Dating by the Numbers: Why “hacking” OkCupid is a waste of everyone’s time
This data point is an outlier.
Is there no problem out there that can’t be solved by SCIENCE? Apparently not. Indeed, it has recently come to my attention that one heroic nerdy dude actually used MATH to get a girlfriend. No really, an actual girlfriend. As in, a living human female that he’s seen naked. (We can only presume.)
Wired magazine found the story so astonishing that they devoted an entire 3000 word feature to it.
The piece tells the tale of Chris McKinlay, then a grad student in mathematics at UCLA, who went searching for love on OKCupid, a dating site that uses daters’ answers to various questions, ranging from silly to profound, in order to calculate a “match score” that supposedly measures your compatibility with a potential date. But McKinlay wasn’t getting as many dates as he wanted.
So he decided to “reverse-engineer” OkCupid. As McKinlay — ever the romantic — explains on his own blog, he used his mathematical skillz to analyze the “high-dimensional user metadata in [the] putatively bipartite social graph structure [of] OkCupid,” and adjust his own profile accordingly.
Basically, he crunched a lot of numbers to figure out how the kinds of women he was most interested in — in particular one data “cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie types, musicians and artists” — tended to answer questions. And then he fiddled with his own answers — and his choice of which questions to answer — so he would score higher match percentages with them. Ta da! Suddenly he had more matches.
He claims not to have answered any questions dishonestly, but as Wired notes “he let his computer figure out how much importance to assign each question, using a machine-learning algorithm called adaptive boosting to derive the best weightings.”
It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out that fudging your answers so they’re more like those of the women you’re targeting will make it look like you’re more like them. You can pull this same trick in real life by pretending to agree with everything a person says.
But you don’t have to be a psychologist to see that doing this kind of defeats the purpose of OKCupid’s match algorithms in the first place. You’re creating the illusion of chemistry where there may be none. Essentially, you’re cheating, but in a really self-defeating way.
And by focusing so intently on statistically crunchable data, he also ignored a lot of the more intangible “data” that the profiles provide if you actually sit down to read them. The numbers don’t reveal anything about a person’s verbal charm, or their sense of humor. They don’t tell you about the interesting little details of the person’s life.
As Katie Heaney notes in a Buzzfeed piece on McKinlay’s strange quest:
[M]uch of the language used in the story reflects a weird mathematician-pickup artist-hybrid view of women as mere data points … often quite literally: McKinlay refers to identity markers like ethnicity and religious beliefs as “all that crap”; his “survey data” is organized into a “single, solid gob”; unforeseen traits like tattoos and dog ownership are called “latent variables.” By viewing himself as a developer, and the women on OkCupid as subjects to be organized and “mined,” McKinlay places himself in a perceived greater place of power. Women are accessories he’s entitled to. Pickup artists do this too, calling women “targets” and places where they live and hang out “marketplaces.” It’s a spectrum, to be sure, but McKinlay’s worldview and the PUA worldview are two stops along it. Both seem to regard women as abstract prizes for clever wordplay or, as it may be, skilled coding. Neither seems particularly aware of, or concerned with, what happens after simply getting a woman to say yes.
And that’s where McKinlay’s system seems to have fallen down entirely. Though Wired is eager to present his “hacking” as a great success, it took McKinlay more than 90 dates — 87 of them first dates with no followup — before he found his current girlfriend.
In other words, his wondrous system produced a metric shit-ton of “false matches” and wasted a lot of people’s time, including his own.
And in the end it wasn’t his data crunching that brought his girlfriend to his door; as Wired notes, she found him on OKCupid after doing a “search for 6-foot guys with blue eyes near UCLA.” Happily for him, McKinlay already matched her preferences in these areas. In addition to appreciating his height and eye color and location in physical space, she apparently was also charmed by his cynical approach to OkCupid dating, so maybe they are a match made in heaven, if not in his data crunching techniques.
While McKinlay was going on first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date, people I know have found wonderfully compatible matches — and long-term relationships — through OkCupid without having to date dozens of duds along the way.
