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Bad Taste is Colorblind

Jill

"A Walk to Remember" book cover / movie poster

Race is just a color, you guys: We are all terrible and have bad taste in everything. I have a dream that country girls and boys who love Jodi Picoult and Tom Clancy will some day stand arm in arm with god-fearing cool guys and gals who like Tyler Perry and Hitch. We will bond over our shared love of mascara, lipgloss, shortening single-syllable words into LOL-speak, and Elizabeth Gilbert. And everyone will learn that there is no apostrophe in “Tuesdays With Morrie,” but there are commas in “Eat, Pray, Love.”

We are the world, etc etc.

20 thoughts on Bad Taste is Colorblind

  1. It’s hard to take it seriously since it’s, you know, “official research” from Ok Goddamned Cupid.

    But I admit: I do like Tyler Perry and LOL-speak.

  2. I love Malcolm Gladwell! Oh no wait actually I love Nina Simone, Baudelaire, darjeeling, and getting my MFA. Damnit, I always knew I was Middle Eastern on the inside, we have the best taste in everything.

    On a serious note, OKcupid’s stat dumps are always good for a laugh.

  4. Hey, there are some signs of good taste too! White men like the Coen brothers, black men Mos Def, indian women anna karenina and Austen, middle eastern women Baudelaire and Billie Holiday, and Pacific Islander men like… oh no… oh god not… I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL!?!? Good Lord. Some proud Pacific Island men need to make profiles on OkCupid just to avoid using those words and bring them statistically down.

    PS Seriously, Baudelaire and Billie Holiday? Could there conceivably be a classier pair of tastes? Middle Eastern women on OkCupid are making the rest of us look bad.

  5. It seems I’m a Middle Eastern woman or an Asian guy, and my partner is very conclusively a white woman (we are both white men).

    You’re right, though, everyone is awful. I particularly don’t like sharing The Hitch Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy with all these white guys who appear to have had personalityectomies. No! You are a geek book! You belong to people with actual interests!

  6. I love the OKC data reports. Methodologically, they’re really interesting, and they do a good job of walking the line between promoting their site and mocking their members. It’s kind of awesome.

  7. Back when I was devoted to OKCupid as something of a high minded “these are supposed to be my people” (nerdy atheist hipsters), social experiment on internet dating I was really disenchanted by the data they presented on race and biases. It was a stark reminder of all the ways in which having all the commonalities in the world wouldn’t get you past the oh-so-enjoyable kneejerk that is casual racism. It was somewhat devistating at the time, because I was operating under the naieve misconception that the people who frequented OKCupid were sexually unrepressed, progressives on the whole. And yes, I’ve recently been informed about a “bridge in Brooklyn”. I’m talking to my people about it.,,

    This bit of data is more interesting…or at least more amusingly presented. But otherwise, it seems to show me how consistantly socialization seems to program us to be very similar little lemmings. I’m choosing to attempt to defy that paradigm. (And I despise diet coke and generic “soul food”. And sushi).

  9. @g_whiz,
    yeah I feel you on that. I do think that OKC is vastly more accepting of the “nerdy atheist hipsters …. sexually unrepressed, progressives” and represents them more than any other big dating/social site out there and I’ve met a lot of progressive people in my no-always-so-progressive city through okc but yeah, pretty much this:

    It was a stark reminder of all the ways in which having all the commonalities in the world wouldn’t get you past the oh-so-enjoyable kneejerk that is casual racism.

  10. That might be the best formula for determining the likes of white dudes I’ve ever seen. I know it holds true in my case anyway.

    Van fuckin Halen! Wooooo!!!

    Sorry bout that.

  11. This is somewhat timely, since I just got a response to my ad on OK Cupid in which the guy (who was using a form letter) used his association with Rudy Giuliani and the fact that he was with Giuliani on 9/11 to pick up chicks.

    I protested, and he told me I was liberal and therefore didn’t value character.

  12. Pingback: Matthew Yglesias » Stuff White People Really Like

  13. g_whiz and groggette, not to stray far off topic, but I feel compelled to cavil with your categorical (?) use of “sexually unrepressed” as a descriptor of progressives. You didn’t particularly dilate on what you mean, but I take it as a judgmental slight against those who choose to have less casual sex or otherwise be not as sexually active as other people (or those, for that matter, who are of the asexual orientation or otherwise involuntarily or voluntarily celibate). Just as judgments shouldn’t be made or shaming occur against people who are more sexually active or have more sexual partners than some other people do–well, the opposite holds as well, and progressive people have a wide variety of personal attitudes toward sex and sex lives. I know you probably didn’t intend your statements as a broad insult, and you have a right to think that individuals are sexually repressed, but your statements can be interpreted as prejudicial and problematic. Thank you for reading.

    (Sorry if this comment seems at all patronizing; such is not my intent. I’m pathologically shy and hardly comment anywhere, so I don’t have much practice and am little inarticulate/gauche.)

  14. The stats sound like they’re a description of what aspects of pop culture people like to align themselves with.

  15. I love the OKC stat stuff. Gah, to be a sociologist working on their back end, and to actually see the raw number data… *swoons*

    That being said, for whatever it’s worth, I met my now-husband on OKCupid. 🙂

  16. Rose N, that’s a fair criticism. In my mind “sexually unrepressed” just means someone knows what they want (or don’t want) when it comes to sex and doesn’t play games or engage in slut shaming or anything like that. But that’s not the common definition of that term and I apologize for the offense.

  17. forgot to add, I don’t know about g_whiz but I wasn’t using sexually unrepressed as a descriptor of progressive, but just as another personality trait that I like in people. I’ve met (my definition of) sexually unrepressed conservative d-bags and (my definition of) sexually repressed progressive people and you’re totally right that political idealogy isn’t directly lined up with someone’s sexuality.

  18. And I, fully admit I was naieve and mistaken in my assumptions about OK Cupid users as an aggragate. The entire purpose of my post was to point out that while my experiment with OK Cupid was doomed from the start, part of it was because I was expecting them to somehow be uniquely “different” and perhaps progressive (and not biased). And I was mistken. And honestly, you can infer what you like by “sexually repressed” as a qualifier here. I was referencing it because it was/is quality I was looking for in friends and potential matches. (And if backstory is required, I spent grad school in the bible belt around conservative closet cases who rather than being open about their sexualities they’d shove me into their closets with them) So yes, I find sexual openness and being out of the closet important to having fully functional relationship PERSONALLY as a gay man who doesn’t want to live any more of his life making apologies for other people’s baggage. I do hope you don’t take it personally that I wasn’t in any way refering to you.

  19. As an South Asian woman, I find it interesting/disturbing that SA women put “social justice” as a frequent interest, while SA men put “ayn rand” as an interest. It would be fun to imagine a date between those two people.

  20. t-ster: that is disturbing, and fascinating.

    Also, this post made me LOL quite a lot, and on this fabulous note I get to go to bed – Jill your blogs are so hilarious/ insightful I’ve wasted about 4 hours I should have spent doing something slightly more academic. (Procrastination with me is STILL nerdy).

    Thanks a lot.

    p.s. Also, I met Jodi Picoult (I had to run a book signing for her) and she was *unbearable* in person.

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