anything on bravo femme side never been married care of himself
music madonna attracted to women who daughter family meet a man who
music britney lesbian friends for a good woman find a man who
ltr oriented are femme treat a lady who knows what he
romy and michelle’s butch femme good women meet a man
new guys lesbian movies my kids my family man who knows how
barefoot contessa single lesbian hello ladies a nice guy who
kathy griffin u haul type of girl honest guy
single gay butch but woman that can a man who has
the comeback are feminine real woman are a nice guy
hiv positive femme who my son family christian man
density of souls elena undone woman to share like a man who
modern family glee the butch my daughter family a guy who has
ab fab not butch intelligent woman man that knows
most gay movies imagine god my kids love jesus
muriel’s music brandi girl that i can a man who will
christopher rice walls could meet a woman who man that has
muriel’s wedding lesbian romance have no children true gentleman
other gay femme women son family you are a gentleman
flipping out debs with the right woman guy to share
find mr feminine women treat her nice guy who
guy to date you’re femme right lady like a guy who
sordid lives soft butch great woman a guy that can
stereotypical gay my future wife a woman who can christian woman
flight attendant hunter valentine nice woman for a good guy
are you there vodka lesbian looking i like a woman you’re a gentleman
As before, I’ll let you interpret the users’ words in detail, and I’ll just point out a few general trends. The two straight lists are all single-mindedly concerned with the person’s (potential) partner. Every last entry for straight women is focused on the guy she’s looking for (I’m counting Jesus here; he’s single), and the men’s only departure from talking about women is to note the presence or absence of children. These lists together read like “Me Tarzan, you Jane” in long form. Or maybe as adapted by Nicholas Sparks.
The lesbian list is more inward-looking, with more self-description, but it’s still quite similar to the straight lists. Like straight women, lesbians are very much typified by the relationship they’re looking for (you’re femme, my future wife); they’re just using different words.
The gay male list is very different from the other three. It’s full of pop culture and has comparatively few references to the user’s immediate person and family. Anything on Bravo has to be the most spot-on generalization of all time. That said, it’s interesting that gay men are the least sex- and sexual identity–focused of all three groups. Or rather, they get their identity from something besides sex.
This method is, again, made to emphasize differences between the groups, but other data shows that the boundaries are porous. One of the most intriguing findings from OkCupid is the answer to this match question, asked only of the site’s self-identified straight users.
Q: Have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?
women men
Yes, and I enjoyed myself. 22,308 26% 12,070 7%
Yes, and I didn’t enjoy myself. 6,153 7% 10,100 6%
No, but I would like to. 14,896 17% 7,632 5%
No, and I would never. 42,286 49% 137,455 82%
85,643 167,257
That is, 51 percent of women and 18 percent of men have had or would like to have a same-sex experience. Those numbers are far higher than any plausible estimate of the true gay population, so not only do we find that sexuality is more fluid than the categories a website can accommodate, we see that sex with someone of the same gender is relatively common, whether people consider it part of their identity or not.
The above data is from users who chose “straight” when signing up, but in that same pull-down menu OkCupid offers “bisexual” as an option. About 8 percent of women and 5 percent of men choose it. I have seen much frustration among bisexuals both on OkCupid and elsewhere with the idea that bisexuality is not a “real” orientation—that, for example, bisexual men are just gay men who haven’t come to grips with it yet. Many gay people see bisexuality as a hedge. A recent study by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health puts it well, if a bit dryly: “Respondents who identified as gay or lesbian responded significantly less positively toward bisexuality … indicating that even within the sexual minority community, bisexuals face profound stigma.”
Gerulf Rieger of the University of Essex, working with psychologists from Northwestern and Cornell, concluded in a 2005 paper that in terms of genital reaction to stimulus, almost all self-reported bisexual men were gay, some were straight, and very few were physically aroused by both sexes. He thus described male bisexuality as a “style” of interpreting arousal rather than arousal itself. Understandably, this infuriated the bisexual community; Rieger later revisited the topic to conclude that male bisexuality might be “a matter of curiosity”—that “interest in seeing others naked, observing someone else having sex, watching pornographic movies, or taking part in sex orgies” explained the apparent disconnect between bisexuals’ self-reported attraction to both sexes and their observed physical attraction to only one. Their minds enjoyed all types of sex, but their bodies were more discriminating.
On OkCupid we find support for the spirit of Rieger’s conclusions, if not his vague terminology. The vast majority of bisexual men and women seeks exclusively one sex or the other on the site. Below I’ve shown where the people who identify themselves as bisexual actually send their messages.
