(no subject)

[rm]

It is very hot today, and the thought of fencing -- bargh. I'll go. Because I always go. But my god. I think it is, at the moment, too hot for me to have anything else to report.

Your Score: Masculine

You scored 83 masculinity and 40 femininity!

You scored high on masculinity and low on femininity. You have a traditionally masculine personality.

Link: The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test written by weirdscience on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Comments

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

Though I understand why the test is structured the way it is (and though I take much delight in taking them as well!), it still bugs me at the back of my head how they fail to take into account cultural variations. Like they seem to encapsulate middle-America norms of masculinity and femininity. Some of the "directness" that is considered masculine is considered just plain rude in some countries; I found this when I was working as an editor in Japan for a journal whose articles were directed towards Western readers but written in English by authors whose first language was an Asian language. One of the things we had to do was edit to make the author's (regardless of gender) language more direct, much to the consternation of the authors themselves.

Moreover, even regional variations aren't taken into account, I think. For example, the norm of niceness seems to count towards femininity, but at least from my experience growing up in the South (and re-living there recently), it's just a general expectation. (This is not to say Southerners can't be assholes--many, both male and female, are--but there is a heightened expectation of pleasantry in interaction than I've seen in the Northeast.

This is putting it simplistically, of course, and I'm not trying to generalize about various cultures, but rather to provide some examples that might run counter to the test. And I'm not even trying to criticize this test--it's just an amusement, after all. Just musing out loud about some of the dynamics behind these tests.