''We're not psychologists. We're math guys,” remarked Sam Yagan, the chief executive of OKCupid. He wasn’t being self-deprecating.

OKC suggests romantic pairings based on information gathered from a sprawling, seemingly endless questionnaire. When filling out the questionnaire, users are also asked to rank the relative importance of each question and to say which answer or answers they would prefer in a partner. Users, in other words, describe to the OKCupid database their ideal “match” as a set of data points.

Because users are generally able to intuit the basic parameters of how the system works, they upvote the questions most likely to be useful in narrowing down a pool of millions of strangers—that is, the questions most likely to be incredibly divisive. A good OKCupid question is like a good question in a game of “Guess Who?”--one that eliminates the most candidates.

The questionnaire asks users to provide their own definitive standards for in-group and out-group belonging. Then, in their profiles, users are expected to distinguish themselves within their chosen group or groups through a combination of photographs and prompted text.

OKCupid profiles are sort of like really long pick-up lines pitched at an imaginary “perfect match.” In general, they show humanity in a humiliating light, and various OKCupid users have taken it upon themselves to liberate the profiles of others, condensing them into image macros and sharing them outside the context of the site. The ethics of this are out of focus, because the culture has not yet decided where sites like OKCupid fall in terms of public vs. private space, and what reasonable expectations people can have when they join these sites.

The found OKCupid profile has become one of the Internet’s most unsettling genres. Part Cindy Sherman film still, part Robert Browning monologue, the best found profiles match the uncanny visual embodiment of a cultural type with an elliptically unraveling text of unconscious self-revelation.

For example:

The Tumblr “Nice Guys of OKCupid” [1]develops a specific variation of the found OKCupid profile. NGOKC doesn’t just expose the strange. Rather, it proposes to chart a demonstrable connection between a kind of rhetoric found in the romantic self-advertising of OKCupid’s profile pages and a pattern of data logged in its semi-hidden underworld of fascinating soft science.

The connection is that male users who go on at length in their profiles about being a “Nice Guy” who is perpetually “Friendzoned” because women prefer “Assholes”—these people often express, through their questionnaire, profoundly hostile and confused notions about female sexual and psychological autonomy.

For example:

The term “friend zone” is traceable to a 1994 episode of Friends in which the hopeless nebbish Ross is referred to as “Mayor of the Friendzone,” for his pattern of being romantically rejected and platonically embraced. The term mostly disappeared from popular culture in the last half of the 1990s, but it’s been revived online in the past 10 or so years.

Look at the recent Internet meme “Women Logic.” Nominally intended to expose the distorted thinking patterns of females everywhere, it has, in its crowdsourced form, been given over hugely to complaints about nice guys, assholes, and friend-zones:

The desire to rearticulate this complaint in as many forms as possible means that it’s bled across Internet genres and communities.

Among Internet “Rage Comics”—miniature narratives in which people complain about daily life using a combination of text and stock characters—there is a whole sub-genre dedicated to the topoi of The Friend Zone:

I admire this one on a formal level, for its nearly wordless visual grammar and shocking parataxis:

The friend zone mythos has spawned a whole pantheon that contains not just the Nice Guy and the Asshole, but lesser Olympians, such as Friend Zone Fiona, Friend Zoned Phil, and Friendzone Johnny.

Fiona:

Phil:

Johnny:

Reddit—“the front page of the Internet”—is rich with debate about the zone. Recently, for example, some lost and frightened Candide began a thread by asking, “Why does the friend zone happen?”

The section of Reddit with the most zone-talk is r/MensRights, a sub-Reddit dedicated to self-described “Men’s Rights Activists,” or MRAs. One of the regularly linked-to sites on r/MensRights, for example, is “A Voice for Men,” which features articles such as, “Nice Guys Are Emotional Toilet Paper” and “Mr. Nice Guy doesn’t live here anymore.”

MRA culture grew out of various masculine revivalist movements of the 90s and early 2000s: the right-wing moralism of the Promise Keepers; the revenge-fantasy sociopathy of the “seduction community” cataloged by Neil Strauss in The Game; Nu Metal.

MRAs distinguish themselves from these predecessors through their ability to mock-impersonate and invert the specialized language of the very progressive advocacy groups whom they exist to oppose. These men are “activists,” and they are advocating “rights.”

MRAs adopt a peculiar tone of wounded self-righteousness, one that’s bled into popular culture on certain issues, as is the case with nice guys, assholes, and friend zones—terms MRA message boards have been instrumental in popularizing.

Indeed, a landmark in the MRA movement was the launch, in 2001, of the-niceguy.com, which currently greets readers:

"Let's just be friends." If you're here, you've probably heard this phrase a thousand times from many different women, all of whom you were romantically interested in at one point or another.

Back in 2005—the oldest version of the site currently viewable—the landing page read:

I'm NiceGuy. Why did I make this site, if I'm Nice? Because: Ameriskanks (mostly) Suck. ("Ameriskanks" means "North American females" obviously.) And yes, they 're horrible beyond imagination. Don't shoot the messenger. It's actually a good thing for me to come out and say this- our biggest critics are our truest friends because they show us how to improve ourselves. In this case, I'm giving an entire gender the criticism it needs to improve itself.

This site is currently subtitled, “American Women (Mostly) Suck.” It’s become, since its launch, part of an entire community of sites, including americanwomenreallysuck.com and stayawayfromamericanwomen.flippertv.com.

All of these pages argue that women from certain other countries—mostly in Eastern Asia—make better sexual and/or romantic and/or conversational and/or life partners.

There is a logic linking “Nice Guys” and “Assholes” to MRAs and the historical recurrence of expatriated Orientalist fetishism, and this logic is what’s under analysis by “Nice Guys of OKCupid.”