To land in either of the “message only” swaths, a user had to send 95 percent or more of his or her contacts to that sex, so the threshold there is quite high; this isn’t an accounting trick. Only a fraction of the bisexual user base has any significant contact with both sexes. Whatever the mechanism, Rieger’s claim that self-reported bisexuality doesn’t reflect observed behavior appears correct in this case. Interestingly, for men, messaging changes over time. In that change we find plausible evidence for the hedge narrative: more than half of younger bisexual men message only other men, and that percentage drops steadily until the mid-thirties, at which point most of the male bisexual user base is messaging only women. This is what you would expect to see if men interested in men stop identifying themselves as bisexual as they get older and become more comfortable with being called “gay.” But this question takes longitudinal data to fully answer, which we don’t have yet.
That said, who we say we are and how we behave are two separate things, and the latter shouldn’t automatically disqualify the former. People are ultimately free to describe themselves however they choose, and demanding that their labels fulfill a researcher’s (or a website’s) definition is pointless. Any discrepancy is ultimately the label’s fault, anyhow—individuals love in whatever way feels right to them, and sometimes the words to describe it have to catch up. On Valentine’s Day 2014, for example, Facebook launched more than fifty different gender options (allowing users to choose terms like transgender or androgynous instead of male or female). Ellyn Ruthstrom, president of the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston, was talking about orientation and Rieger’s work, but could have been speaking to my data too, when she told the Times, “This unfortunately reduces sexuality and relationships to just sexual stimulation. Researchers want to fit bi attraction into a little box—you have to be exactly the same, attracted to men and women, and you’re bisexual. That’s nonsense. What I love is that people express their bisexuality in so many different ways.”
We certainly find this varied expression when we look at the “typical” words in the profile text of bisexual men on OkCupid. In the top thirty are bisexual, pansexual, cross-dressing, and heteroflexible. In their antithetical list, you see clos
e with my family and really enjoy my job—markers perhaps of the loneliness and disaffection that come from being an outsider, even among other outsiders.
Bisexuality for women is a bit different. It’s more mainstream—or at least the version trafficked by the likes of Miley Cyrus is. Perhaps because marketers know that “sex sells” and that stars need to push boundaries, a kind of gay-for-pay lite is common in today’s pop culture. In Miley’s case—though of course I don’t know for sure—it seems like a costume to sell records, no different from Gene Simmons’s face paint. Similarly in costume, scammers targeting guys online will often select bisexual as the identity for their fake accounts. On Facebook, 58 percent of fake profiles are “female bisexuals” versus just 6 percent of non-fake. On OkCupid, the problem isn’t quite that pronounced, but selecting bisexuality along with a few other key indicators guarantees you’ll get special review from the site’s admins.
But even on our legitimate profiles, which is almost all of them, female bisexuality and straight male fantasy are linked. You really pull this out of the data when you look at the profile text: it’s mostly women inviting the world to threesomes with their boyfriends or husbands.
most typical words for …
bisexual women
bi female
bisexual female
me and my husband
me and my man
my boyfriend is
hubby and
we are a couple
i am bisexual and
me and my boyfriend
fun couple
couple we
married couple
we are not looking
fun with me and
do have a boyfriend
my bf and
female to join
girl to join
another couple
bi woman
my boyfriend my
i am bi sexual
my hubby and
join me and my
female for
my boyfriend and i
we are looking to
a triad
no single
send us
If I could put this to a beat and get Pitbull to do the middle eight, it would go straight to number one. That said, for all the crassness of sexual-identity-as-business-plan, it’s a hopeful sign when a minority identity is something the mainstream thinks is worth co-opting instead of suppressing. Indeed, for sexuality, we see that things are changing, and quickly. Devising the projections we looked at above, Nate Silver clocked a marked change in American attitudes in the last decade. Acceptance of gay marriage accelerated markedly in 2004—and he determined, “One no longer needs to make optimistic assumptions to conclude that same-sex marriage supporters will probably soon constitute a national majority.”
Thus, it all comes back to counting, and the fraction is going our way. Though people have been gay forever, in the late nineteenth century, people began to “self-disclose” their homosexuality as a political act. The phrase “coming out” was coined a few years later. Now, the goal of living and loving openly, which gay men and women have sought for so long, is near realized. The change is epitomized in the “out” celebrities, of course, but more so in the millions of other people whose names I’ll never know but who have helped tick the metrics of acceptance ever so slightly upward. The day is coming when pollsters can put down their pens, scientists will turn their lenses another way, and enterprising students can use their algorithms to calculate other things. The day is coming when the world will be so open, no one will need to guess.
1 Please see a map of the world circa 1491 for more information.
2 Survey data is frequently polluted by outside factors, like how the researcher chooses to word the questions or chooses to weigh sexual experience against sexual identification.
3 And the political, religious, and entertainment careers of the people who perpetuate it.
4 This is based on two assumptions: (1) that roughly 5 percent of the country is gay and (2) that, of the Census-reported 93 million singles in the United States, half are actually dating.
