Dating & Mating

Clinton vs. Trump Supporters on Match.com

Dating (The Love Hawk)

Earlier this year, Match.com released its annual Singles in America study. The study surveyed 5K+ singles ages 18-70 in 2015 on a variety of subjects pertinent to those who date. The results are fascinating, in no small part because Donald Trump was still a sideshow attraction and not a full-blown potential threat at the time.

Without further ado, here are some findings:

Clinton supporters are:

70% more likely to discuss politics
102% more likely to lie about their number of past sexual partners
2,133% more likely to expect no physical contact

Trump supporters are:

82% more likely to be unemployed
116% more likely to talk about an ex
1,104% more likely to expect sex on the first date

But some benefits are bi-partisan, as the press release touts:

Individuals who are passionate about political issues (regardless of their affiliation) have better sex, with 13% more orgasms; they are also 32% more likely to experience multiple orgasms.

If that’s not a good reason to get politically involved/educated (or fuck across the aisle, at the very least), I don’t know what is.

“Loving” Film Releases Interracial Emoji Couples

Love-Moji (‘Glamour’ en Espanol)

Given our current obsession with all things tech, Focus Features has found a fitting way to promote the company’s upcoming film “Loving:” custom emojis.

The Love-Mojis feature a variety of emojis of interracial couples in about every combination you could think of. So if you’re in an interracial couple, and you haven’t yet felt your coupling properly represented by the Unicode Consortium, your time has finally come!

Why is this important? Let’s start with the film itself: “Loving” follows Richard and Mildred Loving, a Virginia couple who got married in 1958. This wouldn’t be so remarkable except that Richard was white and Mildred was black. Their marriage happened during a time where interracial dating, much less marriage, was frowned upon, to put it lightly. Interracial marriage could bring a charge of miscegenation (race mixing, in plain terms).

The Lovings were arrested after their marriage for the crime of their relationship, and forced to leave Virginia. Once in D.C., they began legal proceedings. The Loving v. Virginia case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, which struck down said laws that were on the books of sixteen states. (All sixteen states were in the South. Shocker.)

Needless to say, this was a landmark case.

But why use emojis to promote it?

Since emojis debuted, the options for emoji couples were pretty stark. They didn’t show the breadth of real-life relationships in terms of race and also sexual preference. The new Love-Moji take this into account, and rectify the oversight.

There’s also the fact that using emojis has become a convenient visual shorthand for emotions we don’t particularly feel like typing out in words.

You can get the Love-Moji via app stores and at VoteLoving.com.

“Loving” comes out on Friday, Nov. 4th.

Tinder Usage Up 129% Among Athletes at the Rio Summer Olympics

Rio Olympics 2016 (Indian Express)

By now, it’s common knowledge that Olympic athletes hook up during their time in the Olympic Village. And naturally, one way to facilitate this is via dating apps. Specifically, Tinder has proved to be the number one choice for Olympic athletes looking to get laid.

Over the first weekend of this year’s Olympics, Tinder usage spiked a whopping 129% amongst the athletes. Impressive, right? But the data is incomplete.

This is the second Olympics where Tinder has made a splash. During the Sochi Olympics in 2014, it was reported that mobile dating usage surged, and that Tinder was the app of choice. However, since this is solely anecdotal evidence, no numbers have been reported so that we can’t gauge the size of said surge. And we cannot make any year-over-year comparisons of the growth.

Another issue is that, yes, Tinder usage is up 129% among athletes, but to what are we comparing the activity? Are we comparing to the usage data to the previous Summer Olympics (which would be London in 2012) or the most recent Olympics (the aforementioned Sochi)?

Though the number raises a few questions, it’s pretty entertaining to realize that elite athletes are just like the rest of us.

How Common is Intimate Partner Violence?

James Deen and Stoya (The Guardian UK)

Late last year, adult film star James Deen was accused of rape by his former girlfriend, fellow adult film star Stoya. Other performers later came forward to accuse Deen of sexual assault, but Stoya’s two tweets on Nov. 28, 2015, started Deen’s downfall: He’s since been dropped from one major studio.

