In Which the internet is not such a looker that it should presume to judge.

So, I got a weird email last week. Years and years ago, I signed up to a dating site called OkCupid, mainly because my Strong-Willed friend Sophie said that I ought to because they had a good chat function and we could, like, hang out online or something. Which is fine. Of course, it was rendered obsolete almost immediately by the advent of Gmail as a thing which everyone had, since it had a much better, less annoying chat function. Also, it was in a sense preemptively obsolete, since I actually hate chatting online. I don't know why, I know I liked it in highschool or thereabouts (remember ICQ?) but I've found it strangely clunky and awkward pretty much my entire adult life. Anyway, the point is, I still have this old account that I can't figure out how to properly delete (also, if I'm honest, although I don't actually use it, I kind of love the ridiculous long thing I wrote for my profile for that site, and I don't want to just discard that. I mean, it could hardly be relevant to anything else, since it's essentially an embedded blog post on the subject of one of those stupid profile questions they ask on those sites; "What are 6 things you couldn't live without?". Maybe I should just copy it across to here and properly deactivate my account? It's just very hard to be bothered. Plus, what if I re-read it and it turned out it was a bit lame? Much better to keep in in reserve, thinking of it as awesome and never really accessing it.

I never log in these days except when the email notifications really pile up and I get curious as to what the second halves of all these messages which begin "I read your profile and you seem really interesting although did you know that alligators actu.... To Read More Log In Now!" say. Because I actually cannot imagine a situation where I would ever feel comfortable meeting up with someone I had only met online, so I feel removed from the entire thing, like logging in to my account would not be logging in to my own account but into that of some other girl who looks and writes like me but is in any way whatsoever interested in the idea of “internet dating” as a thing which applies to her. I’ll happily talk to someone online (except that, like I said, I’m not a “chat” fan) but meet up? Oh no, I don’t think so, not at all. It feels like it would be essentially the awkwardest thing ever, and I hate and fear awkwardness. Even thinking about trying to meet up and converse in a deliberate premeditated fashion with someone whom I’ve never actually met, but for whom the standard desultory we’ve-just-met conversational topics have already been used up in emails and so forth, makes me all worried. I get bad enough meeting up with people I actually know after any kind of hiatus.

Anyway, I got this email the other week that was all "Hi, Username! We have data on your attractiveness!" I did not even make that sentence up. They deadset (I keep saying "deadset" this week, also "legit". Apparently I am subconsciously trying to become more ocker by sounding like Ginger Meggs or something. Not that he said "legit" much, as I recall) used the phrase "We have data on your attractiveness", as if that was anything other than desperately creepy.

I was going to just pick out the best bits of this email to eviscerate, but actually, on rereading, the whole thing is so entirely despicable in almost all of its implications that I'm just going to copy/paste the thing en masse. Don't worry, it's not long:

"We are very pleased to report that you are in the top half of OkCupid's most attractive users. The scales recently tipped in your favor, and we thought you'd like to know.

How can we say this with confidence? We've tracked click-thrus on your photo and analyzed other people's reactions to you in QuickMatch and Quiver.
. . .

Your new elite status comes with one important privilege:
You will now see more attractive people in your match results.

This new status won't affect your actual match percentages, which are still based purely on your answers and desired match's answers. But the people we recommend will be more attractive. Also! You'll be shown to more attractive people in their match results.
. . .

Suddenly, the world is your oyster. Login now and reap the rewards. And, no, we didn't just send this email to everyone on OkCupid. Go ask an ugly friend and see."

Every one of those sentences is awful in all its implications, good grief. I think my over-all reaction would definitely be a resounding "how dare you!?", and I'm not one to double-punctuate like that unless it's really serious. This is the sort compliment which would earn a ringing slap in an old-fashioned movie. Or any movie with people in it, really. Or, like, reality, if anyone were ever so unwise as to come up to me and say "I thought you were ugly for the last several years, but I think now you're just passable! Isn't that great? This makes you a better person!" in person.

To start with, I've had the same photo for well over 2 years. Nothing about me has changed. Not in that photo, anyway. It's an alright photo, I look dead ordinary, not misleadingly glamourous, but obviously not a wildly unflattering angle or aything. Pleasantly plain, perhaps. But not different, not different to how it was years ago, not at all. The only conceivable change in that unchanged photo is that heavy-framed glasses may now be slightly more trendy than they once were, so that people are looking at it going "eyyy" (like the Fonz) not "ewww" (like Jocks do to Geeks in 80s movies). But the "scales have recently tipped in my favour"? Oh really? Sod right off, website.

