Don’t want your Web dating service matching you up with any fatties? There’s a fee for that.
OkCupid.com, which bills itself as “The best dating site on Earth,” is now allowing users to filter their prospects by “body type.”
The 9-year-old site, whose basic service is free, is charging a filtering fee, of $4.95 to $10 a month, for its A-list members. It allows them to hide the body types they’re not attracted to.
The site offers 10 body-type choices, beginning at thin, and ranging to average, “a little extra,” “full figured,” “overweight” and even “used up.”
If you don’t like anyone larger than “average,” you can filter them out. Or, if you’re into chubby prospects, you can filter everybody else out.
OkCupid said singles are going to size up their date prospects according to what they consider physically attractive anyway, so the site is doing nothing different from what goes on in bars and clubs.
But outraged critics said the body-type filter is a form of online discrimination.
“How you self-identify on the site, and how you’re going to be perceived on your date by your date, is going to be a point of potential insecurity,” one OkCupid user, Alana Massey, 28, told ABC News.
However, site co-founder Sam Yagan said the filter option is, well, just an option.
“The idea that it is somehow pejorative I think just doesn’t hold water, just by the fact that people are choosing to self-identify that way,” he told ABC. “I think it is an obvious feature of a dating site.”
OkCupid, originally launched under a different name by a group of Harvard students, has claimed more than 3 million users.
Users get to identify themselves by choosing the body type they feel is most appropriate.
The “used up” category is apparently for people who don’t take the body type issue all that seriously.
And if you don’t want to be type-cast, you can just leave the space blank.
The monthly fee varies according to age, length of membership in OkCupid and, yes, body type.