Rape can be part of a larger pattern of intimate partner violence. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), intimate partner violence “comprises 15% of all violence crimes,” and women ages 18-24 are most likely to be “abused by an intimate partner.” In addition, 46%+ of women raped are raped by an acquaintance. Of this number, 45%+ of women are raped by an intimate partner. These are scary stats.

As of 2014, women ages 18-24 comprise 4.8% of the total population.As of the 2010 Census, women comprised 50.8% of the total population, or 156.9M+ residents. We can estimate that the current number of women in this age group who’ve been raped by an acquaintance might shake out to 155K+.

Here’s the math:

156,964,212 *.0048 = 753,429 (estimate of women ages 18-24 as of 2014)
753,429 * .46 = 346,578 (estimate of number of women in that age range raped by an acquaintance)
346,578 * .45 = 155,961 (estimate of number of women ages 18-24 raped by an intimate partner)

Obviously, this isn’t an exact estimate, due to a couple of reasons: self-reporting (not all women will probably report rape/violence), and inaccurate data (using both 2010 and 2014 numbers).

Scary, right? Unfortunately, this is the reality, so take care of yourselves.

Match.com Singles in America Data 2016: By The Numbers

Singles in America study header (Match.com)

Man, I love delving into user data from websites (though I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now). Match.com recently released the results of their sixth annual “Singles In America” survey. You can find all their findings on their microsite. Let’s take a look at what insights came to light:

Number of singles surveyed: 5.5K+

Percentage that sushi increases your odds of getting a second date: 170% (!!)

First-date length correlation with second-date chances diagram (Match.com)

Number of men who expect sex on the first date: 6%

Percentage of Millennials likely to have filmed sex: 165% (!)

Orgasms data visualization (Match.com)

Percentage that using the phrase “Netflix and chill” gets you a second date: 99%

Percentage that using the phrase “on fleek” gets you a second date: -26%

OKCupid Data of 2015: By The Numbers

OkCupid logo (IAC)

I love it when online dating sites share their data. You can tell a lot about a person, or people as a group, by what they’re willing to admit to on the Internet.

I’ve picked out the most interesting facts, but you can see the full report for yourself.

State with the most users looking for casual sex: Oregon (15.51%)

State with most users who are (admitted) virgins: Utah (19.78%)

Percentage of people interested in participating in bondage: 58%

Year-over-year increase from 2014: +5%

Percentage of users who masturbate at least a few times a week: 51.3%

OkCupid ‘The Hangover’ 2016 Emoji Data (OkCupid)

Average number of questions a user answers: 125

Percentage of overall users not down with interracial marriage: 3%

Percentage of users in Mississippi not down with interracial marriage: 18%

Percentage of users who said they’d date a transgender person: 25%

Year-over-year change from 2014: +5%

And lastly, the most important stat of all:

OkCupid ‘The Hangover 2016’ Pop Culture Data (OkCupid)

Two Suicides Linked to Ashley Madison Hack

Ashley Madison homepage (Ashley Madison)

We’re beginning to see some fallout from the Ashley Madison hack from earlier this month: Police in Toronto, Canada, have reported two suicides related to the hack, and are undertaking further investigation of the cases.

Reports of the number of Ashley Madison’s users range from 30M+ to 37M+. With those numbers in mind, these two suicides constitute between .00000006% and .000000054% of the site’s total registered users whose data was leaked in the security breach.

I’m curious to see how the hack continues to affect its outed users and those close to them.

Ashley Madison Hackers Post the Site’s User Data

Ashley Madison homepage (Ashley Madison)

Happy Friday! Remember when cheating site Ashley Madison was hacked last month? And how the hackers threatened to release user data to the whole Internet?

Well, they’ve finally done it. The Impact Team, as the group of hackers is known, put the data online on the Dark Web, which can only be reached using specialized equipment. They dumped a jaw-dropping 9.7 GigaBytes (GBs) of data that went back to 2008.

(For context/scale, I have a 4 TeraByte (TB) external hard drive that I keep old school projects and work on. I’ve had that thing for over 6 years, and still haven’t filled it up. One TB is equal to .001 GBs. So you can imagine how voluminous this data breach truly is.)

