
OkTrends: Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex - tel
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/gay-sex-vs-straight-sex/
======
tlrobinson
The most surprising thing about this post is that 5% of OKCupid males and 10%
of OKCupid females think the earth is larger than the sun. WTF?!

~~~
BrandonM
I think you also have to take jokers and drunken misclicks into account. I'm
willing to bet that the true numbers are significantly lower.

Then again, it's pretty bad for anyone in America in 2010 to answer this
question incorrectly.

~~~
pjscott
That would explain why the numbers are so high, but not why the number for
women is twice the number for men. Are there that many more female jokers or
drunken misclickers?

~~~
samfoo
Possible explanation: A larger percentage of fake accounts on OKC are female
accounts? Women are much more likely to be messaged, so if you're trolling it
makes sense that you would choose a female account.

------
mattmaroon
Unfortunately this won't help. Homophobes are not such because they looked at
a bunch of data and came to a conclusion as a result. As such they will not
look at data to the contrary and change their mind.

~~~
ataggart
As my dad said: "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason
themselves into."

~~~
mahmud
Profound, but needs more profanity to compete with @shitmydadsays

------
jgrahamc
The basis for homophobia being that straight men are scared that gay men might
be out to sleep with them has always struck me as odd.

Extrapolating from my experience with women (only a tiny minority find me
attractive), why would I think that all gay men want to have sex with me?

~~~
mithaler
That came across like a straw man to me in the OP, especially in statements
like this:

> The subtext to a lot of homophobic thinking is the idea that gays will try
> to get straight people into bed at the first opportunity, or that gays are
> looking to "convert" straights. Freud called this concept schwanzangst; the
> U.S. Army calls it Don't Ask Don't Tell.

I haven't really heard any arguments from those people that made any sense,
but all the same this came across as an uncomfortably large leap.

~~~
gaius
The US Army's position is more likely to be "we actually don't care but we
can't say that until Congress changes the UCMJ, so, uhh, be all you can be" -
that's what don't ask don't tell really means.

~~~
ugh
My understanding of DADT is that you cannot be openly gay. Not quite be all
you can be.

~~~
gaius
Perhaps it's a moot point now:
[http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/10/12/us/AP-US-Gays-
in-...](http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/10/12/us/AP-US-Gays-in-
Military.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=US-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-JOI-101210-NYT-
NA&WT.mc_ev=click)

------
feral
I don't see this mentioned in the other comments, but there is almost
certainly more going on here than meets the eye.

From <http://www.okcupid.com/faaaq> \- people get to explicitly filter
potential matches according to the answers those matches have provided to
these questions. It is not a black box recommender system - people can mandate
explicit rejection criteria.

This creates an incentive to lie on the questions.

It would make sense for users to try and make their profile statistically
close to what they think the [type of people they would like to date] specify.

For example, Bob wants to go out with a 'good girl' (lets call her 'Alice').
Bob reasons that Alice, being a 'good girl' would probably want to go out with
a guy who has never cheated; so Bob will neglect to mention his affair with
Eve on his profile.

I would guess that users, even if they don't initially realise the strategic
situation they are in, will quickly learn it socially and through feedback,
and adjust their profiles accordingly.

The end result being that the answers given on the website, that provide the
data being visualised here, should be treated with caution.

I imagine that certain questions such as 'number of sexual partners' comes
with large disincentive to lie, due to social pressure.

As such, the conclusions here should be taken with a grain of salt - and
that's even before discussing selection bias amoung the users of a particular
social dating site. Such services are adopted as they spread through the
underlying social network; it is well established that social networks are
heavily clustered, and rarely give representative samples until they get very
large.

Its still very interesting stuff, but we should be careful about how strongly
we interpret it.

------
j_baker
I have difficulty believing that there's that big a difference between
straight women and straight men in terms of same sex experiences. It's more
likely that the stigmas attached to male same-sex experiences led more of them
to lie about it.

