Taste for Beer and Inclination for First Date Sex: Data on Dating

I recently discovered the most insightfully fascinating blog. Written by the good people behind OkCupid, on it they compress their users profiles' data into these simple graphs with powerful one liners: they objectify people, correlate oral sex and eating habits, and activity on twitter with masturbation probabilities. It's amazing!

My favorite so far links beer appreciation with the potentiality of sleeping with someone on a first date:

How amazing?

Weirdly the same day I heard about this blog, I finished an old New Yorker article on online dating that mentions it. In the article we learn about the science and math behind meeting a significant other, potential differences between the photo pauses that attract men versus those that attract women, the OKcupid founders' marital status, and the religious rigor behind eHarmony's experiments. About the blog we learn that the data is based on the analysis of 34,620 couples and that, according to its author, Nick Paumgarten, the blog's purpose "is to attract attention: the findings, like the quizzes [in its early days the site's four Harvard math majors founders attracted members through quizzes] are to lure you."

Not so sure about being lured by OKCupid, but totally lured by human beings.

What Does the Man Want? Negotiating Gender in Ads

According to Old Spice, the man wants a girlfriend. According to Argentina's best selling beer, Andes, the man wants a girlfriend. What both brands also agree on is that by their very nature women will only want to be girlfriends if men can comply to a multitude of qualities that men (by their very nature) will never have. 

It's a tough situation. Luckily brands are here to help us negotiate our gender differences and expectations:

Step 1 - to 'get' a girlfriend fool the female olfactory sense into believing you are the perfect man (which translates as simultaneously a motorcycle owner, kitchen maker, beach showerer, cake cooker, forest adventurer, swan diver).
Step 2 - once the girlfriend acquired continue to perpetuate the lie by answering her phone calls in a manufactured audioscape to dupe her into thinking you are unable to see her because of a terrible situation beyond your control (diarrhea, hospital emergency, bar mitzvah, traffic jam, karate class, babysitting).

I think it's a an interesting demonstration of cowardliness and fear of solitude which is rarely reserved to men. In many ways these ads are more representative of human traits ( which applies both men and women) and our high hopes that things might hide these aspects of our kind than gender specifics. Although undeniably prince charming fantasies and men lying to the ones they consider themselves the closest to make for funny (selling) situations.

Demonstration:
June 2010 - Old Spice Deodorant

January 2010 - Andes Beer (Del Campo/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi Buenos Aires)