Men Dating Online Aren't As Creepy About Age As You Thought*

*Except for those in their mid-thirties. Watch out for those guys.

ER/FAMEFLYNET ER/FAMEFLYNET

When it comes to selecting a mate of an appropriate age, one common, decidedly non-scientific rule is "half your age plus seven"; in other words, it's probably inappropriate to date someone who is younger than your age divided in half, plus seven years. (If you're 29, like the author, says, you shouldn't date someone younger than 22.) The webcomic XCKD memorably called this the "Standard Creepiness Rule".

Here it is plotted out for men:

Randy Olson / Via randalolson.com

But how do people dating online adhere to this rule? Given the now-ubiquitous spread of stories of lechery and malfeasance, you might expect that people — namely, men —widely disregard this social standard when they look for a date online.

Last week, the data scientist who founded OKCupid, Christian Rudder, released a book, Dataclysm, that included a chart depicting the age range that male OKCupiders use to search for dates. Randy Olson, a computer scientist at Michigan State, dropped that chart on top of his chart of the non-creepy zone:

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