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!
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. 😛 (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. 😛 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.