The Man Boobz Survey is up! Go take it! [UPDATE: Survey closes Thursday at 8 PM, EST]
Survey says: Actually, none of these are options on the Man Boobz survey
Thanks to the hard work of Argenti Aertheri and the suggestions of various other Boobzers, the Man Boobz survey is now up and ready to be taken. It will give me — and all of you — a better picture of just what sort of people read Man Boobz on a regular basis. It’s completely anonymous. Go take it! It will only take a few minutes.
I will probably leave it up for a couple of days, and will report the results here as soon as the numbers are crunched.
I think pretty much any other question you might have about it will probably be answered on the survey itself, so hop to it!
Thanks Argenti!
Posted on June 22, 2013, in announcements, self-promotion. Bookmark the permalink. 632 Comments.
arubakeru: You answered the question I was going to ask: You are in spain. That answers (to me) the question I was going to ask (in relation to your grandmother).
This article might help, as a starting off point.
(I’m not jewish, but I have a fair conversance with Judiasm, and Jewish Culture, for a non-jew. I also have resources in Jewish communities).
Pecunium, your links don’t work.
Carp! That link is fishy. Here it is. Marranos, Conversos,and New Christians
Hahaha, still doesn’t work!
Wordsp1nner — congrats!
“This particular racist goal post was so obvious to me (I mean, not that I embraced it, but it was obvious to me that this is how racists regard whiteness) that I was shocked when I saw an American talk show where there was a KKK member who had a deep tan and black hair. My completely spontaneous reaction was “But… how come you’re accepted by the KKK looking like that?”. Then I thought some more and realized that racist standards are probably really different in the American south compared to rural Sweden.”
Yeah I tan, have had like 3 sunburns and all of them were like, April and fuck why did I spend all day in the sun with no tan yet?! Hair’s brown with a touch of red, turns red when the dye fades out (not quite as red as pecunium though). But in the US? White.
Aaliyah — so far your guess is correct.
Pecunium’s borked link should be this — http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Marranos.html
“marrano” means pig/dirty in Spanish
Congrats to Wordspinner!
just thought you might find that interesting…
I did the survey. I didn’t answer the political belief question because honestly, I’m not very sure myself. I’m probably more of a social democrat, but that belief system is tainted for me because the the social democrat party in my country are that in name only (much like the socialist party).
I also didn’t answer the class one. I’m unemployed, but I am living with my mother who is middle-class, so I have a lot of advantages other unemployed people wouldn’t have, so I wasn’t sure what to answer.
But other than that, I really liked the survey, very comprehensive and very inclusive, kudos, Argennti.
Ok, it says that already in the article…
Thanks Pecunium, it’s a very interesting site.
It’s odd that in the Bay Area (and in the UK) I’m often read as not white (sometimes Hispanic or Arab, often Persian which is weirdly specific – in the latter case it’s always people who’re Persian themselves reading me that way), but in Texas I was almost always read as white even with a dark tan.
Except when my family went to Mexico when I was 8 and the border guards didn’t want to let me back into the US because they were convinced that my parents couldn’t possibly be my parents, since neither of them were as “foreign” looking as I was and my accent didn’t match theirs since I had never lived in the UK at that point. They accused my parents of trying to smuggle me in to be a maid, it was pretty damn trippy.
I didn’t understand why there wasn’t simply the option communist. Some people prefer that simple label to any sort of labels that are linked to people having come up with those theories.
It would be interesting to see what the survey would look like if all the trolls who have been here participated. Perhaps that should have been added as a category?
Anyway, I’m delurking; have been reading this site for a few days after I had a strange experience. I am a man and I was walking with two female friends, and this guy walked up to this shouting that I was being dominated by women and I needed to take the Red Pill. Possibly he was angry because one of my female friends had pinched me on the arm playfully. So unlike most of you, I was introduced to the strange world of the MRA outside the Internet.
CassandraSays, it’s weird how people see others depending on the country. I have a friend that looks Arab too, but I didn’t realize it until we went to Greece and someone pointed that out. When I was growing up there was not a lot of diversity in Spain, so I never really thought about things like race.
