Ohhhhh OKCupid – Online dating, sexuality, and self-esteem
I have an OK Cupid account. I’m not sure exactly when I signed up, but looking at old email notifications indicate I’ve had a profile for over two years. Online dating, in my mind, isn’t inherently “good” or “bad,” it’s just one more tool available for meeting people. Using it in such an eyes-open way, I’ve gone on a few dates and even had a few relationships lasting a couple of months, but nothing major or super long-term.
My profile explicitly lists that I’m trans:
DISCLOSURE: I am trans. If that’s a problem, don’t message me.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t think I’m under any obligation to provide the above disclaimer. However, I am waaay to lazy to deal with the coming out conversation at this point in my life, so am willing to deal with the ramifications of disclosure.
GEEK: The above disclosures and disclaimers were originally written as HTML-style tags, but OKC apparently edits fake tags out, leading to this final stylistic choice.
And that pretty much says it for me: My disclosure on OKC is as much a result of laziness as of politics. But recently I’ve started using OKC in a different way, as a self-esteem–booster and emotion-explorer. And to do that I’ve done something radical. Something crazy. Something I feel extremely conflicted about and am continually second-guessing. I’ve changed my profile from ‘Lesbian’ to ‘Bisexual.’
To be clear, I don’t identify as bi. I hate being one of those too-cool queers who complains about OKC’s options, but I don’t think any of their sexuality choices – straight, gay, or bi – totally fit. I’ve described myself as ‘homoflexible’ (from the more commonly used of ‘heteroflexible’) but I’m not sure that works either. I enjoy flirting and dancing with guys, could imagine myself making out with one and enjoying it, don’t know that I’ll ever want to sleep with one but am not inherently opposed to the idea. For all of that, my primary attraction is to women. But after talking with a friend about the dearth of women contacting me on OKC, she suggested I try changing my profile to bi, as everyone knows bi women get contacted by shit-tons of guys.
And she’s right. Almost instantly after switching my profile to bi, I started getting ‘liked’ by guys, getting messaged by guys, getting propositioned by guys. And while I’ve instantly deleted nine out of every ten messages I’ve received, for one reason or another, its been a confidence boost and a self-esteem boost. I’ve gotten compliments on my performance videos, gotten into discussions about books listed on my profile, and just generally been flirted with. (I will say, from this very unscientific survey, guys are more likely than girls to send messages in which there’s no indication they read your profile. Which is obnoxious.)
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, though. Flirting is fun and all, and I realize that online dating profiles aren’t exactly expected to be flawless examples of truth and honesty, but I feel somewhat uncertain about what I’m doing. Part of it, I think, is from having invested so much time and energy into thinking of myself as someone who is only attracted to women. With so much of my identity and my presentation and my social interactions shifting over the transition, my sexuality has felt like a constant, even if I’ve gone from being perceived as straight to being perceived as gay – the people I’m attracted to hasn’t changed. And seeing guys at the gym doesn’t do it for me the way women do…this very afternoon I was working out on a treadmill and having a difficult time keeping my eyes off of the woman next to me, something that never happens with men.
But I could imagine saying ‘yes’ if the right guy on OKC asked me out, something I never would have considered a year ago.
It makes me think of a scientific study which said “ both heterosexual and lesbian women tend to become sexually aroused by both male and female erotica, and, thus, have a bisexual arousal pattern,” in contrast to men where their “sexual arousal show patterns that clearly track sexual orientation.” In short, men are turned on by what their sexuality would suggest – gay men turned on by men, straight men turned on by women – where women are turned on by everything, regardless of their sexuality. Now, it’s a small study, and it was conducted by the jackass J Michael Bailey, so I’m taking it with a grain of salt. Yet, as time passes, I’m realizing more and more I simply like being appreciated, regardless of the source of appreciation. I’d rather be hit on by a hot woman, but I’ll take a hot guy hitting on me over no attention at all.
I think.
So we’ll see. Maybe nothing will come of this, and in a day or a week or a month I’ll change my profile back to “lesbian.” Or maybe I’ll go on a few dates with guys, find the experience miserable, and do the same. But, regardless of the outcome, I plan to learn something about myself.
Themocracy
Hi – I haven’t visited your blog in a while (and I’ve probably never commented), but I just ran into it again. Two things to add regarding this post:
1. I am also trans and I used OKCupid for a little while, with much the same online dating philosophy as you, except I didn’t disclose in my profile. I do identify as bisexual, but I ended up switching my profile to heterosexual for pretty much the same reason you switched yours to bi (I didn’t want that kind of attention). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with listing something vaguely approximating your “true” orientation on a dating site if it makes things more convenient for you. Dating sites are just practical tools, after all.
2. I’m a social psych grad student. It makes me squeamish citing Bailey for anything, and his methods are highly suspect even discounting his transphobia. Check out Lisa Diamond for more (and better) work on the subject of female sexual fluidity. For example, her recent talk at this year’s Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference made an interesting distinction between “constitutional” desire (desire toward groups corresponding to one’s self-identified sexual orientation) and “facultative” desire (situational desire toward other groups).
Welcome back! Thanks for chiming in. I totally agree with what you’re saying about #1 – dating sites are tools (and occasionally their users are tools, too…) and it’s OK to use them as will best serve me. This is kind of an experiment, so I’ll see how it feels as I keep moving forward.
And yeah, Bailey sucks. I’d love to learn more about Lisa Diamond’s work! Do you have any links to talks or papers of hers?
