Nordic Appearance, Unusual Presence

The profile opened, apparently in earnest: Height. Nordic appearance. Unusual presence. This was Julian Assange’s OKCupid dating profile, surfaced and circulated in December 2010—the same month WikiLeaks was dropping State Department cables that had foreign ministries in varying states of panic, the same week Assange was arrested in London on Swedish sexual assault charges. The timing achieved something that satire usually has to manufacture.

The text is a genuine document of a very particular kind of self-regard. He describes himself as directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project that is, he notes, male dominated. He lists his background as spanning cryptography, intelligence agencies, civil rights, political activism, philosophy, neuroscience, mathematics—essentially everything that matters. He warns prospective partners not to write unless they are spirited, erotic, non-conformist. He specifies that he has no time for timid women. He closes, more or less, with: I am danger.

What to make of Assange as a figure was already complicated in 2010 and only became more so afterward. The Swedish allegations were serious. The cables were genuinely significant. The self-mythology was simultaneously real and ridiculous. The gap between I am danger and "currently surrendering to metropolitan police" is the kind of gap satirists usually have to invent. His dating profile sits in that same impossible space: sincere, absurd, impossible to look away from. A gentleman enjoys and says nothing. He wrote that one down too.