How? Partly because OkCupid’s match algorithms led them to some interesting candidates. But mainly because they read profiles carefully and looked for compatibility in the words, not the numbers.
Posted on February 7, 2014, in okcupid, PUA and tagged okcupid. Bookmark the permalink. 728 Comments.
Is every profile on OKCupid somebody’s experiment? I’m beginning to think so.
Yeah… that Katie Heaney article was bullshit. If you want to actually see some real hashing of the topic check Dr. Nerdlove’s article on this. I think he also called her out as acting on an agenda from his twitter account.
http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/
Basically, the guy went on lots of dates. That’s still good. That’s still an improvement from his first status.
I bet he’s such a nice guy.
I dunno, this doesn’t seem as bad as all that.
Back when I was doing on-line dating (on the long-departed Spring Street Personals via Salon.com), we didn’t have these fancy “compatibility scores” so I had to set some basic
search filters and then read ALL the profiles and try and figure out which ones seemed compatible. They were sorted in order of most-recent update. I probably went on around 50 first dates before I met the person I married. (And there was nothing really wrong with most of the others – they were nice enough, there just wasn’t any chemistry.)
What I’m getting from the article is that OK Cupid won’t let you read ALL the profiles; you can’t see a profile unless it’s got a good compatibility score, and the algorithm for calculating the compatibility score is a bit arbitrary. So there’s some value in figuring out how to game the algorithm so that you can make your own decisions about compatibility without letting some dumb machine do it for you.
(I guess there would be a risk of getting pestered by the sort of people who think they’re compatible with everybody. Back in my day, you had to pay a dollar to send the initial message so that was less of a problem.)
” you can’t see a profile unless it’s got a good compatibility score,”
I wish that was true – I could have done without all those 0-40% d00ds messaging me :/
As a user of OKCupid, I sort of found the entire idea a bit odd because their system, though imperfect, seems to come up with some pretty decent matches. I usually describe them as “as close as you can expect” and frankly met some great people – just no one I was romantically compatible with. So I guess I don’t see the benefit he got except, perhaps, some confidence.
Going on ninety first dates sounds rather exhausting. I don’t see how that’s really preferable to not going on ninety first dates. That’s slightly less than two dates a week for a year, which would be nice with one partner, but 90? Even 45 first dates and 45 second dates would be better, because then you’re enjoying the first date well enough and getting to know the people slightly better. I can’t think of 90 restaurants I’d want to try.
I would rather go a year without dating.
No, OkCupid lets you see people regardless of match score. I’ve noticed looking at the CreepyPMs subreddit that a lot of the creepy messages are sent by guys with really really low match ratings who are obviously only looking at the pictures.
There was some controversy a while ago about whether or not OkCupid was hiding profiles of users who were rated more attractive from some of the other users; I’m not sure what the deal is with that.
No, you can see any matches you want. There are different ways to sort, the default is “Special Blend” but you can look for “highest enemy %” or “highest match %” and then scroll to the bottom of the list to see your lowest matches or whatnot.
You can even, as a straight man, ask OKCupid to show profiles of “girls who like girls” and it will show you all the profiles of women who have absolutely no interest in dating you. And you can then send them messages anyway. It’s really weird.
No, OkCupid lets you see people regardless of match score.
Thanks – I’d never used the site, so I misunderstood what was happening. I guess his goal was to trick other people into contacting him? If so, that’s pretty low. In my day, you were allowed to set basic search options, but after that you had a moral obligation to read ALL the profiles.
Reading the article, yes. He had a program visit thousands of women’s OKCupid profiles and then he would wait for them to reciprocate and visit his profile, and then he’d respond to the ones that messaged him. I suppose it’s faster than my system, but every so often you’ll end up with a Christian who goes around calling herself Jewish (which bothers me so much more than an atheist saying that she’s Jewish).
McKinlay wrote a rather whiny retort to Heaney’s article here:
View story at Medium.com
I like a lot of what Dr NerdLove has to say most of the time…but often (including in that article) he’s still treating relationships like some sort of quest. Mind, he treats it as a quest that involves interaction with other human beings…but still…
Like, the bit where he’s like “be optimistic because no one wants to date someone who’s complaining all the time,” is like….well yeah…but then shouldn’t the advice be “get help w/whatever shit is happening in your life so that you can be authentically optimistic?” – I wouldn’t want to agree to a date with someone who seemed more upbeat than they were, only to find out later that they had a pretty negative outlook on life.