It has happened to me too because I look “whiter” than most white Spanish people, and some people still ask me if I’m French (that happened to my mother as well), but when travelling to the North of Europe there is people much more pale than me.
Umm… does gender neutral count as trans? I know it’s a question of what I consider myself to be, but I’m not sure whether I consider myself to be trans or other… maybe I’ll just go with other.
Your story is better though, mine was boring haha :-D
*delurks*
That was an extremely awesome survey! I wish more surveys were that comprehensive and in-depth, although I am happy to say this is the second super-in-deph demographic survey I have taken on the internet. I do wish I could have pitched in to help with the Pagan section though – for example I had a problem picking one because while I am a Hellenic polytheist, I am not a *reconstructionist*. So I felt conflicted picking that option. ^_^; It’s nuances like that that are really difficult to know/find out if you’re not already part of the in-group you know?
Oh wow… white privilege twinge: I’m not at the top of the ethnicity list!! :-o
*pokes self with a stick*
Hi there BlackSphinx! Here’s your welcome package. ^_^
It might have been said already, but my mom insists that I comment that there was no “Episcopalian” option for raised-as religion. (“We’re way less conservative than Anglicans!”) ;p
There also wasn’t any “Anglo-Catholic” (think High Church Episcopalians/Anglicans who want to reconcile with Rome, but are, generally, more socially liberal than Rome can stomach, and too Religiously Conservative for the Anglican Conference).
Religion is hard to taxonomise. It’s splitting, and lumping.
“Umm… does gender neutral count as trans? I know it’s a question of what I consider myself to be, but I’m not sure whether I consider myself to be trans or other… maybe I’ll just go with other.”
That’s why the are you trans* question is separate, pick whichever you feel comfortable with (or just skip it, I don’t think I made that one required)
Re: white not on top — that chunk, like the rest, are alphabetical! Honestly alphabetical sorting was a hell of a lot easier than trying to make judgement calls on the order.
*smacks Christian list with a stick* cursed thing, why didn’t you have such large groups while having the handful of Shakers left on you?! Just go with other I guess, sorry!
I noticed that too! I’ve had people insist that Episcopalians are actually Anglicans before, which irked me on my granny’s behalf.
Pecunium — everything else I’ll apologize for but you made the Catholic list!
The sillies are setting in already, I need more coffee.
Sorry to everyone I missed, I readily acknowledge I am neither perfect, nor an expert on most of the topics listed (more like nearly all of them, I guess I sorta know the gender section fairly well)
I’m so glad I found Manboobz! I’m shy and socially awkward so it’s difficult for me to express my emotions without feeling that I’m being weird, but I’m having a happy day and I wanted to tell you all that I love this site and that I am learning a lot from all of you. Thank you! :-D
@CassandraSays: That sounds like a horrible experience! Train employees once threatened to not let our familly dog travel on the Eurostar from Brussels to Lille, and they had to relent once my 8-year old sister figured out what was going on and burst into tears. What happened to you seems like the kind of stuff that would give you nightmares way into your adult life.
*hugs*
Actually it was more Monty Python sketch than terrifying experience*. It was just sort of surreal, because at that point I was still on my mother’s passport and she was showing it to them going “see, check it out, there she is” and they just refused to believe it. Even weirder is the fact that other than the difference in coloring I look just like my dad.
*The fact that I wasn’t scared? Totally privilege.
I’ve seen “paganism” defined in such a way to include any polytheistic belief system. I suppose that’s where people are getting the idea that Shinto, Vodou, etc. are pagan.
Cassandra — smuggling you as a maid? Dafuq?!
In interesting survey things that I can say without fear of biasing it, so far we have boobzers in…
Canada
US
Brazil
Argentina
Iceland
Norway
Sweden
Finland
UK
Ireland
Denmark
Estonia
Portugal
Spain
France
Belgium
Netherlands
Italy
Germany
Denmark
Austria
Czech Republic
Poland
Hungary
Bulgaria
Greece
Israel
South Africa
India
Japan
Australia
New Zealand
Damn near ever US state, though I only sorta test it after my test data came from not-CT. Including Alaska and Hawaii though!
Nifty, we’re from all over the place!
