Williamsburg is the best place in New York to troll for pervy hipsters, and no one in Chelsea can stop thinking about sex, right? Not according to dating-website science. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, OkCupid, the personals site formed by a foursome of Harvard mathematicians, generously lent Intel its number-crunching nerds to break down New York neighborhoods by attractiveness, interest in sex, kinkiness, and selectivity — zip code by zip code. C’mon, singletons, you didn’t really think we’d leave you to fend for yourself, did you?
OkCupid has 7 million monthly users, the highest-concentration of which can be found right here in New York City. After analyzing how members rated profile photos on a scale of 1 to 5, the numbers show that the most attractive potential mates by borough live in the West Village, the Upper East Side, and Brooklyn Heights. “Not coincidentally, these are three of the most expensive places to live in the city,” says Christian Rudder, OkCupid’s resident data whiz — and a founding member of Brooklyn indie band Bishop Allen.
The pretty pink map above displays the response rate of each neighborhood per number of messages received. The darker the color, the more likely residents of the neighborhood are to flirt back. (Any zip code with less than ten OkCupid users was excluded.) Overall, Brooklyn denizens are less discriminating about who they will respond to than Manhattan dwellers, with Park Slope proving itself to be much less picky than its food co-ops and micro-roasters might imply.
But which neighborhoods want to go beyond flirting and do the damn thing? To measure what Rudder calls “sex want,” (i.e., horniness) OkCupid culled people’s answers to questions like, “If it were up to you, how often would you have sex?” “Is sex the most important part of a relationship?” and “What are you looking for most, sex or love?”
Some of the results were surprising. “Confounding stereotypes, Chelsea is the least horny neighborhood below Central Park,” Rudder says. It’s also the choosiest in writing back would-be to suitors. (We asked if that’s because the Chelsea denizens who might bump-up the results were all on Grindr instead. But CEO Sam Yagan said OkCupid’s gay and bisexual userbase consists of early adopters who most likely use both services.) Less surprisingly, the NYU area and East Village are the most sex-driven locales in Manhattan, although, “they’d be middle-of-the-pack for Brooklyn,” according to Rudder. Among Kings County’s happy horndogs, Bushwick shines forth as an examplar of both maximum interest in sex and minimum discernment in message response. Rudder’s explanation for Bushwick’s rise to the top? “Viva la loft parties!”
But even if Bushwick has the city’s ’s “swingingest” singles scene, it doesn’t have the monopoly on perversion. Says Rudder, “The deeper into Brooklyn you go, the kinkier people get — it runs along Bushwick Avenue to Pennsylvania Ave. to the sea.” In ascending order of depravity, the rankings go Williamsburg, then East Williamsburg, then Bed Stuy and Bushwick, then Cypress Hill, then East New York. Relative kinkiness was analyzed by looking at answers to ¡muy scientifico! queries like, “Do you like to receive pain during sex?” “Have you ever tried anilingus?” “How many sex toys do you own?” and so on.
Now that the word is out on where to find good-looking, sex-crazed, undiscerning pervs, what’s to stop OkCupid users from changing their zip code to match the type of dater they’re interested in? “You could do that,” says Yagan, but it’s going to get awkward when it’s time to get on the subway. “What are you going to say? ‘No, I just put that down to meet people like you.’” Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to take the 2/3 to New Lots Avenue to find out what the hell is going on in East New York.