~~~
BrandonM
I've been at numerous parties where I've seen straight women making out with
each other... never straight guys. I realize that's not exactly sex, but it's
along the path.

Edit: Forgot to mention... there's no real reason to lie to a match question
on OKCupid. You can skip the question or answer it while making your answer
private.

~~~
jfager
_there's no real reason to lie to a match question on OKCupid_

Depending on how much emphasis you're placing on "real", sure there is. You
could be using it as a proxy to lie to yourself. You could be trying to
convince OKCupid that you're the kind of person that should be recommended to
the kind of person you want to meet. You could be setting up multiple personas
for hook ups vs real dates. Etc, etc.

~~~
BrandonM
Those are good points. I mainly just wanted to put that information out there
for anyone who wasn't familiar with how OKCupid works.

------
tommorris
OKCupid statistics posts are often pretty damn awesome. But I'm not wild about
this one:

First of all, it attempts to argue that gay people aren't promiscuous on the
basis of statistics derived from a dating site. It is perfectly possible that
gay OKCupid users aren't more promiscuous than straight OKCupid users, but gay
OKCupid users aren't representative of gay people overall. The article doesn't
actually mention sample size. It may be possible that they have a very small
gay userbase, for instance. It certainly is interesting to know the
differences between gay and straight OKCupid users, but it tells us less than
they seem to suggest.

First off, it's a dating site, not a hookup site. If you want to find out
whether people are promiscuous, you can't work that out simply on the basis of
a dating site because dating sites (as opposed to hookup sites) find people
who are interested in romance rather than casual sex. You wanna know whether
gay people are more promiscuous? Take OKCupid statistics and compare them to
statistics from a sites like AdultFriendFinder (or some of the Craigslist
sections)...

Secondly, Jim DeMint is not saying gay people shouldn't be teaching in schools
because straight people are better teachers. No, he's saying it because he
thinks gay people will - I dunno - somehow transmit gayness rays to students.
DeMint is bigoted and his suggestion is idiotic, but OKCupid's response is
irrelevant because DeMint isn't saying that gay people are less intelligent -
he's saying they shouldn't be teachers because they are gay and, you know,
they like to recruit people and indoctrinate them into the secret gay liberal
agenda (or something equally barmy).

------
m-photonic
It would be nice if they would tell us what percentage of their site fell into
the different gender/sexual orientation categories.

~~~
mshron
Sure.

Men: 90% straight, 6% gay, 4% bi.

Women: 85% straight, 5% gay, 10% bi.

-Max Shron (Data Scientist, OkCupid)

~~~
m-photonic
Great, thanks. And what percentage of the site is male/female?

~~~
mshron
Had to go back and check this. It varies from place to place, but for the site
as a whole it's about 55% men, 45% women.

------
Groxx
I love that they put this kind of data online. It goes a long way to debunking
a lot of popular myths. And utterly _fascinating_ at the same time.

Go OKCupid! _Please_ keep doing this!

~~~
FR6
Yes it's really great that OkCupid take the time to put together those stats
and give their results to the public.

Another interesting stats that they release is about how the user profile
photo affects the message they get:

[http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-
dati...](http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/)

------
araneae
Wow, lesbians are more _everything_... except into sports. Huh.

~~~
ciupicri
And politeness and optimism :-(

------
ciupicri
What about bisexual men and women?

------
DirtyAndy
I'd take all of this with a grain of salt. This is a survey from a dating
site. The majority of their members haven't been able to get any in other ways
and hence use the site - so comparing partners, experiences etc is not
necessarily a good subset of general society.

I'm not putting down anyone who uses such a site, in this day and age I
certainly would if I was single, but I am not sure the sexual habits of single
people who use a dating site is really a good subset of data for this.

