What would happen if you analyzed the online dating profiles of 19,095,414 single Americans? Based on one man's experiment, you'd discover which places are the kinkiest, loneliest, happiest, most virginal, and more.
Artist R. Luke DuBois recently joined 21 dating sites in order to create his own "census of the United States." He proceeded to analyze the profiles of over 19 million single users and tracked how frequently any of 20,262 unique words occurred in their profiles. He then took that data and transformed it into a series of maps showing in which parts of the country certain words appeared most.
The analyses were broken down by congressional district — rather than state — but there don't appear to be huge variations within state boundaries in many cases.
"Stop yapping and show me the results already," you're shouting, but there's one more thing you need to know before we look at some of the statistics: The project uses word frequency counting and "word frequency counting doesn't check for context, e.g. the sentence "If I see another happy person I will scream!" counts just as much as "I'm a very happy person."
That aside, here are some of the most fascinating top-and-bottom lists, courtesy of DuBois:
- Most lonely women: Ohio 18th (Eastern Ohio, Rural)
- Most lonely men: Georgia 9th (NW Georgia, Rural)
- Least lonely women: Illinois 2nd (Cook County Chicago Suburbs)
- Least lonely men: California 33rd (Los Angeles)
- Most happy women and men: Washington's 7th (Seattle)
- Least happy women: New York's 16th (Bronx)
- Least happy men: Nebraska 3rd (Central and Western Nebraska)
- Most kinky women: Near-tie between California 16th (San José) and West Virginia 3rd (Southern W.V.)
- Most kinky men: New Mexico 2nd (Las Cruces/Roswell)
- Least kinky women and men: Wyoming's At-Large District (Entire state)
- Most virgin women: Louisiana 2nd (New Orleans)
- Most virgin men: New York 12th (Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope in Brooklyn; Maspeth, Ridgewood, in Queens; Lower East Side in Manhattan)
- Least virgin women: Texas 29th (Houston)
- Least virgin men: Louisiana 2nd (New Orleans)
- Most kissing women: California 50th (San Diego)
- Most kissing men: Connecticut 5th (Northwest Connecticut)
- Least kissing women: Tennessee 8th (Northwest Tennessee)
- Least kissing men: Washington 4th (Central Washington)
- Most spanking women: North Carolina 12th (Gerrymandered district included Charlotte, Winston-Salem,Greensboro, Lexington...)
- Most spanking men: Missouri 3rd (Saint Louis)
- Least spanking women and men: South Dakota At-Large (Entire State)
Want to see more of these results? Then we recommend checking out DuBois' project website or his section on the bitforms gallery nyc page. There's more data to be found there than we could possibly share in one article — and we wouldn't want to spoil all the fun of browsing through the crazy maps anyway.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.