Lots of non-binary lurkers, aww. Guys, we won’t bite, your survey was made by a non-binary. They all respect my ze/zir pronouns, promise we’ll be good about it with you! And we have cupcakes!
That’s really interesting. My hair has naturally ranged from very dark brown to orangish to almost dirty blonde depending on how much sun I’ve been exposed to, but nowadays it’s almost always brown to dark brown because I always wear hats outside. In the United States, I’ve never not been considered white (my heritage is mostly German) but I wonder if that’d be the case if I lived in Europe. Huh.
Yay survey! Obviously my idea with the white European/other didn’t communicate itself very well. In NZ the majority-white population is mostly mongrels with varying amounts of Anglo-Saxon/Gaelic/other European extraction. I feel like there should be different categories for generally white from countries like England/Canada/US/Australia/NZ vs white European, without making tooooo many options. Oh well. :P
Anglo Catholic aren’t Catholics. They are in the Anglican Communion: which is it’s own brand of hard to ID, and not really my Baliwick.
@Amnesia: I think you’re on the safe side if your hair bleaches easily in the sun. But you know how some people’s hair stay really dark even if they’re out in the sun and get a deep tan? They’re the suspicious ones…
I should add that I actually think the goalposts differ between racists in, say, Stockholm (capital of Sweden with large black and arab neighbourhoods) and racists far out in the countryside who never encounter real POC:s that they can hate on.
Non-Angelican non-Catholics…more people I missed, great. Argh. Sorry!
Hrovitnir — I wonder if that’s the difference…the r/mr question, and the one above it, are about 10% off on whiteness…
@Amnesia: We’d probably figure you for an American. I once heard a story about an African-American man who was being harrassed by French police in Paris. When he produced his passport, they replied “Excuse me, sir” and left him alone.
Off topic: A divorce lawyer is doing an AMA in r/mensrights, if anyone is interested:
http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1gwvd2/i_am_a_divorce_lawyer_ama/
Hey, believe me, I am not complaining. I just… I was shocked to have been shocked by it. If anything, I should thank you for pointing that particular lump of privilege out.
Again, not complaining. I’ve actually been wondering if I count as a member of the trans community or not for a while, ‘cuz I’m not really sure where to go to talk about gender identity, this just gave me an excuse to ask someone. :P (I think I’m probably not trans, because that would seem to imply a transition is somehow desired, but I’m not sure what I’d transition to even if it was. Maybe a cat?
…I should take my own damned survey already…it’s weird, I’ve always done the super official sort that you Do Not Take (I fudged that once so the one non-straight person wouldn’t be so alone, fucking Christian college [and it's weird, one of my few sunburns was at the gay at Messiah picnic…I was about the only current student though, and only knew about it because of the ex-fiancé's older brother])
Gods I am so off topic. Did I mention that my brain is jello?
For the sake of my blood pressure, no. No, I am definitely not interested. If anyone brave enough to look chooses to leave snippets here, though, I will be interested to read your analyses.
Athywren — there’s a subset of trans* people who feel only though who transition are Really Trans*…and a subset that think those people are idiots. You might enjoy this — http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/ 2012/04/02/harry-benjamin-syndrome-syndrome/
Also, plenty of trans* women either just don’t want “the surgery”, can’t afford it, or don’t feel the risks of major surgery like that are worth it.
Now, my non-binary ass put neither so I could check it, so take that all as you will.
RE: Dvarghundspossen
Having been raised on the Texas racial system, I got a laugh out of local racist differences. Here, being tan is a beauty thing, so of COURSE the racists have to approve of tanned blond people! (Also, it gets so hot in the summer that anyone who can tan does.)
Dunno about you, but the racial system was pretty borked, and prone to confusion. We spent our whole childhood and adolescence positive that Lex Luthor was biracial…
Also… damn, even with Argenti’s changes, I had trouble with the gender one. The multiplicity impacts us so much that I feel weird just saying I’m a trans man without an addendum.
Viscaria, it’s actually good. The lawyer is not an MRA (or a feminist, for that matter).