I’m not seeing how anyone could interpret this method as “success” because:
– it’s a case study, and people would be stupid to extrapolate from one data point (his)
– we don’t know what the counterfactual is (it’s not a case control study)
– and someone else found him, although who knows how much of an influence his manipulated profile would have had. And would his algorithm have found her?
In my mind, the fact that he manipulated his profile in order to be viewed as more attractive to the group of people he was interested in is fucking creepy.
Only if he lied about things or misrepresented himself. Otherwise, changing your profile to present yourself better is a good thing to do.
For example, I might not want to have my driver’s license photo that makes me look like a cannibal on my OKCupid profile. And if I had it there, some people might recommend removing it.
I got a message from a guy once who was literally my highest enemy match in the entire world. I didn’t reply.
And I knew a guy there who hacked OK Cupid to have a very high match with EVERYONE. He only answered a couple of questions, but they were ones that everyone answers the same way. As far as I could tell though, he didn’t actually go on dates. He just liked chatting to people online. He was active in the OK Cupid forums, and his favourite thing was telling NIce Guys to stop whining.
@barcognito
I’ve had dudes do this to me. They’re creepy :/
Ok, some info on the math behind match scores, cuz I joined recently and being a stats geek…
You answer questions, if you want, other people do likewise, with each question you have to answer how important it is to you. From irrelevant to mandatory (which doesn’t mean mandatory btw, it just means, ah I’ll get there in a second). Irrelevant gets 0 weight, and mandatory gets, uh, 250? weighted points, the rest get weighted points on what looked like a log scale (so they get further and further apart the more important it is). Then they take your answers and the weighted points for them, and multiply it by everybody else’s to get the match/friend/enemy score.
So all he really did was say things were more or less important to him based on whether he thought the women he was looking for would check the options he did. Assuming he isn’t lying about not lying, he spent a lot of time and too much math to set the weights to wtf they actually meant to him. That is, if his pretty little algorithm said that his ideal woman was, idk, almost certain to check off the answer he preferred, he’d put it as mandatory instead of “a little important”. Pretty silly since whatever the question was it was likely that the sort of woman he was looking for would answer it with the option he preferred. Like, if it’s, idk, “would you date a smoker?” and he thought he didn’t give a shit if she would, but his math found that nearly all the women he was interested in put that they would, he’d put “yes” as mandatory to increase the match percent for that question.
——
Relatedly, I found someone else who thinks the gender binary is the pits, has read the posts here occasionally, and is fine with just being friends. We only started talking yesterday, so I don’t have high hopes or anything, but hey, anyone who likes it here has odds of being the sort of person I want to be friends with.
Oh and I didn’t play the OP’s false weighting game. And my profile was basically one long string of “warning: I’m diagnosibly mentally ill, if you can’t deal with that, there’s the door, if you think that’s romantic or want to fix me or something, fuck off”
I am tentatively hopeful I might manage to make some friends up here, since everyone I know is in Pittsburgh, Pecunium, or busy with work (and childhood friends, particularly those I might contact again, are all LOOK AT MY KIDS! which is adorkable, but they’re clearly also all I AM EXHAUSTED!)
And argh your gender options are binary. That’s annoying.
I’ve had dudes do this to me. They’re creepy :/
Fucking seriously? I knew you could answer “Yes” to the “Do you think rape is OK sometimes” questions and still stay on the site, but there’s an “I would like to harass lesbians” button too?
90 dates to get one successful hit is not efficient, mathematically or evolutionarily. In fact, it’s kinda pathetic. If you want to entertain yourself with algorithms, this was a fun experiment, and if you want to pretend that your ability in that department led to a successful match that you alone were totally in control of, mmkay, but seriously, my dating pool of choice is a local bar, and the strikeout rate there, for pretty much everyone, ain’t nowhere near as bad as one in ninety, no algorithms involved.
