{"id":13554,"date":"2015-02-27T09:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T14:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=13554"},"modified":"2015-03-16T16:02:55","modified_gmt":"2015-03-16T21:02:55","slug":"what-do-women-want","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/02\/27\/what-do-women-want\/","title":{"rendered":"What Do Women (Seeking Men) Want?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dating site OKCupid did\u00a0an analysis<\/a> of 500,000 inquiry messages\u00a0to determine what keywords correlate most strongly with getting a reply. \u00a0It has some great lessons about dating and some counter-stereotypical news about what heterosexual women want from men.<\/p>\n

This first graph\u00a0shows that mentioning someone’s level of attractiveness decreased the likelihood of getting a response (for both men and women), though men were more likely to mention looks. \u00a0But general compliments about one’s profile increased the likelihood of getting a response (the middle line is the average number of responses, the green bars signify an increase in the number of responses, and the red bars a decrease):<\/p>\n

\"compliments-chart\"<\/p>\n

A good lesson in operationalization: “pretty” is used in two ways in our culture, so when they made sure to differentiate between pretty (meaning “sort of”) and pretty (meaning “attractive”), you can see clearly the way that commenting on looks decreases the recipients’ interest:
\n\"pretty-chart\"<\/p>\n

So, in contrast to stereotypes, many women cannot be flattered into a date (though the figure above includes men and women, I’m assuming most people being called “pretty” are female).<\/p>\n

Further, the site found that when men sent messages, female\u00a0recipients preferred humility to bold self-confidence. \u00a0The words below all increased the chances of a woman responding to a man’s inquiry:
\n\"efface-chart\"<\/p>\n

Instead of bravado and flattery, women appear to actually like men who take an interest in them. \u00a0They respond positively to phrases that indicate that a guy\u00a0actually read their profile and is interested in the content of their person:
\n\"engage-chart\"<\/p>\n

The lesson: Treat a woman (on the OK Cupid dating site) like a human being and she will respond positively.<\/p>\n

And to answer the question, “What do women want?” \u00a0As my dear friend David Landsberg would say: “Everything!<\/a>”<\/p>\n

This post originally appeared in 2009.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. Dating site OKCupid did\u00a0an analysis of 500,000 inquiry messages\u00a0to determine what keywords correlate most strongly with getting a reply. \u00a0It has some great lessons about dating and some counter-stereotypical news about what heterosexual women want from men. This first graph\u00a0shows that mentioning someone’s level of attractiveness decreased the likelihood of getting a response […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[387,329,55,2089],"class_list":["post-13554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dating","tag-emotion","tag-gender","tag-gender-beauty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/03\/2.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13554"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66100,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13554\/revisions\/66100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}