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OkTrends: Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex
- chanux 16y agoI had this idea coming from somewhere that gay-ness is occurred by mind body mismatch (No offense guys). "In personality traits" chart, gay men appeared to be more feminine (or less masculine) while gay women appeared to be more masculine (or less feminine). But following this line of thoughts, in the "what's bigger: the sun or earth" chart, the gay men and women seemed to have the places switched. Just something I noticed.
- goatforce5 16y agoHow exactly does a really basic general knowledge kinda question have a gender assigned to it?
- chanux 16y agoStraight men and straight women were in opposite ends of the chart. So I thought the sequence is more likely to be straight men, gay women, gay men, straight women. I got it wrong thinking gay women are more masculine than gay men. Actually the chart looks ok to me (in my line of thought) now.
- khafra 16y agoGender dysphoria is pretty thoroughly described and catalogued seperately from the hetero/homo continuum. There may very well be correlation, but the idea that one causes the other is worthless without new data.
- araneae 16y agoWow, lesbians are more everything... except into sports. Huh.
- ciupicri 16y agoAnd politeness and optimism :-(
- jgrahamc 16y agoThe basis for homophobia being that straight men are scared that gay men might be out to sleep with them has always struck me as odd. Extrapolating from my experience with women (only a tiny minority find me attractive), why would I think that all gay men want to have sex with me?
- cynicalkane 16y agoDon't extrapolate from your experience with women... extrapolate from your experience with men. Men are far less choosy about who they would sleep with, given the opportunity.
- jgrahamc 16y agoReally? Ok, HN... If you are male and would sleep with me please send me email. I'll keep your details secret, but I'd be fascinated to see some hard evidence for this assertion.
- BrandonM 16y agopics or GTFO ;) (I'm straight, and I normally wouldn't say something like this on HN, but it's sooo perfect right here...)
- danilocampos 16y ago> hard evidence for this assertion Regrettable word choice.
- acqq 16y agoThe pictures: http://www.google.com/images?q=John+Graham-Cumming http://www.google.com/images?q=John+Graham-Cumming
- sudont 16y agoEgo?
- mithaler 16y agoThat came across like a straw man to me in the OP, especially in statements like this: > The subtext to a lot of homophobic thinking is the idea that gays will try to get straight people into bed at the first opportunity, or that gays are looking to "convert" straights. Freud called this concept schwanzangst; the U.S. Army calls it Don't Ask Don't Tell. I haven't really heard any arguments from those people that made any sense, but all the same this came across as an uncomfortably large leap.
- DirtyAndy 16y agoI'd take all of this with a grain of salt. This is a survey from a dating site. The majority of their members haven't been able to get any in other ways and hence use the site - so comparing partners, experiences etc is not necessarily a good subset of general society. I'm not putting down anyone who uses such a site, in this day and age I certainly would if I was single, but I am not sure the sexual habits of single people who use a dating site is really a good subset of data for this.
- ctide 16y agoHow's the 20th century working out for you?
- TGJ 16y agoIt's a grain of salt take it how you want. Because you yourself are surrounded by networking does not mean that everyone is surrounded in the same way. It's something to consider. Much like OKCupid being a free site vs surveys from say, eHarmony.
- lukesandberg 16y agoI think that being suspicious of a cohort bias on OKCupid is totally legitimate. It's reasonable to assume that the subset of people who use OKCupid is not representative of society as a whole. Now im not sure exactly what biases this might introduce, but one should always be aware, especially considering that the OKCupid users are a self selected sample (not a random sample) of society.
- potatolicious 16y ago> "I think that being suspicious of a cohort bias on OKCupid is totally legitimate." Absolutely, but that's not what DirtyAndy was getting at - he's assigning his own stereotype of an OKCupid user, which he has little data to back up. It's perfectly valid to be suspicious of population bias in a website - any website for that matter - but to extrapolate and pretend to know just how that bias is tilted (without data) is doing yourself a disservice.
- tlrobinson 16y agoThe most surprising thing about this post is that 5% of OKCupid males and 10% of OKCupid females think the earth is larger than the sun. WTF?!
- araneae 16y agoIf there was ever a convincing argument that women are dumber than men, this is it.
- araneae 16y ago...and that's the fastest I've ever accumulated downvotes. Come on guys, I didn't say that women are dumber than men. I just said that this is the single most convincing piece evidence for that. Doesn't say much for the existing evidence given that this is a crappy non-scientific OKCupid blog post, now does it? Knee-jerkers.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- BrandonM 16y ago> Come on guys, I didn't say that women are dumber than men. I just said that this is the single most convincing piece evidence for that. You're missing the deeper implication that you're cruising around the Internet looking for, and pouncing on, such evidence. Why is it important to you whether or not women are dumber than men? > given that this is a crappy non-scientific OKCupid blog post In my opinion, OKCupid's OKTrends blog posts are second only to MythBusters in putting out interesting, entertaining, scientific answers to questions for which a lot of people are either completely uncertain of the answer or have terrible misconceptions.
- araneae 16y ago>Why is it important to you whether or not women are dumber than men? Wouldn't you want to know if you carry within you an inherent deficit or advantage? I do. That's why I got my genome sequenced. Now I know my risk of colorectal cancer. Knowledge is power. Blah blah blah. Also it's interesting. And clearly it's not just interesting to me, but to HN as a whole. There's a sex-related post on the front page practically every time it loads. >OKCupid's OKTrends blog posts are second only to MythBusters in putting out interesting, entertaining, scientific answers to questions So you admit that in terms of one scientific fact that has implications for a person's understanding of size, scale, and space, women are inferior to men.