Of course alcohol often is, so…
@kiki
Luckily the dudes I got weren’t too harass-y, though I still was some creep-ed out. Mostly cuz, like why would straight* dudes be messaging me when it breaks it down by “x who likes x” One of them was about 25, and the other one was 30. I’m 19, for comparison :/
*iirc the ones I got were straight.
Not to excuse their behavior, but did you have the box checked that you were looking for friends? I only ask cuz I’m not really looking for a date so if someone not interested in my apparent gender had a really high match percent or something I might try making friends. But creepy is creepy, regardless whether they were trying to make friends or not.
@argenti
I did have the box checked (cuz it’s true) but I’m a lot more suspicous about meeting guys over that site, especially guys that much older than me. Though they may have been just looking for friends, but still. 30 yr old guy trying to talk to 19 old girl. idk I felt it was rather creepy.
I get a lot of messages from guys with 0% match. I can usually guess how creepy the message will be by the match percentage, the lower it is the creepier the message. The last one was a guy with a fetish for virgins (which is creepy all on it’s own, his whole profile was about wanting a pure virgin to deflower). I don’t even know why he messaged me, my profile outright states I’m kinky and on the opposite side of the country.
I love how the point about not treating women as people sailed right over Shadow Nirvana’s head.
Oh yeah the 30 year old dude was creepy outright, I was thinking in general, not guys with over a decade on you!
OT but a friend linked this on facebook and it’s bugging me in a way that I’d like some help unpacking.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-health/10607040/Getting-thin-why-is-it-the-ultimate-female-ambition.html
On the surface it seems to be saying, “why is society so screwed up that women feel such an unreasonable need to be thin”, and I think that’s why my friend linked it and thought it was good.
But it really seems to be saying “women are so much sillier than men (and special snowflake me) because they care about being thin to the exclusion of all else.” Sounds like privilege blindness and ‘splaining.
Marie,
It is rather creepy.
“Basically, he crunched a lot of numbers to figure out how the kinds of women he was most interested in — in particular one data “cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie types, musicians and artists” — tended to answer questions. And then he fiddled with his own answers — and his choice of which questions to answer — so he would score higher match percentages with them. Ta da! Suddenly he had more matches.”
– I wonder if this would work for the Manosphere? Adjusting for their “type” of woman.
Old Reader — prolly not, too few of the questions are things like “can your partner ever owe you sex?” and “must women shave their armpits” (and that latter one is a fairly common view). Basically, the questions aren’t bigoted enough to help those bigots.
“On the surface it seems to be saying, “why is society so screwed up that women feel such an unreasonable need to be thin”, and I think that’s why my friend linked it and thought it was good.”
– I certainly don’t feel an unreasonable need to be thin, nor does any woman I know.
“But it really seems to be saying “women are so much sillier than men (and special snowflake me) because they care about being thin to the exclusion of all else.”
– I’ve never met a woman who cares about being thin to the exclusion of all else, has anyone here?
If a woman is concerned about finding a mate, the last thing she needs to worry about is her size.
Despite Manosphere’s objections, there are plenty of men (and women) who are not attracted to thin women. There are even some men (and women) who are only attracted to “plus sized” women, of varying sizes and shapes.
I’ve never used one of these sites so my question may continue to be naive, but how is it possible to lie/not lie on one of these sites? For example, if the question was whether you liked Italian food, and you like it a bit, is it a “lie” if you say you like it a lot in order to meet women you think you will like, if these women all indicate that they like Italian food a lot?
I think my basic question is, where does misrepresentation about oneself cross the threshold from misrepresentation to lying? Or, maybe, is it possible to actually lie to the types of questions asked?
Because, to me a major warning signal is hearing someone say: I didn’t lie, I just changed my answers a bit.
And bloody hell, it looks like the dude didn’t have the test, training, and validation sets either. And it was apparently all done on one point in time data, or near enough.
Last question: how do people feel about having OKCupid information used in this way, where someone comes along with a data sweep and uses information scooped on many people this way? Because the apparent volume of data he accessed and used makes me creeped out as well.
