Chateau Heartiste

The datanauts at OKCupid ran the back channel numbers for New York City to find out who among the city’s 400,000 users on the dating site were the “most desired”, an appellation that relied on the simple metric of which users received the most messages from lovelorn horndogs. (More on that later.)

CH has taken issue before with OKCupid’s liberal-leaning data crunching team for sampling bias and misinterpretation of their findings. Analytical flaws aside, this very rough measure of “most desirable OKCupid user” does offer us a glimpse into the radioactive, hyperventilated, full metal jacketed sexual market of New York City, the American city with, arguably, the greatest concentration of 9s and 10s after LA and Miami. What does the crude sampling of OKCupid messages received say about New Yorkers’ sexual tastes?

I’m afraid, not anything flattering. However, there’s nary a fatty in sight, so at least NYC cleared that low hurdle.

First up, the NYC woman “voted” most desirable by OKCupid message ballot count is a heavily tattooed courtesan with a FUCK MY STARFISH cumdumpster gaze:

Cutting to the lace, this chick, as seen here, is a 7.5. CH deems her in her present state totally bang-worthy. But what does she look like underneath her three layers of industrial grade make-up and complimentary lighting? Drawing on my vast reservoir of expertise, I bet she drops to a 6 in the sunshine-y morning sans artificial face. The tats, of course, are a major slut giveaway. Not that sluttiness is necessarily a bad thing; it depends on a man’s perspective. Does he want a faithful girlfriend, or a bedroom adventure?

The impression this girl wants to leave on potential suitors is 1. I’m a fucktoy, 2. I will keep you at a distance and never let you know the real me, and 3. I’m an attention whore with a burdensome and unnecessary high female IQ and a low self-esteem nurtured by doubts about my ability to get a real alpha male player to commit, and so I will pretend I’m the one choosing my inglorious cad-chasing, pump and dumping lifestyle.

If you don’t believe my astute psychological diagnosis, here’s some choice quotes from her:

It doesn’t hurt that Lauren, after getting out of a four-year relationship with a “pathological liar” [ed: chicks dig… ah fuck it, you know the drill] who had a drug problem, isn’t necessarily looking for anything serious. So, in OKCupid’s searchable “I’m looking for …” section, she, like most women, selected “long-term dating,” “short-term dating,” and “new friends.” Unlike most women, she also selected “casual sex,” figuring she might as well tell the truth.

“At first, I thought if you listed ‘casual sex,’ guys would realize that even though I don’t want to be in a relationship with you, we can still go out, get drinks,” she says, but it triggered a vulgar explosion of come-ons. “It’s like, I’m not a prostitute. But they don’t get that.”

The attention, she admits, has been flattering—an ego boost after a rough breakup. She also confesses that she was “never the pretty girl” growing up and appreciates being in the position to approve or ignore other people.

Online dating: Inflating the egos of subclinical headcases since… I dunno, when did this clitshow start?

The finding of Lauren as most desirable NYC OKCupid girl also tells us a lot about what men value in women they meet online: namely, quick sex. Undoubtedly, there are hotter girls than Lauren peep toe-ing along the city’s sidewalks, but they’re not on OkCupid. Or if they are, they’re not as likely to create an image of themselves as around-the-way gothgirls. Lauren’s incomprehensibly vaunted position in the OKCupid universe is symptomatic of the problems with online dating, for both men and women: One, users (especially female users) are a self-selected bunch of marginal SMV participants. The really ugly and the really pretty are, respectively, too dispirited or too romantically successful in the real world to bother with the hassle. Two, women who dress like they spread faster than melted butter will naturally attract the eyeballs of a lot of men looking for a good time. Try to explain this common sensical functioning of the dating market to an SMRT, HIGH IQ city sister and you’ll get an earful of feminist boilerplate in return.

And don’t forget the probable demographic of OKCupid’s male users. Whom do gothgirls with NASA links attract? Nerds. What’s a nerd’s dating life like? The vast empty cosmos. Put the two together and you get a Lauren-sized ego relishing the desperation of 8,000 loveless nerds. 8,000 smart, economically productive nerds who don’t stand a chance against pathologically lying, badboy drug addicts.

I’d fuckin laugh if it weren’t so banal. No wait, I am laughing. Shitting on nerds’ hopes still puts a smile on my face.

Next up, the lesbian found to be most desirable dyke in NYC:

Justin Fuckin Bieber! Lesbians may all be grossly obese and tolerant of their scissor partners’ fatness, but judging by the photo above of most desirable lesbian in NYC, lesbians would prefer to be with very skinny women. Obligate lesbians (as opposed to cute chicks who experiment sometimes) are ugly and go out of their way to look like men, but they retain particulars of the heterosexual female mind, such as a preternatural ability to overlook physical flaws in a lover. Now I wonder if perhaps lesbians secretly desire the love of thin women, just like straight men do, but don’t give enough of a shit to bother with the effort since they know that gardening and softball sublimate nicely for bed death.

Anyhow, enough of this lesbian. I can’t stand looking anymore at those two bones passing for an ass on her.

