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!
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])
“Once upon a time” started roughly around the New Deal and only really got jump started after WWII and the Marshall Plan. In Quebec we got on that train even a little later than that. We had to have Left-inspired separatist movements here to really pump up the conception of a social-democratic society. My parents were Boomers and the first generation in their family that got to go to trade schools. I’m part of the first generation in my family that could go to university (and I took a really pragmatic major, though my interests outside of the science/math/engineering stuff were strong and I could conceive I’d be in academia today if I hadn’t had to start paying bills).
This conception of the middle class as something to aspire to and an achievable goal for the general public is less than a century old, and I’d dare say it was an abberation rather than a social law.
And you guys have no idea how happy it makes me to say you enjoyed it or that it was well designed. After the religion section turned my brain to jello, and all the discussion of class, I’m more than a bit worried I failed at my task.
(Brain you are not Brian, stop it!)
Thanks for that ‘splain, BlackBloc. Obviously I had no idea that the situation I was describing wasn’t the eternal nature of all economies everywhere.
It was exquisitely well-designed, Argenti, especially considering that you were volunteering to do it in your own time. Thank you for setting it up for all of us. If it has sparked a discussion about SES that can only be a good thing.
Oo, oo, I can answer this! NZ seems to follow a very similar pattern to the US, we’re just more left-leaning and socialist. So it’s probably applicable.
My partner is 47. When he was 18 he started working in quality control in a paint factory. He did a chemistry qualification at night school while working. When he was 26 he quit and went to the US for a working holiday. Came back and was offered a job in lower management. Has been there ever since, now he’s regional manager.
Our minimum wage is $13.75, I’m paid $16.50 as a vet nurse, which is average-ish. Their factory staff start on $20.50, get pay rises every year, get free work boots and clothes, get free health insurance (not normal here because we have subsidised healthcare and free emergency care), and a really good retirement plan. People have worked there for decades. He lets them leave early before a long weekend and buys them beers after stocktake. They pay overtime.
I have never had any of those things because I am 28 and started working rather later than him. I have worked at one place that gave yearly pay rises. The current one is not it.
Admittedly, his stories about the rest of the national management team reinforce and grow my prejudices. Most of them would happily shaft the lowest paid people in their company, and my partner aggressively defends his employees from them. They’re all right wing and when he questions their views they just stare at him like an alien. But anyway.
There’s always been an underclass: my brown grandmother and her siblings were part of it. But it most certainly was possible to get a job, keep a job, get steady increases in pay, and retire at the end of it not that long ago.
I’m just building on top of your comment. I always found it strange how my parents could say something like having a degree is a guarantee of a middle class lifestyle when it wasn’t even true when THEY were young and they had to actually work, hard, to make it true, and even then it only lasted for one generation (the one between my parents’ and mine).
RE: Argenti
I think the story you’re referring to is 5 Times BTU Flunked Gender?
RE: hrovitnir
I actually spent some time in your country! I remember just being shocked and floored that people couldn’t just get fired for no known reason. SORCERY. I remember having roughly the same issues getting hired there as I did here… but I was also on a short, one-year visa, and so that probably had a huge impact on my potential employers. Ain’t nobody wants a worker gone in six months.
RE: BlackBloc
I don’t really care anymore about being ‘proper’ middle class. By this point, I’d just settle living in a place intended for humans without fear it’s going to vanish in a month.
Just gonna write way too much in two comments, hopefully someone will actually want to read it. 😛
OMGOMGOMG. I am so so sorry. Just thinking of how I left my cat with my mother when I was 17 and had to get away, and she basically had him PTS for being annoying hurts *so much*. Let alone a fire. I am so afraid of fires with all my animals.
Nonono, it was awesome and you are awesome. Thank you!
@Argenti – To be frank, I don’t think there’s a single definition of class that would have ended with everyone being completely sure how to categorize themselves. Class is just a messy lump of junk that way, in that it is too simplistic a concept for the sheer amount of variables and differences in thinking that go into deciding it.
That said, I’m going to jump on the bandwagon and explain that I put myself down as middle class even though I’m unemployed (and legally unemployable atmo, thanks a lot, year-long wait for residency application), because I have a bachelor’s degree, and my husband has his Ph.D., and even though our income is not really high (and because of things, is tenuous at best right now), we could conceivably ask our parents for money and get it, if we were having trouble paying rent or buying groceries.
I was just glad to see an option for “non-religious.” I hate it when the only options are “agnostic” or “atheist.” I literally just don’t think about religion enough to claim either of those. I prefer to believe in the power of people to do good, and to hope that people will do good. (And be sad when they don’t, but I know there are good people out there who do good things … and prefer not to waste brain cells hoping a deity exists and will take care of things.)
I think someone once said “apa-theist” and I would tend to lean in that direction. I just don’t care enough about religion to care, if that makes sense.
As for social class, I really wasn’t sure what to put. I live in what I might call poverty, but because I’m “between educations” right now I have my parents paying rent for me since my rent would be 100% of my income. I’m not in any danger of poverty or homelessness because my parents wouldn’t let it come to that, but I make less than $700 a month and work 15-30 hours/week. And have two discrete college degrees. :/ Hrmm. Something seems wrong with this …
Aaaand WordPress is back to switching my nyms again. Has anyone found a way to prevent this? o__O
The first time someone explained at-will employment to me my response was “how can that be legal?”.
Also wtf, mom of Argenti’s ex.
Actually, sorry Cassandra, that sounded a bit dismissive of your view of me as having ‘splained.
I *intended* to only build on top of your comment, adding more details, not as a “pfsheh, you’re wrong and here’s how”. I am sorry that I may have failed to get it across in that manner.
No worries, it just initially came across as assuming that I wouldn’t know those things (which tends to raise the ire of any long-time socialist).
Yeah and I didn’t notice it might come across that way *because* I knew you as a long-time socialist and thought it was matter of course you knew this.