Materialists: Rating the ‘romantic value’ of single men

Last week, for roughly 30 minutes, something unusual flicked across the tickers at the New York Stock Exchange. It wasn’t the rally of a newly public company or a market in turmoil. It was the rising and falling value of single men in the city.

Or at least it was the purported value of single men, as determined by movie studio A24. To promote its buzzy film “Materialists,” which is being released this weekend, the studio created a website that invited single men to input their physical and personal attributes, including height, income, age, whether they owned or rented, whether they had hair on their heads, their turn-ons and their icks.

All that data was fed into an algorithm to create each user’s “romantic value” and then streamed in real-time onto the ticker, rating the men in the middle of the mecca of finance. Over this week, the ticker will also be displayed on a mobile billboard that is being parked around the city, making stops at the Wall Street bull, in Central Park, close to the Washington Square Park arch and near Rockefeller Center.

How genuine the entries are — or how inflated the income and height — is unclear, with one user listed as “Donald G.” having a reported income of $50 million. And unfortunately for anyone interested in the listed men, there isn’t a way to get in touch; their names — or pseudonyms — flash onto the screen in green or red for a second before disappearing.

In perhaps the greatest reflection of the current economy, very few of the men on the ticker report owning their living quarters. A24 did not share how many men had signed up to be listed, but the ticker seemed to display hundreds.

The protagonist, Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson, works as a high-end matchmaker with a strong track record of pairing off her clients. But in her personal life, she struggles to choose between her wealthy, tall, handsome boyfriend, Harry, played by Pedro Pascal, and her ex-boyfriend, John, a broke and struggling actor and cater waiter played by Chris Evans. “I would ask my clients what they were looking for in a partner, and they would respond with stats and figures, as if they were talking about a commodity,” she said in an emailed statement. “My job made me feel like a stockbroker for the stock market.

That transactional vision of love, for many, is beginning to feel tired. Many singles are turned off by the mindless swiping and are fatigued by the tedium of unfulfilling connections.

A few days after the “Materialists” ticker flickered to life, dating app Match released its annual Singles in America survey. (The timing was purely coincidental.) The study found that only 9% of singles, across generations, ranked income level as a top priority when seeking potential partners. Height, too, was seemingly irrelevant, said Amanda Gesselman, director of sex and relationship science for the dating app. “Twenty per cent of women said that they feel, on dating apps or in the context of online dating, that they are falsely misperceived as preferring only tall men, and that it causes problems for them because they’re actually open to men of all heights.”

Instead, more single people today believe in love at first sight compared with a decade ago, and almost half of singles reported that their top priorities were an “emotional connection and shared values like honesty, loyalty, trust, kindness and empathy,” Gesselman said.

Qualities like those, however, are too ineffable for the stock market.

©️The New York Times Company