Here are two papers which are available without direct access to academic journals.
http://www.psych.utah.edu/people/people/diamond/Publications/A%20Dynamical%20Systems%20Approach.pdf
http://www.psych.utah.edu/people/people/diamond/Publications/Female%20bisexuality%20from%20adolescence%20to%20adulthood.pdf
Thanks!
I’ve been on the site (From a straight male side) for awhile, and from what I’ve heard, and noticed about response rates, your experience with that change isn’t too surprising.
Have you had any luck finding interesting women after the change? (Unlikely it would have an effect, but am curious if something changed from the flood of messages or such.)
I haven’t seen any change in the occasional messages from women, but it also hasn’t been that long since I’ve changed my profile. We shall see.
And, to some extent, I get the idea of throwing something out there at a wide range of people (women) and seeing if any respond. I was talking with a (straight, cis, male) friend of mine about his online dating experience, and he said it was sometimes tempting to just copy-and-paste the same politely complimentary message to a ton of women. I think it’s kind of a vicious circle: The response rate from women is pretty low, leading to men sending low-quality messages to lots of women, furthering the low response rate.
That said, I do wish the men who are messaging me would step up their game. It reminds me of writing cover letters for job applications. You want to include something that indicates you actually know about the company, and you’re not just sending a form letter…
It’s quite annoying how many men don’t consider that the woman they’re asking out might want to be impressed in order to develop any return interest. I’ve been asked out by several guys who apparently thought I should be so thrilled to be chosen by them that nothing else (like whether I was attracted to them, or found them interesting) should matter.
I don’t, of course, know your friend, so I couldn’t speculate about whether he’s fallen into the trap of saying “I like this stuff about you, why don’t you invest some time in me so I can be interesting to you,” but I think women tend to have a higher interest-threshold for messaging someone back. For a lot of us, the “I like you, let’s get together and see if you like me” intro doesn’t cut it; why message a guy who hasn’t given any indication that we’ll like him?
Compliments are nice, but they’re also one-sided. For someone who wants a person she’s interested in, and not just chosen and flattered by, a message full of compliments can easily boil down to “I like you so we’d go great together,” which renders her opinion of him irrelevant.
It isn’t helped by that it’s often quite difficult to be interesting in a monologue to someone whose profile you’ve read, and I suspect the flood of “ur hot letz hav sexx U can blo me” that accompanies the responses with potential can make someone much less inclined to take a chance on someone who might be a good guy but might be a creep who’s just learned to use his words.
I’m also big on using profiles as a starting point for a conversation: What did you think of book X? How’s grad school going? How long have you been in Chicago?
Something.
Oh, yes. An impression that he considers intelligent conversation to be something other than getting in the way of pussy acquisition is good.
I recently joined out of boredom (it has questions you can answer, I love that!) but as a bi lady, I made a conscious choice to put ‘straight’. It feels like I am lying, but I seriously don’t need the bother of ALL THE MEN EVER asking me ‘so which do you prefer?’
I’ve heard that from a few bi friends, some of whom joined listing ‘straight’ and some of whom changed their profile to ‘straight’ after being annoyed by the responses ‘bi’ got. I haven’t gotten a ton of “oo ur bi want 2 fuck my g/f’ yet, so hopefully the whole ‘trans’ thing is scaring away people who aren’t queer-friendly.
Any luck on your end? And yes, the tests and questions are fun.
i have bi, female friends on OKC (i’m not on there myself) who put ‘lesbian’ instead, both to avoid the kind of responses you’re getting and because they have a larger pool of available guys that they meet anyway.
I halfway wonder if that male/female arousal pattern dichotomy isn’t at least partially cultural, shaped by the ubiquitous presentation of women as the sex class. Women are presented by media and culture TO EVERYONE as sexy, and men and women alike are expected to view them that way, whereas men are not, so the only people who view men as sexy are those whose orientation produces that reaction in them. Men don’t get the same encouragement to view men as sexy that women do to view women as sexy.
In cultures such as the ancient Greeks, there was a strong and common tradition of male bisexuality and also an artistic/aesthetic tradition of viewing the male form as beautiful/desirable. The marble sculptures, the vase paintings, the nude athletics and admiration for the athletes’ beauty . . . one can see the same thing happen there as any cultural or temporal differences in preferred female appearance or eroticization of certain body features—tiny waist or thinness or plumpness or torpedo boobs or shapely legs or anything else that are “in fashion” so to speak, or out of fashion such that the woman is considered plain or ugly when at a different time she would have been highly desirable.
It all seems to suggest that—not for everybody but for many—that to which a person is attracted can be shaped, and perhaps the current gap between male and female bisexual arousal patterns might be different in a society like ancient Greece where the forms of men are presented as sexual to all adults in the society rather than to niche markets of female and gay male audiences.
Oh, I absolutely agree the way men and women think about sex is a cultural construct. Sorry if I implied otherwise. And what you’re saying makes sense, that patterns of attraction would be hugely impacted by cultural and social forces.
I also wonder, within the trans community, if there isn’t simply a willingness to expand one’s ideas of what bodies and body attraction mean. Age and political surroundings may have something to do with it, but I feel like my trans activist-y friends (around my age) are willing to simply say “skin on skin is sexy.” I think (hope!) the process of transitioning, for many people, allows-slash-forces a more in depth examination of what one finds sexually and physically pleasurable.