that means regular looking men have no chance with online dating. If all women were really that picky and hard on men, dating by meeting in real life should be just as hopeless as dating online.

I'm sure I already said this in this thread and every other time we've ever talked about online dating, but one key is to be persistent and invest time in matching/talking to a lot of people. In fact, in a dating app scenario I feel like you already have a leg up on approaching someone in real life because the fact that you swiped on each other probably means there is a baseline standard being met for both parties in terms of compatibility, whether it's from your pics alone or your info as well.

lol

[Disco King]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

I don't doubt that romantic attention is easier for women to get from men than the other way around, but I also don't think that means regular looking men have no chance with online dating. If all women were really that picky and hard on men, dating by meeting in real life should be just as hopeless as dating online.

I think it's true that dating in real life is also pretty difficult for men. For example, this study found that unattractiveness was negatively correlated with the ability to find a mate in men, but that there was no correlation for women. In other words, women tend to have enough choice that they can find a partner regardless of how attractive they are, but this is not the case for men. Socio-economics also played a role. Being unattractive lowered the likelihood of finding a mate who is a graduate or who has higher educational attainment for men, but not for women.

A study by Wang et al. (2018) also found that woman are 1000x more sensitive to men's salaries when it comes to dating and mate choice than men are. Other studies have found that a male partner having a steady income is considered a "necessity" (Fales et al. 2016) for most women, whereas women's dating success isn't really tied to their income or wealth. One study also found that women rate men as more attractive when their photo is pasted into a luxury apartment, but that men did not show any difference in their ratings of women regardless of the photo manipulation. A study by Ong and Wang (2015) also found that men visited the online dating profiles of women at all socioeconomic levels pretty equally, but that women showed a preference for the profiles of higher earning men, and that the profiles of the highest-earning men received ten times as many visits as the profiles of the lowest earning men. Another study (Hitsch et al. 2006) has found that the less attractive a man is, the more money he has to make in order to make up for his poor looks and have a more equal shot at finding a mate.

First, we look at the trade-off between looks and income. Consider a woman evaluating the profile of a man whose looks rating is in the nth decile (n < 10) of all looks scores among men. We would like to know the amount of additional income this man would need to be as “successful” with the woman as another man whose looks rating is in the top decile. To that end, we calculate the income variation such that the woman’s utility index for either man is equal. Remember that the utility index allows for preference heterogeneity through
attribute distance terms, and hence we also need to specify the income of the woman and the “baseline man” in the top looks decile. We assume (here and below) that the woman has an annual income of $42,500 and that the man has an annual income of $62,500. These are the median income levels for men and women among the dating site users in our data.

Table 5.4 shows the income tradeoffs for all looks deciles. A man in the bottom decile, for example, needs an additional income of $186,000 (a total annual income of $248,500) to compensate for his poor looks.

Race and ethnicity are further obstacles for men, I think. But it looks like the obstacles may be a little less harsh in real life than in online dating. One study of online dating found the following:

As previously mentioned, women are more likely than men to state a racial preference. Consistent with prior research, theyare also more likely to prefer to date whites only; among those with an expressed preference, approximately 64% of white women prefer whites only compared to only about 29% of white men.

(Feliciano et. al, 2009).

Racial prejudice seems to be confirmed by OkCupid's own data (another article that you have to go to the archive for because it's been scrubbed from their main site), but it appears that racialized minority men on the website still receive fewer messages than racialized minority women on the website.

A study on speed-dating by Fishman et al. (2008) also found that "on average, women exhibit stronger racial preference than men," but these preferences seemed weaker than those found in the studies on online dating.

It seems this heightened difficulty for male mating has gone on for some time. For example, examinations of our genetic variation show that our population has twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, and that a minority of males, throughout evolutionary history, have mated with the majority of women, with most males never passing on their DNA.

In today's society, the most successful men do not have any more children than the least successful men. However, this is due to the fact that we have moved from polygyny to monogamy, as well as contraceptives and family planning reducing the number of offspring we have. People tend to have goals beyond just reproducing these days. However, the most successful 20% of men are still sleeping with 60% sexual partners:

Reproductive success, even when assessed by a more reliable measure of actual male fertility than the one commonly used, fails to correlate with social status. In striking contrast, however, status is found to be highly correlated with potential fertility, as estimated from copulation frequency. Status thus accounts for as much as 62% of the variance in this proximate component of fitness. This pattern is remarkably similar to what is found in many traditional societies and would result in a substantial positive relationship between cultural and reproductive success in industrial populations were it not for the novel conditions imposed by contraception and monogamy.

(Pérusse 1993)

It seems that these findings are all predicted that parental-investment theory (Reprise probably knows a lot more about this than I do). A further confirmation of this theory is an experiment that's been replicated in cultures around the world on every inhabited continent, in which strangers are propositioned for sex by attractive confederates. Most men accepted the proposition for sex by the attractive female confederate, and the ones that declined were apologetic about doing so. Almost no women accepted the proposition for sex by the attractive male confederate, and most also responded to the proposition with disgust and offense.

So, the short of it is that, dating, romance, and sex are a lot more difficult for men to be successful in than for women to be, and unless you are in the upper caste of men, attaining these things is going to be rough for you. And those at the very bottom have very little hope of ever having success or fulfillment in this area of life.

Citations:
Fales, Frederick, Garcia, Gildersleeve, Haselton, and Fisher. "Mating Markets and Bargaining Hands: Mate Preferences for Attractiveness and Resources in Two National U.S. Studies." Personality and Individual Differences 88 (2016): 78-87. Web.

Feliciano, Cynthia ; Robnett, Belinda ; Komaie, Golnaz. "Gendered Racial Exclusion Among White Internet Daters." Social Science Research, 2009, Vol.38(1), pp.39-54

Hitsch, Günter, J. Hortaçsu, and Ali Ariely. "What Makes You Click?—Mate Preferences in Online Dating." Quantitative Marketing and Economics 8.4 (2010): 393-427. Web.

Ong and Wang. "Income Attraction: An Online Dating Field Experiment." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 111.C (2015): 13-22. Web.

Pérusse, D. "Cultural and reproductive success in industrial societies: Testing the relationship at the proximate and ultimate levels." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16.2 (1993): 267-283. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00029939

Wang, Cao, Sauciuvenaite, Bissland, Hacker, Hambly, Vaanholt, Niu, Faries, and Speakman. "Different Impacts of Resources on opposite Sex Ratings of Physical Attractiveness by Males and Females." Evolution and Human Behavior 39.2 (2018): 220-25. Web.

[teh b0lly!!1]

you guys better keep this carefully researched shit out of the sad sex thread

[Disco King]

No dice.

[pavementtune]

I was registered on such a platform for a few months over a decade ago, so my experience with online dating is mostly second-hand from what people who do use it tell me about it.

What I found off-putting was that I had no way of knowing if someone is just there to find an easy hookup and doesn't care much who it is, what person the other one is. And that's basically what I hear now as well. Sure, the women I talk to who do use it have no shortage on matches. But most of them aren't actually registered to find a quick fuck with someone they have no further or deeper interest in.
99% of the guys I ended up chatting with were extremely fast in wanting to go on a date, like they had just swiped and figured "fuckable, sure, let's go". The one guy I talked to for weeks beyond a surface level I actually did agree to meet. And haha, that joke was on me, too.
I showed up and immediately recognized him as an assistant professor at college I had only nodded to in passing (back then you could have pictures on your profile that did not show your face if you didn't want to.) Naturally, in the weeks of online conversations, he kept that little detail to himself.

As easy as getting matches is, I wonder where in these studies is the very justified fear for women that a date with someone you do not know at all goes south fast.