If asked to describe your personality, what would you say? Do you consider yourself adventurous, dorky, and a little bit kinky? Are you introverted, artsy, and into politics?
Perhaps you're compassionate but also aggressive, or ambitious but also polite.
These characteristics are several of the 20+ personality traits examined by Christian Rudder in the OkTrends blog's latest study: "Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex." Using the match questions answered by OkCupid members, the site collected more than 669 million responses and created a straight/gay comparison chart for personality categories like "Confident," "Literary," Religious," and "Romantic."
Straight men, as it turns out, live up to the clichéd image of the "bullying jock." Based on their answers, they were rated more aggressive, more confident, more violent, more horny, more competitive, and more into sports than gay men. Their hyper-masculinity was tempered, however, by being rated more dorky, more religious, and more romantic than their gay counterparts.
Stereotypes appeared on the opposite side of the t-chart as well: gay men were ranked higher on personality traits that are often considered feminine, like "Compassionate," "Trusting," "Literary," "Artsy," and "Generous," though they are apparently also more ambitious, spontaneous, and political.
Gay women scored higher then straight women on almost every characteristic, with particularly strong leads in the categories of "Adventurous," "Artsy," "Into Drugs," and "Kinky." The only personality traits that were stronger in straight women were "Ambitious," "Into Sports" (at least the women managed to defy a stereotype!), "Optimistic," "Polite," and "Religious."
Rudder's next move is a return to OkCupid's "The REAL 'Stuff White People Like'" study (my reviews of the study can be found here, here, and here), this time using members' descriptions of themselves to measure traits based on gender and sexuality. The words and phrases that appeared most frequently in gay men's profiles were: "The Devil Wears Prada," "Britney Spears," "Mean Girls," "Kelly Clarkson," and "The Color Purple." With only a few exceptions, the terms were all related to films, books, theatre, and music. Gay women overwhelmingly placed "The L Word" in the top spot (so much so that Rudder had to shrink the size of the text to fit the site's template), followed by "Tegan and Sara," "Ani DiFranco," "Piercings," and, again in the 5th spot, "The Color Purple."
Straight men define themselves by traditionally masculine interests, like cars, war movies, sports, beer, and fixing things. Straight women consider their girlfriends very important and are searching for Mr. Right, but are also determined to prove that they are "Independent" and "Self-Sufficient." They also enjoy make up, romantic movies and books, and careers in the medical field.
Rudder's final analysis of the data measures "the frequencies of all one-, two-, and three-word phrases against the site-wide rates." According to his chart, gay users are significantly less "mainstream" than straight users, with bi users predictably falling in between. "In fact," Rudder notes, "what these numbers are saying is that the average gay person has only about 30% in common with the average American." Before anyone writes an angry letter to OkCupid about discrimination, however, consider Rudder's closing comments: "Adding an ethnic group to the plot helps put it in perspective." When Indian users are added to the graph, they are ranked even less "mainstream" than gay members.
So what can we take away from this?
Defining "normality" is an impossible task, and "no one's saying that Indians shouldn't get married or shouldn't be allowed to adopt children....We hope gay people can expect the same treatment very soon."
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