Men, Women & Rejection: An OKCupid Feedback Loop

In my time delving into the bowels of the online dating world, I have noticed a very disturbing trend in the interactions between heterosexual men and women. Two aspects, of a high rejection rate maintained by most women users and the anonymity and unaccountability of the Internet, work together to cultivate intense misogyny in the men of online dating.

Anyone who engages in online dating knows a few basic facts. Alice Paloma covers many of them in her post Original Self Summary but here’s a quick review: in general, demand for 21 - 35 year old women is far greater than supply. Many women receive dozens of messages a day, while men are lucky if they get one a week. As is the nature of the supply/demand dynamic, the women users can be very selective. This creates a “paradigm of rejection” and a power dynamic in which women have far higher status than men. Indeed, many women never respond to a first message; the rejection is implicit in the absence. In fact, according to one OKC employee, the most common form of rejection is “no reply”.

With such a low success rate, it's only a matter of time before even the most optimistic men (men who are looking for relationships, who read women's profiles and who send relevant messages) start to feel downtrodden and bitter. This can lead any combination of the following effects/results:

1.) The Form Letter

Many men draft one Form Letter and proceed to send it out to as many women as possible (as suggested in the post, "A Touch of Psychopathy'"). This turns online dating into a numbers game; the more women you contact the more likely someone will respond. However this approach has a major pitfall: most people can spot a form letter by the end of the first sentence and women, as we’ve already seen, can be very picky. Couple this with a near-empty profile (a result of the unconfirmed assumption that women won’t bother to read the profile) and many men never get a response. It becomes a feedback loop.

2.) The Profile Rant

In the year since I started trolling OKC’s Flagmod feature, I have seen several dozen examples in which men use the Self-Summary section of the profile to vent their frustrations at what their experiences with completely unreasonable expectations of certain OKC women users. (It is impossible for me to tell how many women fall into this trap of expectations.) The Profile Rant in and of itself is not necessarily bad; in fact often they hit the nail right on the head about women’s selectivity. The problem here is, although this usually starts with an honest, if exasperated attempt to educate the women users they have a strong tendency to devolve into misogyny.

3.) The Rejection Flame and/or The Flame War

You know that feeling when you just really want to cuss someone out for being a total asshole (or not) but you don’t cause then you’d be a huge fucking douchetard? Welcome to the Internet: where assholes (developmental age: six) can call each other names with complete impunity. Yes, in fact I have worked with six-year-olds and the only difference is the level of creativity and vulgarity.

Some examples of Rejection Flame include [sic]:

“dumb cunt”

“Ok, sorry you Nazi slut.”

“You stupid cunt go fuck yourself”

Obviously there are more and less extreme manifestations of this. In fact Alice's comment in "Original Self Summary" is a very apt summary of the attitudes of many women users which have helped create this paradigm: "I am hot and most men want to have sex with me.  It’s becoming quite boring.  I don’t plan on having sex with anyone that isn’t worth having sex with.  I can afford to be extremely picky." Miconian's response [“You aren't very smart, you aren't very interesting, and you certainly are not "hot" by any reasonable definition”] is a textbook case of Rejection Flame in which someone arbitrarily takes out his frustration on a complete stranger.

While most people just block the user and/or flag the message, in certain situations (read: when both parties are assholes, developmental age: six) Rejection Flame seeds a Flame War.

If you spend any amount of time on online forums or chatrooms you’ve encountered a Flame War or two (or two hundred). Due to the same environmental factors that enable Rejection Flame, complete strangers can and do get into vicious arguments and engage in behavior that they would never condone if they could be held accountable for their actions. I have no way of knowing whether these men learned misogyny from rejection or if their latent or disguised sexism is merely revealed by these moments of supreme frustration. Most likely it is some of both. But nevertheless, this climate provides a window into a particular manifestation of male misogyny.

Because I see many conversations between many users I am able to discern these patterns but I’ll conjecture that most people are unaware of how endemic this dynamic is to OKCupid. My hope is that, once more people know about this, we can challenge this paradigm. To be clear, I am not blaming one gender or the other. These observable trends quickly develop into feedback loops and in order to break them we have to change the way both men and women conduct themselves online. I’m not saying this will be easy but at the very least we may start a dialogue and in my experience, the best way to change anything is to get people talking about it.

Disclaimers:

I don’t know if these models show up on other dating sites but the systemic forces of the Internet are basically constant so my hypothesis is yes.

This is an examination of specifically hetero-normative dynamics based on trends, not statistics.

Men are not the only users who exhibit these behaviors, although the way it manifests in women users tends to be slightly different. But this is a separate issue for a separate essay.