Fudging your answers does raise a small red flag for me. It also seems counterproductive. There’s a reason the dude had to sit through so many failed dates before he finally met someone he was compatible with. If you try to dodge the screening questions all you’re doing is setting yourself up to spend time with someone who you probably won’t get along with.
Aaaw c’mon, doesn’t seem like this guy deserves to be denounced on here with Paul Elam and roosh and all the rest…just playing the software a bit doesn’t mean he doesn’t respect the actual women behind the data points! I have to disagree that it’s a ‘spectrum’, I think there’s a pretty clear line in the sand between ‘is a nerd with excess time on their hands and a slightly over- analytic approach to human relationships’ and ‘treats women like an inert prize to be claimed’. Maybe the latter attitude requires a bit of the former, but that doesn’t mean the former implies the latter. (You know, as in: All men are mortals, not all mortals are men).
She also hacked online dating. And got a TED talk from it.
Hi Old Reader!
Short answer, yes.
They have recovered, quite well. However posts that imply that they were stupid or silly in order to care so much about their appearance back when they were anorexic/bullemic really doesn’t help their peace of mind.
I know that probably wasn’t your intention, but the social pressure and self pressure on girls (and guys) to be thin is incredibly hard for certain individuals, through no fault of their own.
It’s also becoming a more recognized problem; especially since younger. Between 1999 and 2006, the rate of hospitalizations for children under twelve more than doubled in the US.
We got a problem. Saying people who are effected by the problem are silly for succumbing to societal pressures doesn’t help.
I know that wasn’t your intention, and I do feel a little sorry for jumping down your throat like this, but knowing the people I know… This issue kinda trips my ‘must-defend-friend-group’ trigger.
Yeah, anorexia is not a thing that happens because people are just too suggestible and not as strong and awesome as the people who didn’t develop it.
@Kim, I do find that article a bit odd, the ending is all right but the beginning is a little too much of her gawking and gasping over all these women with body image issues, there’s a little twinge of “I’m superior for not having these issues”; also I find the men’s reaction to her weight loss just as horrifying in a different way (“ew you’re not sexually attractive anymore”) so how come no article about them? I think there’s a bad habit in society of dissecting women’s psychology so much more often and more intensely.
If there was a subset of people you found particularly attractive, and you found out that overwhelmingly that subset found it very important for a partner to do/believe a particular thing that you didn’t do/believe so you decided not to answer questions about that so it wouldn’t lower your match score, that wouldn’t be lying but it wouldn’t be very helpful. I wouldn’t consider it creepy, but maybe it should make you rethink why you are going after that subset of people.
But it’s also possible to see how your answers compare to an individuals and change them to improve your match with that person. That would be super creepy.
Also I’m sure every single one of those 88 dates that didn’t get a follow-up was because he was being picky. Not a single solitary woman met him and didn’t like him.
So, off topic (AND MASSIVE RAPE APOLOGIA TRIGGER WARNING), but Woody Allen has released a statement about Dylan Farrow’s claims that he sexually abused her, and reading it (a) got rid of any lingering doubt that she was telling to the truth and (b) is about the purest distillation of rape culture outside of MRA rantings I have ever read.
The important paragraph:
So, basically, abuse allegations shouldn’t even be investigated (that’s what “dismissed out of hand” means) because
1) Older men are never guilty of sexual abuse if they have never been accused before.
2) Nobody should believe the first person to accuse someone of sexual assault.
3) Abuse allegations are meaningless if the mother of the victim leaves the accuser.
Oh, right. Linky:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/woody-allen-speaks-out.html?_r=0
@ wordspinner
For bonus points, let’s remember that the “woman I would go on to marry” who he’s referring to was also, at the time, his step-daughter.
I KNOW. No way in hell am I giving the benefit of a doubt to a man who married his stepdaughter when his daughter accuses him of incest. I am a big believer that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and… well…
You know you’re witnessing epic hubris when the dude attempt to reference one case where he abused a child who was in his care to prove that he couldn’t possibly have done the same thing to a different child.
