Sapiosexual Seeks Same: A New Lexicon Enters Online Dating Mainstream
Something tells us OkCupid won't be including an identifier for people who are attracted to pirates. Oivind Hovland/Ikon Images/Corbis hide caption
Something tells us OkCupid won't be including an identifier for people who are attracted to pirates.
Oivind Hovland/Ikon Images/CorbisHow would you identify on an online dating site — or how do you identify? Gay? Straight? Bisexual? Well you're about to have many more options on OkCupid, one of the most popular sites for people seeking love and connection.
OkCupid has about 4 million users, and within the next few weeks the site will give them brand-new options for specifying their gender and sexual orientation — options like androgynous, asexual, genderqueer and questioning. And why not?
"Young people like the idea of fluidity," says psychology professor Ritch Savin-Williams. He runs Cornell University's Sex and Gender Lab and studies identity and relationships. He says young people are far more likely to look beyond gender binaries and see sexual orientation on a continuum.
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"I think the new categories are pretty great," says a 21-year-old who goes by TJ on his OkCupid profile. TJ has categorized himself as straight, male and single. But with the new options, TJ says he'll probably identify as trans man, transsexual and transmasculine, meaning he's a man born biologically female who identifies as masculine. All of those words are part of TJ's written profile — the part where he self-describes, not the boxes he is asked to check. He's also planning to update his sexual orientation — as soon as other options get added — to queer and heteroflexible, meaning he mostly goes for girls, with exceptions.
Mike Maxim, chief technology officer at OkCupid, says the dating site wasn't originally designed to handle dozens of terms and hundreds of variables. "The site was definitely constructed around, you know, just men and then women; and, you know, men ... looking for women."
And of course women looking for men. Some of these new identifiers won't appeal to a huge market, but Maxim says why leave people out? And why not add a little cutting-edge cachet by helping to bring a new lexicon into the mainstream? Still, adding so many new terms was a technical challenge.
"That was probably the primary reason we haven't done this earlier," Maxim says. "You know, this has been a feature that's been requested now for, I don't know, years."
The company picked which new terms to add by looking at the most popular ones in people's written profiles. "And using that data," Maxim says, "we were actually able to come up with a fairly good list." There are pansexual, bigender and even sapiosexual, for those who are attracted to smart people.
But when it comes to identifying yourself, words go in and out of fashion, Savin-Williams says. He notes that just a few years ago, "bi-curious" was a popular identifier. Now it's a deeply uncool word that he notes is not one of the new options.
Earlier this year, Facebook added more than 50 new terms for selecting gender identity, but even that might not be enough. Savin-Williams recently heard a surprising new term while teaching a gender and identity workshop at a high school.
"One young woman defined herself as 'squiggly' and there was silence and everyone was saying, 'What exactly is that?' And then she said, 'Well, I feel like that's what I am in terms of my gender and sexuality. I'm squiggly.' A lot of people began to shake their heads and said, 'Yeah, that's pretty good. I feel that way too.' "
OkCupid doesn't currently plan to add squiggly to any of its categories, but single NPR readers and listeners take note: Apparently, in beta testing, sapiosexual was one of the most popular new terms.
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