The government counts everyone who’s not married as “single,” which is obviously problematic in estimating the true single population, especially among gay people. In 2013, OkCupid recorded activity from 650,000 distinct gay profiles, which, by this arithmetic, is 26.8 percent of the actively dating American gay population. Some small fraction of the accounts are duplicates or “ghosts” (seldom used), but nonetheless the site’s share of the country’s gay dating market is substantial. In this note, as everywhere in this chapter, “gay” and “bisexual” users are counted separately, and this calculation does not include the latter.
5 There are gay hookup apps specifically for casual sex: Grindr and Scruff are the best known services for men. The straight analogue for these apps is Tinder. It’s proportionately as popular, perhaps more so. Therefore, I don’t think selection bias (for long-term relationships) in OkCupid’s gay population is any worse than in its straight population, though I do admit this is an impossible thing to know for sure.
6 Forty-nine percent of straight men and gay women have reported four or fewer partners.
12.
Know Your Place
When I was in junior high we had a long lunch period, and since everyone was too grown up at that age to really play or enjoy themselves, after the eating was over, we all just posted up outside the school and waited for the bell to ring us back to class. In the first few days of seventh grade, we sorted ourselves on the asphalt hardtop, and that arrangement, once set, hardly changed in three years. From nearest the cafeteria door to farthest, the order I remember is:
• ultra-coolest kids (mostly from the Heights, which was the wealthier part of town)
• the generically preppy kids
• the college radio REM/Cure people (this was pre-indie rock)
• the skaters
• the heshers (what we called the metalhead stoner types, and anyone else for whom glue was more than just an adhesive)
• me and my friends
• A BIG BROWN DUMPSTER
• exchange students and kids with learning disabilities
Obviously, this alignment was more than just random. The dumpster, god bless it, created a natural gathering point for the untouchables, and from there the +/− polarity of the student molecule took over. Given that at one end of the line my people were playing pencil-pop and debating the merits of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Role Playing Game Not The TV Show Because The TV Show Is For Kids, everyone else fell into place by fundamental force.
One of the beautiful things about digital data, besides its sheer volume, is that, like the back lot at Pulaski Heights Junior High, it has both physical and social dimensions. A piece of paper has two axes, space-time four. String theory predicts that our physical existence requires somewhere between ten and twenty-six dimensions. Our emotional universe surely has that many and more. And in combining these spaces—our interior landscape with our external world—we can portray existence with a new depth.
The way we’ve looked at people and interaction so far—connections, profile text, ratings, and so on—has mostly ignored physical place, but websites and smartphones are of course gathering ample location data. Tweets are geotagged with latitude and longitude; Facebook asks for your hometown, your college town, your current home; many apps know the very building you’re standing in. Here we’re going to layer identity, emotion, behavior, and belief over our physical spaces and see what new understandings emerge. We’ll look at how location shapes a person, and how people have laid new borders over our old earth.
The boundaries of many communities were created by fiat or accident—or both. The United States and the USSR split Korea on the 38th parallel because that line stood out on a map in an officer’s National Geographic. Earlier that same month, Germany was divided into zones of occupation that reflected, more than anything else, whose troops were standi
ng where at the time. Many of our own American states were created by royal charter or act of Congress, their borders drawn by people who would never see the land in person. Absentee mapmaking was and still is a much more pernicious problem in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East—and everywhere else the tread of Empire has stamped the soil. Only very occasionally have maps been drawn to reflect “the will of the people,” and even in those cases, as we’ve seen in Israel, which began its modern history as, officially, the British Mandate for Palestine, the question naturally becomes: which people, whose will.
For websites, political and natural borders are just another set of data points to consider. When information—fluid, unbounded, abstract—is your currency, the physical world with its many arbitrary limits is most often a nuisance. At OkCupid, rivers are an endless irritant to the distance-matching algorithms. Queens is both a half mile and a world away from Manhattan. Try explaining that to a computer. The problem is that when a person is online, he or she is both of the world and removed from it. But that duality also means we can remix our physical spaces along new lines, ones perhaps more meaningful than those drawn by plate tectonics or the dictates of some piece of parchment.
Here you see a plot of how Craigslist carves up the country—each region in the map is the territory served by a separate classified list. One mapmaker called it the “United States of Craigslist” but “united” feels to me like the wrong word—this is a partition, and, within the whole, each little zone is its own petty kingdom. It’s a Holy Roman Empire of old furniture.
Once we begin to graft content to the spaces, the map becomes more interesting. Below is Craigslist’s empire again, but overlaid with the most popular locations listed on the site’s many “Missed Connections” board, where a lonelyheart might post something like:
Both of us boarded the uptown Q at 34th. You were wearing a peacoat and your eyes had that Audrey Hepburn twinkle. We locked stares a few times; if you read this email me.
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) Page 14