Kiwi Girl — there are FAR too many yes/no questions that allow no room for nuance. So more likely he’d say he does, and then say it’s more/less important to him that she like Italian food than it actually is.
*scrolls through own profile*
Here’s a good example —
“Do you think really abstract art – like just splattered paint – can be truly brilliant?” Yes or no
So if the sort of woman he’s looking for tends to put “yes”, but he doesn’t really give a fuck whether she does or not, he’d put “yes” as the answer he was looking for and mark it as mandatory. Thus making it more likely he’d be matched with women who said yes => the women he’s looking for.
Here’s a good take on sexual assault and who gets the benefit of the doubt (hint: not victims)
http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2014-02-are-children-supposed-to-document-their-abuse#.UvQFrQvCZRp.twitter
My, er, favorite part is where a teen gets told to get proof of her father’s sexual abuse, successfully does, and then his attorney claims that well, she wasn’t lying that the abuse happened, but it hadn’t happened as often as she claimed, because girls are inherently liars.
Uuuuuugh, Woody Allen. Just creepy creep creep.
Also, as someone recovering from an eating disorder, I laugh at the idea that they’re entirely created by suggestibility and silly womanfeelings. First, because men do get anorexia, and second, because there are LOTS of folks with eating disorders who feel double-shame because they were raised in a body-positive background or identify as feminists, or whatever else. (I Don’t Have An Eating Disorder covers this really well.)
Basically, eating disorders don’t discriminate. They will take you down regardless of what you believe, how you were brought up, or what culture you’re in. (See: religious anorexia.)
@Argenti, thanks for the explanation, that makes more sense to me now.
I’m still struggling with the criteria he used to decide that *this subgroup* of women are his type, given that *his type* didn’t seem to like the things he liked/dislike the things he disliked/ value the same things.
I thought the *point* of these websites was to suggest people who are likely compatible on the same shared interests/values. That he fudged his answers suggests:
– the questions used for compatiblility matching are next to useless (not sure how feasible this is)
– the material covered by the questions used for compatibility matching doesn’t match what he thinks are important values/interests (again, not sure of feasibility).
If the matches are that bad, it would suggest that a random sample of people would be the best strategy.
This bit from the Wired article:
I mean, fucking seriously? These are naive clusters, so there will be false positives in each, as well as false negatives who are missing. It sounds like he was focussed on looks, followed by “works in a creative job”. I really don’t think that is the magic two-attribute step to finding “true love”.
And this:
Seriously, “latent variables”?
And I think his profile mining was unethical, and he still did it:
So he purposely implemented a botting method designed to get around bot detection software.
In terms of the women he was aiming for, honestly, I’m going to say “fetish”. As an older version of those artsy creative women he’s talking about I’ve always loathed the guys who want a girlfriend like that because, rather than in spite of, the fact that they have nothing in common with us.
Errr, I’d say his “experiment” was unethical and refelcted a rather bloodless approach to potential romantic relationships.
How in the hell did this guy rate a feature article in a major publication? The women who went on first dates with him — are they pissed for wasting their time? Why exactly is he being celebrated? Oh, and OKCupid, are they alright that this guy bypassed their system and just made up his own rules? I could swear this “hacker” qualifies as an asshole on some levels. Maybe I’m being harsh…?
Woody A. married his step-daughter. I just took it for granted that he’s a perv.
Ah, the objectification of artsy creative women. Pardon me while I gag for a while.
And the whole Dylan Farrow shit-show (not her part of it, but the various soul-killing reactions to her story) is just so depressing. I’ve mostly been staying away from reading about it.
Someone who uses phrases like “high-dimensional user metadata in [the] putatively bipartite social graph structure [of] OkCupid” would be straight into the “undatable” file for me anyway, before any other considerations.
Kiwi girl:
Changing the weighting sounds like lying to me. Making out something’s important or unimportant to you when it isn’t, just to get a date … that sounds both stupid and potentially creepy.
Dismissing someone’s ethnicity and religion as trivial sounds like he’s a feckin’ robot.
I’d rather date that cat, even if he is a bit of a douchecat.
