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The Most Important Match Question on OkCupid
Fat Girls, Desire, Online Dating, and “Preferences”
A
few weeks ago, online dating website OkCupid announced that paying
users on the site could now “search” their matches by the answers they
gave to the site’s user-generated match questions. These questions are
as varied as “Have you ever had sex with a person within the first hour
of meeting them?” and “Do you like the taste of beer” and “Do you often
find yourself wanting to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” There
is a lot of random shit people on OkCupid want to know about the people
they might one-day marry/fuck/kill. (Or, you know, have an awkward date with and then never speak to again).
I’ve
been waiting for OKC to allow users to search by match question answers
for a long, long time. I used to spend hours manually scrolling through
each potential match’s questions until I found out how they answered
one question in particular. It goes like this:
Q: If one of your potential matches were overweight, would that be a dealbreaker?
A:
-Yes, even if they were slightly overweight.
-Yes, but only if they were obese.
-No.
-No, in fact I prefer overweight people.
As
a fat woman, it is basically imperative to me that any of my potential
matches answer “No” to this question if I’m going to seriously consider
meeting them IRL. What’s the fucking point, otherwise? (Warning: heartbreak and rejection ahead.)
Almost
as soon as OKC announced the change in search options, people on the
interwebz began to consider what the change meant in relation to
questions on OKC that address racial preferences in dating. Rehashing older discussions about online dating and race, Slate.com’s Reihan Salam penned a piece titled “Is it Racist to Date Only people of Your Own Race? Yes.” He concludes the piece,
To be sure, dating is about more than the sharing of bread, and OkCupid users who express strong racial preferences may well be doing the world a favor by being open and honest about their wants. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask those who do express such preferences, and those who live them in practice, to reflect on them, and on how there might be more to fighting racism than voting ‘the right way.’
I
agree with Salam’s assessment that fighting racism, and other forms of
oppression and discrimination, isn’t just about formal manifestations of
equality like voting, but is also about our hearts, minds, and even
what we do with our genitals. Far from being innocuous and purely
personal “preferences,” who we date, love, live with, befriend, and fuck
is extremely meaningful for how we organize social power, hierarchy,
and affiliation. (This isn’t Rocket Science, folks.)
And
that is part of why discussions about dating are so convoluted; desire
and attraction cut to the heart of deeper, subterranean social meanings,
ones we’re not fully aware of or able to negotiate freely and
rationally. Who we desire to be, and to love, isn’t just a matter of
individualist private choice in the way that the ideology of American
free-market political liberalism leads us to believe. As much as online
dating can feel like online shopping, neither activity is devoid of
political meaning. Both activities are about creating human
relationships situated within larger sociopolitical and economic systems
that are beyond our control as mere individuals.
The
links between a conservative political agenda and a notion of
apolitical personal blame and responsibility is particularly salient
when it comes to body size. As the report “Weighty Concerns” by Samantha Kwan and Mary Nell Trautner notes,
In Western cultures with an ideology of individualism, this belief that we can control our destiny, including our bodies, is deeply ingrained. Sizeist attitudes are particularly embedded in individualistic cultures such as the U.S. Work by social psychologist Bernard Weiner and his colleagues shows that fat stigmatization is more likely when individuals assign individual responsibility and blame to fat people, and Christian Crandall and his colleagues’ research further shows that fatism correlates with belief in a just world, the Protestant work ethic, and conservative political ideology (56).
Being
fat is, in this frame of thought, an undeniable visible marker of an
individual’s failure to live up to the demands of Western political
ideologies of personal responsibility and self-empowerment.
While
we all have both explicit and hidden (even to ourselves) preferences
about who we date, the insistence that those preferences are merely
personal, entirely apolitical, or that they are, somehow, our God-given right,
belongs to the same genre of ideology as other salient conservative
political myths that attempt to decontextualize individuals from their
social surroundings; myths like the welfare queen and the pro-choicer
who just loves murdering babies. To say that dating “preferences” lack
political meaning, that they cannot be harmful because the intent of the
individuals expressing the preference is not to cause harm entirely
misses the point, which is that systems of oppression are systems and ones that replicate themselves through us.
That is, we “inherit” these “preferences” and it is our job, if we are
committed to progressive social change, to “work” on those inheritances
so that our desires, and consequent “choices” align with the social
world we want to pass on to others in the future. (Be the change, y’all. BE the change.)