~~~
ctide
How's the 20th century working out for you?

~~~
lukesandberg
I think that being suspicious of a cohort bias on OKCupid is totally
legitimate.

It's reasonable to assume that the subset of people who use OKCupid is not
representative of society as a whole. Now im not sure exactly what biases this
might introduce, but one should always be aware, especially considering that
the OKCupid users are a self selected sample (not a random sample) of society.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"I think that being suspicious of a cohort bias on OKCupid is totally
> legitimate."_

Absolutely, but that's not what DirtyAndy was getting at - he's assigning his
own stereotype of an OKCupid user, which he has little data to back up.

It's perfectly valid to be suspicious of population bias in a website - any
website for that matter - but to extrapolate and pretend to know just how that
bias is tilted (without data) is doing yourself a disservice.

~~~
DirtyAndy
I assign no stereotype to any OKCupid users (I am not even sure I have heard
of it before), I do feel perhaps that some peoples insecurities about using a
dating website are causing them to take this out of context (I accept my
wording may not have been delicate enough). In 1995 I dated a girl I met
through IRC or a similar such service, and the few single friends I have I
often encourage to at least investigate online services, so I don't fall into
any category of people who judge people who use these services. I would say
that (at least in the UK) probably a slight majority of the people _I know_
are still uncomfortable with the idea of meeting someone online. It is likely
that online dating will become more and more prevalent, will it ever totally
eclipse other ways of meeting people, I don't know - and yes I am a dinosaur
in that I honestly hope that finding love doesn't come down to a computer
metric and getting along via a few emails. The spark of meeting someone
special in the flesh, eyes meeting across the room etc is something I hope is
never replaced by a computer matching you to someone with similar interests
(my wife is amazing, we have an amazing relationship and I am pretty sure no
computer would ever put us together - zero interests in common, that is what
keeps it interesting).

As for no data, I did write my comment with no data to back it up. I would
imagine less than 10% of comments I see on HN are made with solid information
to backup someones thoughts. Most people on here are smart people that can
make up their own minds and provide information from the world they see around
them.

Did you have any data to back your comment up? Here's a start, OKCupid claim
the median number of partners for both men and women, gays and straights is 6.
I've just gone out and googled for such numbers, and whilst I didn't find
anything definitive, I didn't find one median or average as low as 6, in fact
looking at 18-35 as another commentator points out as OKCupid being
representative of, 9 would appear more likely (my guess would have been 8). So
that probably supports my assumption that there is a bias to some degree -
OKCupid users appear to be getting less than the average. I have no idea where
OKCupid falls in the spectrum of dating sites, I have no idea how many active
users there are in the world of dating websites, but I would be staggered to
see statistics that extrapolate to the user base of a singles website being
indicative of overall society. In 10 years time, maybe, but at this point in
time I doubt it. This article is trying to claim it has real facts, all I am
saying is take those facts with a grain of salt.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_The spark of meeting someone special in the flesh, eyes meeting across the
room etc is something I hope is never replaced by a computer matching you to
someone with similar interests_

What does one have to do with the other? They will meet in the flesh at some
point, you know.

I've known my wife for 10 years since meeting on Yahoo! I still remember
vividly the first time we saw each other. If it wasn't love at first sight, it
was certainly love that first night.

------
chanux
I had this idea coming from somewhere that gay-ness is occurred by mind body
mismatch (No offense guys).

"In personality traits" chart, gay men appeared to be more feminine (or less
masculine) while gay women appeared to be more masculine (or less feminine).
But following this line of thoughts, in the "what's bigger: the sun or earth"
chart, the gay men and women seemed to have the places switched.

Just something I noticed.

~~~
goatforce5
How exactly does a really basic general knowledge kinda question have a gender
assigned to it?

~~~
chanux
Straight men and straight women were in opposite ends of the chart. So I
thought the sequence is more likely to be straight men, gay women, gay men,
straight women. I got it wrong thinking gay women are more masculine than gay
men. Actually the chart looks ok to me (in my line of thought) now.

