Sunday, May 24, 2009

dudes and chicks

Any of my couple of readers that are friends with me on Facebook may have seen my profile lately and may have noticed a couple of quizzes that I took recently. They were both asking me how much I knew about men and women, two quizzes, one for each gender.

Do I have to preface the whole rest of what I'm saying by pointing out that I honestly do in fact know better than to rely in any way, shape or form with the results of a quiz at a social networking site? Do you perhaps please think I'm at least smart enough to get it?

I'll give you that the quizzes seemed to rely mostly on stereotypes. I get that. On some level though I do think that some basic stereotypes about gender differences have some bearing in the general neighborhood of truth, though given each individual person that claims one gender of the two is still only going to be somewhere on the spectrum that is gender differences. Think Venn diagram, people, with lots of circles. I get it.

I think that idea of gender spectrum is something that so many people fail to fully recognize, and I may have mentioned something along these lines in a past post even if vaguely. But none of that is quite the point, though it does have some bearing.

The only reason I'm sitting here now writing this is those two damn quizzes. And believe me when I tell you that I almost didn't bother because of the process. My computer and/or my internet connection and/or Facebook and/or anything else I might be leaving out seemed to conspire against me. The first time I tried to take the first quiz asking how well I knew men I kept getting sent back to home. The link to take the quiz didn't work.

I walked away from the Fb and had a beer and tucked some kids in bed. I lazed around a tiny bit and finally had nothing better to do. Dear ol' Fb was calling. This time I was able to go right to and then take the quiz. When I was completely done and leaving the end of the quiz page I saw a link to a different but related quiz asking me how well I knew women.

So on to the quiz results and the point of all this
How well do I know men? 25%
How well do I know women? 100%

Do I now need to point out that I didn't game the results? I didn't. I don't have time for that sort of thing. Okay, I'm blogging it now, so on some level I could have had time, but I'm not doing that. If I don't like a quiz result I just don't bother posting it. You can do that. I take the quiz and try to be honest, and if there's a reason to post the result then I do. I do also get that it's meant to be fun. I did also find out that Fb thinks I'm Frenchy from Grease, so please accept that I'm keeping this in the proper place in order of importance and accuracy as regards me and myself and my place in the world.

I'm really not going into the different ways my mind works to make a big deal out of something so pointless. I guess I do feel some need to point it out, that some nonsense social network site app tells me I must be a woman. It says something on some level regardless of how meaningless that is. Maybe it's just that nearly anything is enough to set my head off on a wild goose chase of nonsense considerations. Or maybe it says I might be a little bit gay.

That's all I know about the matter.