Liberals take themselves too seriously, example 4,381: Online dating app OkCupid has been asking the following question of users since 2003: “What’s more important in a romantic partner: great sex or similar political views?” (Online dating sites apparently are where dignity and discretion go to die.) OkCupid tells the Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett that now, for the first time since it debuted in 2003, more users are answering “politics.”
The politicization of everything proceeds apace.
“The overall number of women prioritizing politics over sex doubled from 2016 to 2018, and the percentage increased from 27 percent to 42 percent across the country,” writes Bassett. “Over the same period, the app has seen a 1,000 percent increase in political terms on people’s profiles.
And we all know what happened in 2016. The Cubs won the World Series. But more relevant to the matter at hand, Trump was elected.
OkCupid CMO Melissa Hobley told Bassett, “Without a doubt, the recent presidential election and current administration have driven young women in particular, but millennials of both genders, to say, ‘Swipe left if you support Trump,’ or ‘I don’t even want to see you as a match if you don’t vote.’”
This is what sociologists call “sad.” But the Trump administration has driven liberals around the bend. And it is a lib-driven phenomenon. According to Bassett, we’re talking about “users in major cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.” So not exactly breadbasket ‘Merica. And Hobley confirms that OkCupid’s users “skew millennial and urban, two groups that tend to lean liberal, with an even number of men and women.”
But really, in the politically antiseptic environs of OkCupid, the chances of Mr. or Ms. Lonelyheart encountering wrong-think in are pretty slim. Bassett:
Since the app has been asking the simple question, “Trump?”, since his election, 90 percent of users have responded “no” or “hell no,” indicating that the app should not even show the people who support the president.
And no one will be shocked to learn this all tracks perfectly with the opinions of people who follow HuffPo on Twitter. Bassett asked Twitter users whether they considered politics “a deal-breaker in online dating.”
“Several women said they won’t even date a man who indicates on his bio that he’s ‘moderate,’ she says, “In this increasingly polarized atmosphere, they assume that probably means he’s conservative.” Which really just sounds like modern Democrats playing to type. Then there’s “Jason, a 39-year-old man in a conservative area in Kentucky.” Jason “doesn’t indicate his liberal politics in his dating profile ‘partly out of fear.’ But he filters out conservative women.”
Bassett doesn’t say what exactly Jason’s afraid of, but he certainly seems wary of anything approaching lucid thinking.
“It sucks that so much of the country is resorting to tribalism, but one side believes in equality for all while the other exists only for rich, white, straight, cis men,” he said. “Maybe some people can live with ‘agreeing to disagree’ on things like that, but I just couldn’t live with myself if I did.”
Jason will die alone, never having developed self-awareness, an understanding of irony or anything remotely like what’s known in the personal wellness community as “a life.”