Still,
Salam is right to point out in his article that people who are
explicitly and openly discriminatory in their dating preferences may be
doing the rest of us a favor by letting us know. I was really pleased
when OKC announced the change in search options, in part, because I do
want to check to see if my potential matches have publicly expressed
dating preferences such as “I strongly prefer to date only people of my
own race.” Overt, public racists like that have, quite simply, #gottogo.
People who think that expressing a racial “preference” for their match
is just a matter of personal choice are extremely unlikely to be a good
match for me.
To be honest, people who have high match percentages with me generally fit a certain profile: they like to read a lot;
they’re politically leftist; they either went to college or are in
college now; they probably like art, coffee, cooking, wine, or whiskey.
They might write poetry or paint. They’re mostly young-ish,
urban-dwelling, hipster-y types. Many of them are queer/of
color/feminist. And they almost never overtly express
racist/sexist/classist/homophobic sentiments in how they answer their
match questions. And that’s rad for me.
But
ask them the question about “obesity” and it’s fucking no holds barred.
Time and time again, I’ll be excited about some Proust-reading feminist
bisexual carpenter or some effeminate philosophy graduate student
barista only to have my hopes dashed on the rocks of overt and unabashed
sizeism. No fatties. As in, I won’t even consider dating someone who has a BMI of 30 or greater (the technical definitions of obese and dealbreaker).
The same people who are seemingly able to make the political connections (or at least try to make them, who want to
make them) between desire, power, and race/class/sexuality/gender
unabashedly refuse to do so when it comes to body size. And I never fail
to feel surprised and disappointed about this. It doesn’t matter how
many times it happens, it defies my expectations.
By
marking “No” to the question “If one of your potential matches were
overweight, would that be a dealbreaker?” you are not saying “I love all
fat people and want to fuck/marry all of them.” You’re just saying,
“I’d consider going on a date with one single individual ‘obese’ person
sometime in my life before I die. It isn’t out of the question that I
might find a fat person interesting/sexy/romantically viable at some
point, someday.” And, from what we know about how fluid human sexuality actually is, this seems like a pretty reasonable assumption that this will, indeed, happen, like, at least once.
But, admitting
that you’re into a fattie, well, that’s not something most people want
to do, because admitting that fact is incredibly stigmatizing. You
might, like, get fat by association, or something. Your social prestige
will plummet like tech stocks in 2000. Especially if you’re a dude.
I
first learned this in the fourth grade when I asked out my first crush,
Jake, on Valentine’s Day. Jake and I had been talking on the phone
everyday after school for several months, doing things like playing our favorite songs for one another. He, like, GOT fourth
grade me, or whatever. When I finally worked up the courage to ask him
to be my boyfriend, officially, publicly, he told me he’d call me back
with his decision. Jake called me back after a few minutes to tell me
that he had consulted with his older brother, showing him my yearbook
photo, and that his older brother had advised him against us going out,
officially, publicly. It was a lesson on gender, desire, and social
status for both of us. And, while the ins-and-outs of negotiating gender, desire, and social status in dating have become more nuanced as I’ve aged, in a lot of ways it feels like nothing has really changed.
The details might be different, but being a fat girl who (sometimes)
dates dudes is a lot like being stuck in the fourth grade, forever. (Total bummmmmer.)
What’s
fascinating, though, is that I sometimes receive messages from people
expressing interest in me and when I look for the answer to the
“obesity” question they have said they won’t date an obese person. This
puzzles me a little, but I have a feeling I know what is probably
happening. They don’t fucking see me as obese. Obese is bad, but they
think I’m cool/sexy/interesting, so I can’t possibly be that.
This
dynamic was recently driven home for me when I foolishly searched for
the answer to this question as I was Internet stalking a real life
friend/crush/hottie. He too had marked, “Yes, but only if they were
obese.” I contacted him to tell him I had a hard time understanding how
we could be friends and/or political allies given his answer to the
question despite the many other ways we were clearly friends and political allies around issues of race/gender/sexuality/class. (I know, I know. Why bother? Glutton for punishment.)
His response? (WAIT FOR IT….)
“I don’t think of you as obese.”
Can you feel the harsh, hot sands of oppression brushing over you? As the fat girl dating monologue on Louie recently addressed, the fucking worst thing you can tell a fat girl is that she isn’t fat. Just don’t. PleasefortheloveofYahweh.