90 first dates … what are the odds Mr Maths Genius wouldn’t even remember their faces or names after a while? If any had called him again (funny how most didn’t, wonder why that could be) he’d probably have struggled to put name + face + relevant details together.
Just the fact that the NY Times bit is called “Woody Allen Speaks Out” makes my blood boil. Like he’s been silenced.
Oh but technically, Allen didn’t marry his step-daughter, since he never married Mia Farrow nor adopted Soon-Yi. He married the sister of his children with Mia Farrow. Which isn’t exactly better; I’m just being pedantic.
Yep, what kitteh said.
Also, I find myself wondering what his current girlfriend — the one he hacked his brains out to find, thinks about all this.
He should have trained himself to act human first.
At least we know his name.
Fuck, I just looked at the graphic on the Wired website, and one of the categories in there is “Dog” (second image in the piece, with the 3D balls).
Wow, just wow.
On Dylan Farrow, I’ve been reading a little, but the whole thing makes me so sad I’m trying to avoid it (there’s nothing I can do to help). Props to Lena Dunham and her twitter support for Dylan, and to the others in the media who have stood up to be counted.
Can you imagine seeing red carpet shots and so on all the time reminding you that your sister is now married to your former dad? Those poor kids.
“He married the sister of his children with Mia Farrow…”
Yeah, still gross. At one time he was involved with Soon-Yi’s mother. What, one day he decided it would be OK to date her adopted daughter? Jesus. Didn’t he ever have a “this may be too awkward” moment?
psst Kitteh, I think that the cat won’t care if the person is a TRAMP, so long as the litterbox is changed, the catfood is nice, and there are toys and a lap. And a fire, in winter, assuming seasons.
Shiraz, no argument on the “this is gross” front. I hope it’s clear from my comment that Allen is a terrible human being.
My cat is, even now, proclaiming his displeasure with my TRAMPy affair with my laptop keyboard.
TW: Woody Allen shit.
The Woody Allen thing is just a giant triggering mess. I don’t know what happened but I do know some journalists are being major assholes about it. Every time one of the brings up the “timing is suspect” I want to scream. It seems completely *unsuspect* to me that a victim of abuse would be triggered and angry by seeing her abuser get a friggin’ Lifetime Achievement Award on international television. Can these journalists not take a second to imagine what they’d feel like if it they saw their own abuser being lionized like that? Also, the ones that “mischievously” bring up Mia Farrow’s brother is a convicted child molester as if that has any bearing on Dylan’s own story . . . ugh ugh ugh it makes me upset and angry.
It’s clear, Cloudiah…no worries. :)
I wonder if he requires a house DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH.
Viscaria – see, your kitty has standards.
Has anyone seen the picture of Allen hugging his and Soon-Yi’s daughters? They look so stiff and uncomfortable. It doesn’t look like “this is Dad and we love him,” it looks like “we’ve been told to pose with creepy uncle and can’t wait to get away”. Even allowing for standard teenage embarassment with parents, in this case, it makes my skin crawl.
“Has anyone seen the picture of Allen hugging his and Soon-Yi’s daughters? They look so stiff and uncomfortable. It doesn’t look like “this is Dad and we love him,” it looks like “we’ve been told to pose with creepy uncle and can’t wait to get away”. Even allowing for standard teenage embarassment with parents, in this case, it makes my skin crawl.”
Ewwww. God. My skin is crawling too.
I see from the sidebar that David recently tweeted this, and it’s a pretty good distillation of the facts of the Farrow case.
Talking to people I know who’ve used OKCupid, I do think there is something to their algorithms. I know best friends who signed up for the site; they ended up with a 99% match to each other.
On Woody Allen, if you haven’t read Maureen Orth’s original 1992 Vanity Fair article on the allegations, and you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend you read it. It convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did indeed assault Dylan. (I mean, I was pretty sure already after reading Dylan’s statement, but … just read the piece.)
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1992/11/farrow199211
Orth also has a piece responding to some of the junk that’s been said about the case in recent days, including some of what Woody said in his appalling NYT statement.
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/02/woody-allen-sex-abuse-10-facts?mbid=social_twitter