Because, right, I’m reasonably ok with not being in the officially “more attractive” category (warning: may be pernicious lies), but when, at the end of the email, they make it clear that the dichotomy is ugly vs. attractive, suddenly what they’re saying is no longer “I’ve just noticed how attractive you are” but “you are only now only just scraping in above the ‘ugly’ mark. Last week we thought you were definitely ugly, now we do not”, which, let’s face it, is unreasonable. Even if you ignore this ridiculously binary idea of physical attractiveness. I mean beauty is subjective and photos are not a reasonable gauge of physical attractiveness as a whole, often, and all that, but also, I am not, in fact, ugly. And I wasn’t ugly last week or any time in the last year or so. At worst, I have been merely not-actively-attractive, and that, I choose to believe, was only on my off-days (why yes, I do respond to a challenge by becoming filled with vain bravado, why do you ask?). I have my flaws, yes, we all do, and I’m not such a fool as to try and list or analyse them here, but they are not serious disfigurements, they are the sorts of flaws which are endearing in loved ones, mainly, I would think. Like the ones most people have.

(I suppose part of the problem here is that there are few people if any whom I would describe as ‘ugly’. Anyone so seriously unattractive that I couldn’t find something nice about them would inspire more pity than name-calling, and before I got to the point of calling a person ugly, they’d have to be pretty much a jerk for me to feel comfortable saying something so mean about them. And then, if they were both very ugly and a really-jerk, I would probably be all “it’s unfortunate for them, being so entirely unattractive, no wonder they’re embittered and jerkish. Still, what a jerk”. This is essentially just not a concept or word that I really ever use. Kind of like how I make an effort not to find bits of people “disgusting”, because again, bits of people are either just ordinary and natural or inspiring of sympathy or pity or whatever (Like innards and ladybits or horrible painful sores, respectively). “Disgust” sounds judgemental and shaming. Same as “ugly”.)

Anyway, moving on, the next paragraph informs me that “my new elite status comes with one important privilege: I will now see more attractive people in my match results”. Ok, how is being in the top 50% of something “elite”? That’s a full half of all the people involved. That’s not elite. 5% is elite, Top 10 is elite. 50% is not elite. 50% is only as elite as a Federal government in a 2-party preference on Election day, and everyone always hates those guys. (This is like the oft-misspelled and constantly misused “stunning” or “divine” on ebay and etsy. “Elite”). More importantly, though, what the hell is with this eugenic business of only showing officially attractive people to officially attractive people? It wasn’t cool when the Nazis tried this, and it’s not real cool now (although obviously this is rather less bad as a whole, I think we can agree). And even leaving that aside, what about individual taste? There were certainly people who they showed me the pictures of before who I thought were pretty attractive. Will I just not be shown those people again unless I drop back below the pass mark somehow, due to random fluctuations in “clik-thrus”? If I do, will I get another email that’s even worse (“Bad news, kid, you’ve been relegated back to the Ugly Corner! The world is neither your oyster nor miscellaneous mollusc nor any other tasty foodstuff. Sorry”)? Or will I just get this same email again if I happen to go down a grade and then back up? Has anyone in charge of anything even thought about this?

The next bit seems much like more of the same, just with some added “don’t worry, we don’t think attractiveness is a personality trait”. But what the hell, has it been keeping the “attractive” geeks to itself, not telling me about them or them about me? This does not bother me per se, inasmuch as, like I said, I don’t actually use the site, but there are people who definitely do. Attractive and unattractive people who may (gasp!) not have the same ideas of attractiveness as the people who are in charge of this crap. I mean, I’ve been shown a lot of people (they send you emails with collections of thumbnails of people you might like) more than once, it’s not like the pool of people the website thinks I might like is infinite. Why would you bother with this sort of wedge politics and not just show everyone to everyone? Especially if you already have “match” algorithms which suggests people who might get on?

Lastly “no, we didn’t just send this email to everyone, go ask an ugly friend and see”. Seriously, what kind of person does this website take me for? ‘Oh, alright then, I guess I’ll just go and ask passive aggressive manipulative questions of one of those friends of mine whom I consider to be ugly. Because that’s how I think about people I like.’ This especially makes no sense given the policy of attractive-people-should-only-have-to-know-each-other-and-not-be-burdened-but-the-unaesthetic-visages-of-the-less-beautiful. Why would the sort of person who want a website to only show them pictures of people who are statistically deemed likely to be attractive have friends they consider ugly? Actually, on consideration, I guess it makes sense. They’re describing there the sort of jerks who probably deliberately hang out with people they consider less attractive than themselves so that they look better in comparison. The sort of jerks who would prize a compliment based on “click-thrus and analyses of other people’s reactions to you” when shown a tiny thumbnail of a self-selected portrait.

Ultimately, it’s a good thing that I have no particular urge to in any way use this site, because man, an email like that gives me a strong distaste for the whole sorry thing. Like 2,000 words worth of strong. Oh my.