For prolapsed giggles, here’s the photo of New York’s most desirable gay man on OkCupid:

Can we stop prancing around the subject and just admit that gay men are borderline Peter Panny pedophiles who love dat schoolboy charm? Not that I’d give them too much shit for it. If straight men had the option and the social sanction, we’d all be banging barely legal girleens.

One of the “winners’ was a straight man, but I see no reason to include his pic here. Not much to say, except he’s decent-looking and appears to have a sense of humor and knows how to demonstrate higher value, (of which the latter two traits are likely the greater attributing factors to his OKCupid popularity).

At a dark, candlelit West Village bar, James Hawver, a 29-year-old real-estate agent and New York’s most popular straight guy, is the living embodiment of his OKCupid handle, MyTiesAreSkinny. Preppily handsome, he’s dressed in a well-fitting H&M blazer with, yes, a skinny black tie and matching pocket square. James’s profile is peppered with references to his travels in Nepal and China and self-deprecatingly confident jokes like: “Ryan Gosling could play my stunt double. That is, if I didn’t already do my own stunts.” The whole profile is self-aware, right down to his height, which he lists as five-foot-nine, though he’s an inch shorter. “They say most guys add two inches,” he says, quoting OKCupid’s statistics blog, OKTrends. “I’m already behind!”

He also has a practical grasp of “law of large numbers” game.

But James has a few simple hacks to further improve his odds. He uses both ­OKCupid­ and Tinder, an app that is almost solely photo-based. Both are owned by IAC, the company that also owns Match.com. In the three and a half hours we spend talking, the phone will ping 47 times: On Tinder, 35 women will match with him; 12 women on ­OKCupid­ will either ­message or favorite him. The week before, he took a screenshot of a Tinder notification: 890 new matches, a personal record. And he has a basic strategy. Like a lot of guys, he was wasting time studying the profiles and photos of women who would never respond. Then a friend shared a deviously simple online-dating trick.

“You ready for the secret?” James asks me. “Not to blow your mind, but it’s disgusting …” He picks up his phone. “So, every couple days, I will do this,” he says. He opens the Tinder app, but before
I can see the first woman’s face, he swipes right: interested. If the woman he likes also swipes right, he has an official match. In short: He never swipes left (not interested).

“I will say yes to every single person,” James says. And he never follows up with someone who hasn’t already confirmed her interest. On ­OKCupid,­ he does the same thing: He gives everyone five stars (and if someone gives him four or fives stars in return, the site will notify him of a match). By doing so, he exposes himself to less risk, an appealing upside to James, who’s had two difficult breakups. He’s since had thousands of matches—so many that he’s had to refine his strategy.

By the way, you’ll note that James receives FAR fewer messages from women than Lauren receives from men. A handsome man simply can’t expect the same kind of lustful stampede from hordes of women than a pretty woman signaling sexual availability can expect from men.

“The last person I matched with was Allison,” he says. If he were to send a message to Allison on a Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday, it would read: Hey there Miss Allison. What kind of trouble did you get into this weekend? “That’s exactly what I do, every fucking time,” he says, laughing. For Wednesday: Hey there Miss Allison. What sort of trouble are you getting into this week? Thursday or Friday: What kind of trouble are you getting into this weekend? And if it’s Saturday: What kind of trouble have you been getting into?

Kind of a cheesy line, but if you drop it on fifty girls a week you’re bound to hit pay dirt on a couple.

The overall vibe one gets from the current online dating scene is one of self-protectiveness and exploitation. Not that it hasn’t always been like that, but these two trends have accelerated since I entered the plunderdome as a pre-teened, continuously turgid stripling. Some men are wising up to the mechanical nature of female sexuality, and women, in response (or as causal agents) are building emotional, snarl-fueled barriers around themselves, and sometimes even physical barriers like tattoos, which intimidate the beta saps and signal the alpha players to swoop in for the thrill. Women bitch about this state of affairs, but, like always, watch what they do. The vagina speaks louder than a million words.

It’s helpful to keep in mind when trawling online dating site data (you listening Rudder?) that “desirability” and “hotness” are not necessarily the same. A slutty 7 will get a lot more messages than a modest 10 for the simple reason that most men, average by definition, consider attainability in deciding which women to hit up for a romantic evening of ass eating.

And the same is true in real life. It may seem paradoxical, but the hottest girls actually get hit on less often than ordinarily cute 6s and 7s. If you want an explanation why 7s seem to have bigger egos than 9s, or why that fantastic 9 tossed you a lascivious look while that chubby 5 steamrolled right past you, there you go. This doesn’t mean really hot girls don’t know their own sexual value. 8s, 9s and 10s may not get directly hit on, but they experience plenty of indirect attention from men in the form of shell-shocked stares, furtive glances, craning necks and nervous fidgeting. Hotties subconsciously pick up these cues, but consciously may remain unaware just how awestruck men are in their company, which contributes to their frustration with not being approached as often as those subtle attraction clues from men would indicate.

It’s been said on other pickup sites, and it bears repeating: As a student of applied charisma, you’ll be surprised to find yourself having more success with hotter girls than you’re used to rather than with the plainer girls which have been your self-limiting expectation.

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