There seems to be some disagreement over exactly how many users had data leaked. “CNN Money” claims 32M, while “Wired” and “Engadget” put the number closer to 37M.

As of July, Ashley Madison claimed to have 40M+ users.

Ashley Madison data dump (Gizmodo)

Among the metrics leaked were users’ names, addresses and phone numbers. “Wired” looked into some initial data analysis:

A sampling of the data indicates that users likely provided random numbers and addresses, but files containing credit card transactions will yield real names and addresses, unless members of the site used anonymous pre-paid cards. One analysis of email addresses found in the data dump also shows that some 15,000 are .mil. or .gov addresses.

Passwords were broken by “hashing,” or breaking into the algorithm a site would use to protect passwords. The hackers used the “bcrypt” algorithm used in web development language PHP. This is usually a secure measure to protect passwords. But hey, at least Ashley Madison tried:

It’s notable, however, that the cheating site, in using the secure hashing algorithm, surpassed many other victims of breaches we’ve seen over the years who never bothered to encrypt customer passwords.

Have a great weekend, and go change your passwords!

#ThrowbackThursday: Violet Gordon-Woodhouse

Violet Gordon-Woodhouse (The Clarion Review)

Here’s someone you might not have learned about in history class: British musician Violet Gordon-Woodhouse was born on this day in 1872. She’s known for bringing the harpsichord back into popularity, and used it to make some records. Gordon-Woodhouse was the first person to make a harpsichord recording, and the first musician to broadcast a performance with the instrument.

But her story is also infused with sexuality. She married Gordon Woodhouse in 1895, taking both his names for her professional one, and finagled a marriage very beneficial to her needs: She insisted on time to pursue her career, and to open the marriage. At one point, Gordon-Woodhouse’s menagerie of men swelled to three others besides her main husband. (Sadly, I couldn’t find any photographic evidence of this ménage a cinq.)

I first read about Gordon-Woodhouse in Betsy Prioleau’s 2004 book, “Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love.” (It’s a great book, if you’re interested in learning about women taking a no-holds-barred approach to their life and loves.) We should all aspire to lead our lives as open as Gordon-Woodhouse did.

Emoji Users Have More Sex

Sexytime emojis (NY Mag)

Happy Friday! [Insert hallelujah hands emoji here!]

If you don’t use emojis in everyday text-speak, you might want to start. Science shows that emoji users have more sex. And don’t you want to be part of that group? [Winking emoji]

Dating site Match.com released a wide-ranging study, Singles in America 2015, earlier this year. The study surveyed 5.6K singles (none of whom, incidentally used Match) in their 20s, 30s and 40s that represented the U.S population according to the 2010 Census. It has some pretty interesting findings, but the emoji one is gold.

For real, the Match researchers found that singles who use emojis have more sex than singles who don’t.

Cultural anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, one of the leaders of the study, found that “54% of emoji users had sex in 2014 compared to 31% of singles who did not.” [Fist-bump emoji]

There was also a direct correlation between how many emojis a single person used and how much sex they had:

Match.com ‘Singles in America 2015’ Emoji Survey Graph (‘Time’ Magazine)

Another benefit to emojis: “women who use kiss-related emojis have an easier time achieving orgasms with a familiar partner.” [Eggplant (or banana) and fireworks emojis here] This suggests that these women value good communication.

As for the emojis themselves, it mentions that the most commonly used ones are the wink (53%), smiley face (38%) and the kiss (27%).

The study showed that people tend to use emojis to show personality, which 50% of single men and women agreed on. Thirty-five percent of singles said that emojis make “expressing feelings” easier.

Fisher has an idea as to why this is happening:

“Technology reduces our ability to express our emotions, and emotional expression is a huge part of communication, so we are reinventing ways to express ourselves”

What are you waiting for?! If this doesn’t convince you to use emojis, nothing will.

If anything, this could help spread the proliferation of emojis so we can all have more sex than ever. Maybe by that time, we’ll be able to switch between English and emoji keyboards on laptops. [Side-eye and prayer emojis]

Sex & Stats: Where Numbers Come to Bang

Statistics. Economics. Sex.