“I don’t think of you as fat/of color/gay/disabled/a woman” is one of the oldest fucking tricks in the book of false universalisms,
right? The logic is this: X form of difference is treated as something
bad/abnormal/undesirable/gross in society. I don’t think of you as
bad/abnormal/undesirable/gross, therefore I do not think of you as X. X
remains squarely unchallenged as a stigmatized/minoritized identity and
the power hierarchy replicates itself, but you get a free pass as an
individual (which is supposed to make you feel special and good). Difference is erased and assimilated back into the idealized norm of white/straight/male, etc.
In
this particular case, the use of the term “obese” causes some real
trouble. There is simply no way to make the term “obese” sound like it
isn’t the worst fucking thing on earth in
our contemporary cultural climate because it is a medicalized term
meant to signify abnormality, disease, and unhealthiness. We see “obese”
people as immoral, unhealthy, lazy, gross because that is part of the
built-in definition of the word. Who would want
to date someone who is all of those icky things? You could basically
re-write the answer “Yes, but only if they were obese” to read “Yes, but
only if they were abnormal, diseased, unhealthy, lazy, gross, and
immoral.” You can’t really blame people for clicking that answer when
you put it like that, can you? (Well, yes, I can, but I expect people to be less fucking idiotic. This is the root of all my disappointments in life, I’m aware.)
As my friend/crush/hottie explained to me, he thinks of “obese” as a health determination,
but he doesn’t think of me as unhealthy. But the thing is, I’m still
fucking obese. “Morbidly” so by BMI measures. And I have no interest in
pretending that I’m not, even though I also consider myself to be
reasonably ethical, healthy, ambitious, and appealing. And that’s what I
told my friend before I abruptly ended our conversation to go to the
gym. (Ohhhh, the irony. Sort of.)
What
makes the question about obesity as a dealbreaker such a good barometer
for my potential matches is that it’s a really good measure of whether a
match GETS IT, or predictably,
disappointingly, boringly doesn’t. By “it,” I mean roughly whether they
get how the personal and political are intertwined when it comes to
love/dating/sex and bodies/body size, whether they want to get it,
whether they’re even trying.
Besides all the obvious political connections to be made concerning the overlap of sizeism and other systems of oppression, like racism, colonialism, and classism,
on the more “personal” level, I want to know they “get it” because I
need to know that anyone I’m going to be involved with is going to come
to bat for me as a fat person. Are they prepared to “come out” as fat girl lover/fucker? Are they prepared to deal with street harassment if we go out in public together? Are they willing to fend off the idea that they’re settling for me? If they’re a dude, in particular, is their masculinity fucking secure enough to handle this jelly and all its social significance? Will they help me navigate a social world in which my body opens me up to unique forms of both fetishization and objectification and sexual violence and abuse? Can they handle the criticism they might receive from their friends, their parents, and society as a whole?
I,
frankly, have no time to waste on dating people who aren’t down to
rumble with me around this issue on the daily, because this shit is part
of my daily reality. And, that’s what people do when they care for each
other: they show up, they speak up, they fight for you. They stand by you.
Sadly, it seems, there are a lot of people who just can’t hang, not
because they couldn’t, in theory, but because they don’t even want to
try. They “prefer” not to.
This is not an essay I ever wanted to write. In fact, I’ve been actively avoiding
writing this essay for weeks and passively avoiding writing it for
years. There is nothing more unappealing than being a bitter fat girl in
our culture; this is made abundantly clear to me every time a
well-meaning friend tells me to be “more confident” or to “lower my
standards” or when people explain to me that there is nothing different
about my experience of love/dating/sex than a thin person’s. This shit
is hard for everyone, they reason. And they’re right: it is hard for everyone, just not in the same ways and not with the same social meanings.
It’s been made even more clear that I shouldn’t be writing this essay by the way that fat girls are silently pitied or cruelly mocked as the butt of the joke
in popular media, but never, ever get to tell the truth about our own
experiences in way that feels complicated, nuanced, and authentic to us.
And
it is made clear by the way that talking about fat, and being fat,
especially on the Internet, opens one up to some of the most harsh and
degrading backlash imaginable. It’s made clear by the way I can never
read the comments section on any article about fat or fatness without
feeling like I want to die. It was for this reason that my mother
expressed fear when I told her I was writing this essay; could I handle
the responses I would get? she worried. Well, Mom, I’m afraid, too.
Ultimately, that’s why I had to
write this essay, the one I didn’t want to write, the one I’ve been
avoiding; the cost of not writing it, of letting other people narrate my
experience for me using words and storylines that feel alien and
alienating, became too great.
I’m
a bitter fat girl. And I have good reason to be. Fuck me, date me, love
me, anyway. Prove to me you’ve got what it takes. Show up for me, show
up for the struggle.
