Via Dr. Helen, I found a fascinating test called the “Bem Sex Role Inventory” and I’m not sure what to make of the result, but here it is:
Androgynous
You scored 53 masculinity and 70 femininity!
You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.
My test tracked 2 variables
How you compared to other people
your age and gender:
You scored higher than 25% on masculinity
You scored higher than 74% on femininity
The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test written by weirdscience on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test
I found most of the questions impossible to answer, so I usually gave a default answer of “often.” Had there been an “it depends” choice, the test would have been much easier. I was briefly reminded of my freshman psychology class at UC Berkeley — which I dropped because they wouldn’t let me examine the inner workings of another damned test.
UPDATE: Speaking of inner workings, if you have a blog and decide to directly copy the code for your profile, be advised that it has all kinds of extraneous garbage and commands in there which will mess up the layout of your page. (Took me awhile to edit it all out.)
MORE (12/08/05): Having had a chance to ponder the test results, I’ve concluded that this might account for my status as a “woman who wants to become a man but who is by accident of birth already trapped in the body of a man.”
Well? Can anyone offer a better explanation?
AND MORE: I’m not alone. According to Tom Maguire, Bob Woodward is Valerie Plame. (Glenn agrees.) But that’s said to be a metaphor….
Hmmm…. That must mean that there was a metaphormosis. Like this?
Sigh. It’s all in the head.
Comments
9 responses to “I don’t need no stinkin’ sex roles!”
50 masculine, 43 feminine. Also, by comparison, my scores are very low (higher than 12% and 0% respectively), but no indication of what that implies: perhaps a “weak personality”, or just an alien one? Or perhaps a small sample in my age range could skew my results? The raw scores seem about right for me, in any case, and as I had few choices at the extremes, that might account for the low percentages. But I don’t see myself as “Traditionally Masculine”, either.
I’m a 56 masculine 73 feminine.
You scored higher than 35% on masculinity
You scored higher than 85% on femininity
No idea what that means, really.
Androgynous? Me??!!??
Androgynous You scored 66 masculinity and 63 femininity! You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles. My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other p…
whoa
“You scored 66 masculinity and 63 femininity!
You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.”
I do believe there are significant differences between the genders, but I beg to differ that they fall in line with something called “traditional sex roles.”
Looks like everyone who takes this test “beats” me in one way or another. But how am I to determine what being beaten is? What is “better”? Is a higher feminine score better? Or is a higher masculine score better? Who should be tasked with valuation?
You scored higher than 23% on masculinity
You scored higher than 8% on femininity
Not directly related to this post, sorry, but I wanted to pass along this article about finding historical “gays” (from http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/12/12/tag_youre_gay.php)
Backed by the museums documentation watchdog, MDA, the group Proud Heritage this week began sending out a two-page survey requesting that institutions throughout the country list the gay and lesbian documents and artefacts in their collections. “For the first time ever, we are asking museums, libraries and archives throughout Britain to revisit their holdings and reveal what they have that is queer,” said Proud Heritage’s director Jack Gilbert. “At the moment these are not classified correctly, or held completely out of context and never see the light of day.”
… At the Lllangolen Museum in Denbighshire, north Wales, for instance, there is an exhibit commemorating the lives of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. Known locally as the Ladies of Llangollen, they lived together in a small cottage from 1819 until their deaths in 1829 and 1831, and were renowned for wearing dark riding habits, an eccentric choice of dress for the time.
“They would never have used the word lesbian to describe their relationship but there is no question that they lived together and shared the same bed,” said Mr Gilbert. “We think there may well be similar examples in other archives, but because people didn’t use words like lesbian and gay 200 years ago archivists have either overlooked it or simply don’t realise it’s there.”
Yep, it’s the museums’ job to dig up such flaming examples as this.
Can these “historians” be confident that these women might not have indignantly denied an lesbian relationship?
Sounds like a historical outing to me; I just I hope it isn’t at taxpayers’ expense.
Quite so, I completely agree, sorry I wasn’t clear where I was coming from. In the post you cited above (under “MORE”), you linked in the comments to a much earlier post (#380) in which you coined the memorable phrase “having your life ruled by tyrannical labels created by Victorian psychiatrists”.
The subject in general, and that post in particular, have been on my mind lately — and this article seemed like an egregious example of imposing the tyrannical labels, retrospectively, on the whole of history.
And taxpayers will be financing the undertaking, we can be sure of that. Britain’s “museums documentation watchdog” is already on board; American universities and museums will not want to be any less progressive.