OkCupid Now Allows Users To Filter Out ‘Fat’ Girls
Like, really, everyone, I think, when I was on OkCupid I skimmed and browsed based almost entirely on photos after checking my “best” matches. I saw nothing wrong with this and still don’t. Physical attraction isn’t the most important thing in a relationship but, like sex, if it’s bad then it becomes the most important thing in a relationship.
My OkCupid career was brief, only about 3 months, and I met my current girlfriend on OkCupid. One thing though, I distinctly recall there not being a body type filter that actually functioned. OkCupid paid no heed to my listed preferences. I’m taller and trim and I have personal tastes about how I generally wanted my mate to look. No harm, no foul, but it made trying to find someone I was attracted to physically as well as mentally more difficult than I thought it should have been. Well, that’s all changed now, apparently, if you’re willing to pay $4.95 a month.
There’s been some backlash…
The site offers 10 body-type choices, beginning at thin, and ranging to average, “a little extra,” “full figured,” “overweight” and even “used up.”
If you don’t like anyone larger than “average,” you can filter them out. Or, if you’re into chubby prospects, you can filter everybody else out.
OkCupid said singles are going to size up their date prospects according to what they consider physically attractive anyway, so the site is doing nothing different from what goes on in bars and clubs.
But outraged critics said the body-type filter is a form of online discrimination.
“How you self-identify on the site, and how you’re going to be perceived on your date by your date, is going to be a point of potential insecurity,” one OkCupid user, Alana Massey, 28, told ABC News.
Interesting. I guess being able to filter out men under six feet tall wasn’t a form of discrimination then. Turnabout, it seems to me, is fair play, and it’s the men getting soaked by having to pay for this filtering. People like what they like. What’s wrong with that?