Oh, OK Cupid, why did you have to go and do a thing like this? The famous dating website is now going to offer a “premium” service where you can tell them to filter out people who have physical traits you feel that you find unattractive. Worse, they’re allowing paying customers to put in filters that only show them the most “attractive” people, no doubt based on how long and often other people look at their profiles. You know, for the people who need others to tell them what’s attractive, of which there are sadly plenty.

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On its surface, there’s not really a whole lot to complain about. Some people are huffy, but at the end of the day, dating is a lookist institution and always will be—it’s not cool to insinuate people should fuck people they don’t find attractive. (It’s a pressure that already falls harder on women than men. Look at all these sad stories of women continuing to grit their teeth and fuck boyfriends they are no longer attracted to because they feared, at the end of the day, being “shallow”.) Granted, it’s a lookist institution only in the broadest sense, which a lot of people don’t want to admit—what I might find a major turn-off, looks-wise, might turn the next person on and so on and so forth. There really isn’t one standard, and that’s why I think the people—let’s face it, mostly men—who will pay money to see the people that are more “objectively” attractive are getting ripped off. But a fool and his money, etc. I can’t blame OK Cupid for exploiting that.

What I am mad about is this: This feature is going to cause a dramatic rise in the number of angry dudes online bitching that women are shallow, status-obsessed monsters who aren’t giving them the pussy they deserve. You can just see how this is going to happen:

Angry, entitled dude pays a premium to see only the “hottest” women on OK Cupid. These are, by definition, the women who are already getting the most attention from men on the website. Angry dude already has most women rejecting his messages, but now that he’s putting them into inboxes that have the highest signal-to-noise ratio, his reply rate will dwindle down to zero. He will conclude that women are all a bunch of shallow bitches who are only interested in dating “alphas”. We will all have to hear about it as whining dudes flood feminist websites, holding us accountable because of their poor, irrational, entitled choices.

I blame you, OK Cupid, for the upcoming surge in Nice Guys® that only look at women that a computer algorithm has determined are hot, but think it’s inexcusable that women would be “shallow” enough to reject them for any reason at all.

But I’m A Nice Guy from Scott Benson on Vimeo.