There is a specter haunting online dating—the specter of communism. “Forget OKCupid,” reads the About section of the OkComrade Facebook page. “Too bourgeois.” OkComrade was created with the intention to facilitate romantic relationships between members of the political left.
OkComrade has embraced the “big tent” style of Leftism, welcoming “socialists, communists, and anarchists wherever they might be.” After all, everybody deserves to make out, right? Users simply comment with a brief self-summary, which the moderators then share to the main page. “No sexism, no racism, no heterosexism, or transphobia,” the page’s creators wrote in their very first post. “Don’t be a dick. Don’t make fun of others. If you do, you are banned, and if you are a real jerk about it, we will find additional ways to humiliate you.” Sounds reasonable to me, though inevitably the community is not without its brocialists and manarchists.
Nonetheless, fans of the page include as prominent a Leftist as Doug Henwood, contributing editor at The Nation and proprietor of the Left Business Observer. “Will there be an app like Grindr or Tinder?” Henwood asked, after reprimanding the administrators for having chosen a “heteronormative” cover-photo. “Hopefully!” one of the admins replied. “After the page started to go viral, we thought it would be a neat idea to make something like a Grindr/Tinder app. Some of us are working on it.”
The folks behind the page did not respond to a request for comment. In the meantime, interested parties can use this OkCupid browser extension, which incorporates “class consciousness” as a metric.
Illustration by Jason Reed