- j_baker 16y agoI have difficulty believing that there's that big a difference between straight women and straight men in terms of same sex experiences. It's more likely that the stigmas attached to male same-sex experiences led more of them to lie about it.
- BrandonM 16y agoI've been at numerous parties where I've seen straight women making out with each other... never straight guys. I realize that's not exactly sex, but it's along the path. Edit: Forgot to mention... there's no real reason to lie to a match question on OKCupid. You can skip the question or answer it while making your answer private.
- jfager 16y agothere's no real reason to lie to a match question on OKCupid Depending on how much emphasis you're placing on "real", sure there is. You could be using it as a proxy to lie to yourself. You could be trying to convince OKCupid that you're the kind of person that should be recommended to the kind of person you want to meet. You could be setting up multiple personas for hook ups vs real dates. Etc, etc.
- BrandonM 16y agoThose are good points. I mainly just wanted to put that information out there for anyone who wasn't familiar with how OKCupid works.
- mikeklaas 16y agoSure there is. Your answer is still used to match with other people, even if they don't get to read it.
- araneae 16y agoOr that attraction is more straight-forward with men. I.e. step a, look down: Is your penis erect? Women might be more likely to experiment because they don't have that instant visual cue.
- m-photonic 16y agoIt would be nice if they would tell us what percentage of their site fell into the different gender/sexual orientation categories.
- mshron 16y agoSure. Men: 90% straight, 6% gay, 4% bi. Women: 85% straight, 5% gay, 10% bi. -Max Shron (Data Scientist, OkCupid)
- m-photonic 16y agoGreat, thanks. And what percentage of the site is male/female?
- mshron 16y agoHad to go back and check this. It varies from place to place, but for the site as a whole it's about 55% men, 45% women.
- mattmaroon 16y agoUnfortunately this won't help. Homophobes are not such because they looked at a bunch of data and came to a conclusion as a result. As such they will not look at data to the contrary and change their mind.
- Groxx 16y agoI love that they put this kind of data online. It goes a long way to debunking a lot of popular myths. And utterly fascinating at the same time. Go OKCupid! Please keep doing this!
- FR6 16y agoYes it's really great that OkCupid take the time to put together those stats and give their results to the public. Another interesting stats that they release is about how the user profile photo affects the message they get: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...
- feral 16y agoI don't see this mentioned in the other comments, but there is almost certainly more going on here than meets the eye. From http://www.okcupid.com/faaaq http://www.okcupid.com/faaaq - people get to explicitly filter potential matches according to the answers those matches have provided to these questions. It is not a black box recommender system - people can mandate explicit rejection criteria. This creates an incentive to lie on the questions. It would make sense for users to try and make their profile statistically close to what they think the [type of people they would like to date] specify. For example, Bob wants to go out with a 'good girl' (lets call her 'Alice'). Bob reasons that Alice, being a 'good girl' would probably want to go out with a guy who has never cheated; so Bob will neglect to mention his affair with Eve on his profile. I would guess that users, even if they don't initially realise the strategic situation they are in, will quickly learn it socially and through feedback, and adjust their profiles accordingly. The end result being that the answers given on the website, that provide the data being visualised here, should be treated with caution. I imagine that certain questions such as 'number of sexual partners' comes with large disincentive to lie, due to social pressure. As such, the conclusions here should be taken with a grain of salt - and that's even before discussing selection bias amoung the users of a particular social dating site. Such services are adopted as they spread through the underlying social network; it is well established that social networks are heavily clustered, and rarely give representative samples until they get very large. Its still very interesting stuff, but we should be careful about how strongly we interpret it.
- ciupicri 16y agoWhat about bisexual men and women?
- tommorris 16y agoOKCupid statistics posts are often pretty damn awesome. But I'm not wild about this one: First of all, it attempts to argue that gay people aren't promiscuous on the basis of statistics derived from a dating site. It is perfectly possible that gay OKCupid users aren't more promiscuous than straight OKCupid users, but gay OKCupid users aren't representative of gay people overall. The article doesn't actually mention sample size. It may be possible that they have a very small gay userbase, for instance. It certainly is interesting to know the differences between gay and straight OKCupid users, but it tells us less than they seem to suggest. First off, it's a dating site, not a hookup site. If you want to find out whether people are promiscuous, you can't work that out simply on the basis of a dating site because dating sites (as opposed to hookup sites) find people who are interested in romance rather than casual sex. You wanna know whether gay people are more promiscuous? Take OKCupid statistics and compare them to statistics from a sites like AdultFriendFinder (or some of the Craigslist sections)... Secondly, Jim DeMint is not saying gay people shouldn't be teaching in schools because straight people are better teachers. No, he's saying it because he thinks gay people will - I dunno - somehow transmit gayness rays to students. DeMint is bigoted and his suggestion is idiotic, but OKCupid's response is irrelevant because DeMint isn't saying that gay people are less intelligent - he's saying they shouldn't be teachers because they are gay and, you know, they like to recruit people and indoctrinate them into the secret gay liberal agenda (or something equally barmy).