So far that reddit’s thread is actually honestly GOOD. The lawyer isn’t biased, is answering mostly totally legit and polite questions, and the one fool who asked about hypergamy had someone else tell him that won’t get answered. One guy is claimed men are being jailed for failing to pay 100% of their income, but the answer above it says he’s never seen it and would file a motion as soon as he collected his jaw from the floor. So yeah, amazingly, it doesn’t seem to be a cesspool.
LBT — if you want I can make a copy that isn’t cookie protected and email you it.
Welcome to all the delurkers, and yeah, seconding the “please feel free to delurk” message to lurkers! :)
Dvarg – that’s just what it was like, very obviously, when I was a kid. Southern Europeans were definitely not Dinkum Aussies. There was a fairly silly effort to call migrants New Australians, to counter the usual racist names, but all that happened at schoolyard level was that it became a slur too.
Yet the same racists despised anyone white who wasn’t deeply tanned. Go figure.
Well, Kitteh, as much as the better pay and interesting animals are a real attractant to me, I’m not prepared to live in Australia specifically because you can cut the racism with a knife. NZ has the same issues but it’s so much milder… I find it mind blowing how bad the racism and politics are over there. :(
I know I’d be OK as an educated, white-passing person, but the revolting things I’ve heard out of apparently lovely, intelligent young white Aussie’s mouths, with no idea that I might be horrified…
That’s interesting! Are you in the US? There does seem to be a rather different conception of race over there. I was really confused when I heard that being able to tick *two* races was a new thing not that long ago over there. And white NZers are inordinately proud of being mongrels, often. A good sign of a racist is people who get crabby about “NZ European”, because they’re “just NZers!” *rolls eyes*
That AMA is surprisingly not shit. It’s just MRApists asking him dumb questions and him responding with obvious answers.
Took a minute to glance at Cloudiah’s link. :) You guys are right, it’s pretty good for r/mr. What with everything going on, though, I’m a little fragile for even that! Much rather hang out with you guys and Tumbl the day away.
Re: The survey, I found class a little challenging as well. I don’t think it’s a failure of the survey, though, just a result of all of our societies being complicated things.
Hrovitnir — despite the oddity of my email reply about when I was out cold, yes, I’m in the US (just nocturnal!) The checking two races thing was a last minute decision on my part too, it makes the stats harder to compute and with nearly a thousand replies already, I’m beginning to regret it! I think the first set of data is probably going to be in terms of “X people checked at least Y box” unless y’all want to wait a week while I sort how many of each combination we have!
Or “X people ID as one or more things, including Y” because yeah, sorting the combinations gets headache inducing (it’s fine, I like stats based headaches, but it takes time and for national census that’s a hell of a lot of data to sort!)
Yeah, that Reddit thread is really good. It’s obvious that the MRAs asking questions don’t enjoy hearing sense.
Re: class in the survey. Yeah, I answered middle-class, as I have a PhD and I’m an academic, but my income barely puts me over the lower bracket of what constitutes “middle class.”
Thanks for all the hard work, Argenti.
I sort of gave up on the critter-question, because kitties! What other animals even matter any more? ;)
Also, Dutch people represent, yo.
I think it’s also a reflection of an overall demographic shift where each generation tends to make progressively less money than the one before, ie wages haven’t been keeping up with cost of living for a long time, at least in the US. Basically once upon a time coming from the right sort of family and getting the right sort of education almost guaranteed a middle class or upper middle class lifestyle, now that’s no longer the case.
RE: Argenti
It’s okay. Shit just be complicated when you’re multi is all.
Wages and thus standard of living have been slipping for non-professional jobs for a while too (industrial, trades, and so on). Basically the US economy is tilting towards lower paid service jobs, which is going to have an impact on whether or not people end up in the same class (as determined by income) as their parents.
Haha. In my head, somehow you’re an Aussie. :P Nocturnal is the best way to be. ^_^
I was surprised at the multi-option. I have no idea how you actually sort these things to be representative, but if I can help data-sort from afar I’m happy to BTW.
RE: CassandraSays
Basically once upon a time coming from the right sort of family and getting the right sort of education almost guaranteed a middle class or upper middle class lifestyle, now that’s no longer the case.
Being fairly young, I’ve actually wanted to ask the older folks I know about this. Because I kinda assume that world is just some collective cultural fantasy that never existed, and that things have always sucked like this. Is it not so?
