Dating online, an inquest

It all started as all good things start these days : on irc.

ThickAsThieves I imagine dating in your 30s in 40s these days is pretty much all online websites now?
mircea_popescu Betas shower the websites, alphas let the girls suggest girls for the club.

This set me to wonder, how exactly does it work online ?

Conveniently enough, a certain website dedicated to BDSM-friendly dating has, among a bevy of other methods of communication, a feature allowing any user to see a list of all the users which have more or less recently pulled up his profile. Fortunately for our purposes it also has a security hole, allowing one to set this bit for roughly speaking the entire user database. And so, I've created, for 48`571 different, extant users the illusion that I have visited their profile. This has made a total of 189 people check back within 48 hours, signifying an engagement of about 0.4%.ⁱ

The whole story is available as csv if you're interested in doing your own processing, but otherwise here's some graphical summaries :

While the abundance of males is perhaps no surpriseⁱⁱ and the hordes of self-styled "dominants" perfectly in keeping with what you'd expect coming out of young men engaged in exploring their environment, did you have any idea homosexual menⁱⁱⁱ are really such a small minority ? On a BDSM site ? They friggin invented the thing for crying out loud. I guess BDSM has sold out huh.

Moving on, everyone declares an age. Everyone. So long quaint difficulties and obnoxious coyness of a century ago, it's all forgotten. The average age as declared by our sample works out to 36.09^iv years. The average declared height is 178 cm (15 abstain), the average declared weight is 180.94 kgs (32 abstain). Apparently height is a much touchier subject than age, although being shorter is objectively worse than being taller, whereas being younger or older is not quite better or worse than the alternative. Yet these are both factors the subject has no real control over. What's truly shocking to me, however, is that weight - fully within the subject's control like no other variable, is the touchiest subject of all, and - what's more! - everyone is way, way, way out of bounds. 180 kgs is obesity, and this is the average of active people. Imagine all the lazy slobs too fat to even click on a profile pic!

O wait, trick's on me. Weight is given in lbs not kgs, and it's not really all that bad. Whew! :D

And now for the triplet breakdown. There are no less than 70 (seventy!) users that self-identify as straight-male-dominant. That's half the entire male population and almost a third of the entire sample. Their average age ? 39.4! They're actually older than the site average, perhaps hinting that traditional normative sexuality^v is a thing of the past, slowly shuffling towards the grave with all the 50 and 60 yos that grew up in the same mental space as I did.

On the other end of the spectrum, the prized female types are rare : seven straight female submissive, seven bisexual female slaves^vi. Better than nothing, but still : the average natural harem'd be built out of five dominant men to the obedient woman rather than vice-versa.

All in all a somewhat interesting passtime. Let me know if you come to any sort of interesting conclusions on your own.

1. It is important to note that this counts as a vibrant and active online community, and that the "advertisement" so to speak was directed at their vanity. The average banner in the average community probably does worse, and remember we're discussing clickthrough here, not any sort of action. These considered, expecting one sale out of a million impressions of your banner may be overly optimistic. [↩]
2. Quoth Greenspun :

   When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:

   A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?

   Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:

   1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
   2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"

   [↩]

3. While I disagree that there's such a thing as "homosexual women", in that what women do together may be fun but it's not sex any more than salad is food, nevertheless self-identified lesbians accounted for less than 10% of the gayness tag, and thus... well... we'll just ignore them. [↩]
4. Seeing how we have > 200 respondents, the two digits are actually meaningful. [↩]
5. Growing up I think I have never encountered any male that'd identify as anything else than straight dominant if their life were on the line. [↩]
6. It's perhaps improbable to have a female slave that's not bisexual, strictly because from the male dominant viewpoint, tuna isn't optional in the diet of slavegirls. [↩]