Phone number
Dammit.
Laramy got me an Android this past Christmas. I mean this, of course, in the phone sense, not in the Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation sense, which is unfortunate but understandable.
It’s kind of cool to have a phone that doesn’t flip open anymore. No longer do old women accost me while I’m texting, crying “Goodness, my dear! We have the same phone!” and weakly waving their jitterbugs aloft. My flip phone had a camera, thank you very much, boasting an entire megapixel. So there, bitch.
My new phone is awesome. I can do all sorts of things to avoid being productive and paying attention to people. Alchemy is basically an opiate with a touchscreen interface. I’m told my Android can also make and receive calls or something, but whatever.
But this is interesting: According an older entry on OkCupid’s fascinating OkTrends blog, which features the spoils of their various dating site data mining adventures, Android owners get less sex than other smart phone owners. Or perhaps, more precisely, sleep around less.
Since the data is all from OkCupid users (though quite literally over 9,000 of them), maybe this is a pure anomaly. We can generally say that a single dating site isn’t a perfect microcosm for the entire population of Earth, but since there’s no ready explanation for why it exists anyway, I don’t see any blatant reason why this correlation would be limited to OkCupid users only, and not translate to a wider sample.
Here’s their pretty graph:
Notice that these numbers are all for 30-year-old smart phone users. Android owners have had an average of six partners, whereas female iPhone owners are total studs with twice that, and Blackberry users fall somewhere in the middle. This correlation plays out in phone owners ages 18 to 40.
What’s going on here? Theories?
It seems that iPhones tend to take better pictures than Androids, but Androids take better pictures than Blackberries, so that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Anyway, that would be assuming that these people have met most of their sexual partners through OkCupid, and all in the past few years. So that’s not it.
And I refuse to believe that a statistically significant number of people out there are seduced because of personal electronics, so “shiny phones are the new shiny cars” rings hollow. But if they were, my Droid is pretty awesome; sleep with me.
This has to be something about which people which phones appeal to, I think.
Either way, I like to think I’m bringing up the average just a bit, being a tad more in iPhone country with my number of conquests. Come on, Android people, let’s get laid more!
I think you can look at the branding to get something out of it. Also because the iphone was the new shiny, and a lot of people still have the iphone they bought when it first came out. Early technology adopters may be more likely to have more partners. The blackberry I think of as what you get when you’ve got a job that wants to email you everywhere, and maybe people who will be managers have certain numbers of partners. And the android I think of as what my techy friends buy, the ones who aren’t addicted to apple and who resent closed networks and operating systems. I know plenty of techie people who have had a lot of partners, but I also know a bunch who haven’t.
This is handwavy hypothesizing, but testable. Probably okcupid has some questions or quizzes about technology that they could run regressions against! But maybe they’d be biased by who answered those particular questions.
I really like how they publish the results of their data mining, though. The last one, about how women get more hits if some proportion of men think they’re unattractive, was pretty neat.
@miette Good theories there. I too loved the last OkTrends post. Very interesting, and stuff I’d never thought of.
Perhaps their sample group was the first ten people they talked to. That could skew the data just a smidgen. Who am I kidding? I’m just pissed because I run a droid.
@Clint Maybe porn stars get a group discount on iPhones and really skew the numbers. Who knows?
Notice how I refrain from asking you your number. Because I am a gentlewoman. Perhaps I should poll my readership anonymously, supposing I can figure out how to make a poll in WordPress…
I have a Palm… And suddenly I realize that sounds like I’m not talking about a phone at all.
I think the iPhone users are lying. They are compensating for their lemming like devotion to the new and shiny. Either that, or they are so enthralled by the new and shiny that they jump on every one-night-stand and never get the volume and adventure that repeated sex with the same partner can give you. It would be a different graph entirely if they graphed the average number of orgasms per week by phone type.
More orgasms trump more partners in my book.
*blows raspberry and poll writers*
LOL! that was supposed to say AT poll writers. But the slip is pretty funny.
@Penny It could very well be a quest for novelty and the Next Big Thing, for sure. But gee, I don’t know any apple geeks that are like that, do you!?
I should’ve mentioned this, but the OkCupid blog didn’t poll their users as to what phones they were using (although I’m pretty sure the number of sex partners question must’ve been self-reported, but it was completely independent from phone brand identity). They detected what device had recorded a user’s profile pictures (anonymized, of course) so this actually only deals with people who posted smart phone photos to a dating site. So there are lots and lots of variables in there. Like, maybe the sexiest of Android users prefer to take pics with their Nikons and thus their phone preferences wouldn’t show up.
Still, very interesting. And I agree, I’d rather have more orgasms, but lots of both are lovely.
It might also have something to do with location. I don’t know about Blackberries, but iPhones don’t really work in large areas of the midwest – AT&T just doesn’t have the coverage here. Verizon has almost a complete monopoly on small towns and rural areas in the midwest and the situation is probably similar in other rural areas. And considering that Android phones are available from Verizon, but iPhones aren’t yet, that might skew the numbers. If AT&T serves more urban areas, that means it also tends to serve more liberal areas. And liberal areas might be more liberal in terms of sex, too.
I went back to a Flip Phone to keep from accidentally calling people. But, yeah I am kinda old.
I went from a blackberry to an Android, and I love it. Alchemy *is* a drug- one my fiance and I have spent hours in bed playing, both before and after sex. (and for the record, the graph is definitely skewed; my youth puts my number somewhere near 20, and I own an Android, so pphhbbtt!)
Is there significantly more girl-girl sex than boy-boy among iPhone users or are the numbers skewed?
@Vic I would still have that flip phone if not for my nice, shiny present. There’s no shame in it, even if it’s an actual jitterbug.
@Josh Yeah, I know a lot of Android users who are way over six. But you have to get a damn big sample size to really see trends like this form, I think. I wonder if there are a disproportionate number of lifestyle virgins or serial-long-term-monogamists in the Android camp bringing down our average.
@Mousie762 It’s perfectly common for people with iPhones to have sex with people who don’t have them, or even with people who entirely lack any smartphone whatsoever. The discrepancy between male and female would really only be odd if we were dealing with a closed system.
@quizzical pussy
You’re right of course, but I still find it odd. Perhaps whatever it is about iPhone users is present in women more than men on average.
I’m currently a Blackberry user and have been planning to get an Android phone as soon as I get hired for a new contract, due to the open source platform that I can so easily program for. I’m afraid I won’t be helping; it was one when I was 30.
I still have an EnV and **blowing raspberriesd** it’s called that for a reason ;)
@quizzical pussy
It’s a Tracfone. But maybe there should be a poll for Jitterbug users, a lot of them can take out their teeth! Sorry, for the mental image ,Kids! ;-)