Also, gender! Our readership leans more feminine than masculine, and despite the gains that women have made over the past 30 or so years women now still haven’t caught up with where their fathers were in terms of income/job status.
girlscientist — yeah the income guidelines are weird. Like, my pharmacy student sorta ex is going to graduate into a field where ze might make 6 digits, and have a shit ton of debt. Wtf’s that count as? Use actual available money?
bookdragonette — oh no you didn’t! My fishies matter!
LBT — yeah I guess, sorry I couldn’t make it easier on you. Tangentially, can you point me to your short story with the gender questionnaire from hell?
@ LBT
Actually the idea that standard of living and average income is dropping and the economy is shifting towards jobs with shitty pay is pretty well documented. It’s weird talking to my Dad (who’s been in management for a long time) about this stuff, because his ideas about how easy it is for graduates to find jobs and how secure those jobs are is totally out of whack with how things are now.
I find the class/income gap in the US really terrifying. We’re heading the same way, just slower and less extreme. :/ I just can never get my head around how little people get paid in service jobs over there. And in reading notalwaysright.com, which is hilarious and probably at least some of the time made up, there are *so* many mentions of people being fired over one incidence and just no recourse, it’s horrifying.
It’s easy to get frustrated at how hard it is to let someone useless go over here (if you do things properly) but by god it’s better than the other option!
The thing is, certainly amongst my peers, you tend to think of the US as $$$. Because if you do a desirable, professional job, you can get paid 2-3x the amount as here. NZ can’t *afford* to compete with the likes of the US for specialist surgeons and researchers.
Yet while that’s a totally viable option for me, I could *also* be the person earning 1/3 of the pitiful amount I get now to do a service job with no respect and totally vulnerable to my employers. Never mind absolutely no free healthcare services. W. T. F.
/ramble
Cassandra — that’s true to the point I used combined definitions because one had separate income averages for men and women! And the other two made no fucking mention of poverty, just rely on gov’n; and both sometimes mentioned work autonomy.
Also, the first one, with the averages by gender, had a fucking weird as way of handling everything above middle class. Like, upper middle class meant millionaires.
(Also he’s in oil, a field in which a. wages are much better than in a lot of other industries and b. hiring isn’t as stagnant as it is in a lot of other fields.)
Another factoid from Dad – he’s now hiring people who have graduate degrees for jobs that they would have been qualified for with an undergrad degree when I graduated, and the people who only have undergrad degrees are mostly having their applications disposed of in the round file. It’s created a weird phenomenon where the employees of his generation are hiring and managing people who’re all at least one if not two steps further up the educational ladder than they are. Dad left school at 15, got trained via a union, progressed from there. Everyone who reports directly to him has at least an undergrad degree.
I finished it. Very well designed survey. Some of the class vs. income issues remind me of Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier”, in which he explains his perception of the intersectionality of those concepts in Britain at the time, and how it impacted efforts to promote socialism.
I think one of the big reasons my baby boomer parents want me to go back and finish my degree (beyond that it would give validation to their denial of my mental illness) is that when they went to school, a bachelor’s degree was considered something of a guarantee of a) financial success and b) upper-middle-class “respectability.”
Not really relevant, but anyone else here encounter the assholes who assume having gone to college makes you less worthy of respect than them because clearly you’re too good for their lifestyle?
@ hrovitnir
Yeah, my Dad has been mounting a campaign to get me to move back to the UK for years, and one of his main arguments is that the direction the US economy is moving in is “feudal”. The gap between working class and professional class is widening at an alarming rate.
…which is part of why I included definitions. So much of the US is all “I’m middle class and don’t need food stamps like those lazy idiots! I can get by on meat and potatoes, they buy organic shit!”
And how WIC mothers are welfare queens (cue racism) and they went to college four decades ago so they’re still middle class.
Or like, my ex-fiancé — raised with house cleaning service and ALL THE THINGS. Now living with new-fiancé’s parents. (Father’s in Florida and relative decent these days, mother should die in a house fire [because she tried training the cat to be an indoor cat through pain, which meant when the house went up the kitty didn't try to run out, so pardon me if I think she should've been stuck with it, I loved that cat])