We are knee-deep in mandatory trainings, and, God, are they ever stupid.
Take, for example, the homophobia index test. You are supposed to agree or disagree with the following statement:
“I enjoy the company of gay people.”
I definitely enjoy the company of some gay people. And definitely don’t that of many others. My enjoyment has nothing to do with their sex lives because I’m not a creep. So how am I supposed to answer it?
More importantly, how is N supposed to answer it? He doesn’t really enjoy anybody’s company except mine and our daughter’s. So in a literal sense, no, he doesn’t enjoy the company of gay people. How would he even find out if anybody is gay? Why would he retain that information?
Or this one:
“Gay people deserve what they get.”
This really depends on what they get. Promotions? I don’t know, are they good workers? Terminal illnesses? Then no, I don’t think anybody “deserves” it. It sounds like something is absent from all these questions, and that absent but turns them to mush.
Then there’s this:
“When I meet someone I try to find out if he/she is gay.”
No, it would never occur to me to do that. It will probably not occur to me to find anything out about that individual. Wouldn’t a gay person who’s looking to date be the most likely participant to be interested in finding out?
I have a question for gay people, though. Do you really want your co-workers to be interrogated about their feelings regarding gayness in this way? If somebody made a test like this about, say, Ukrainians, I’d lobby as loudly as I can to make the horror stop. I absolutely promise I never felt anything negative towards gay people in my life. Since I first found out they exist, I had nothing but good, positive feelings. This homophobia quiz, though, I gotta tell you. I started kind of realizing how one could develop negative feelings.
Clarissa's Blog 
What is the answer format for this idiotic test? Is it a rigid “yes-no” setup where the person being tested is limited to either agreeing wholly with the question or disagreeing completely?
Dreidel
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Does your website no longer allow comments or questions from readers unless the reader has officially signed up as a member?
Dreidel
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The quiz seems extremely idiotic, even for idiotic quiz standards.
Ol.
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One has to take seriously the possibility that the purpose of the exercise is to get people to hate gays. If people did not hate gays, there would be no need for such tests and somebody would be out of a job.
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“I have a question for gay people, though. Do you really want your co-workers to be interrogated about their feelings regarding gayness in this way?” No. In addition to being anti-woke out of principle, I’m against it out of self interest. Whatever brownie points one may currently get for being “queer” (not many, ime) is not worth the backlash (which has already started but is nowhere near its peak yet)
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Just as a general background response, it is far more likely that someone will have the same reaction gays as furries. Neutral, so long as one knows nothing about their habits, then it’d be homoaedia,
In your case, with the incessant nagging and occasional fits of bullying, it still won’t provoke -phobia, but homoekkhthrós.
I know normal people don’t give two pins about this kind of fussy nomenclature.
It’s weird how the movement went with “phobia”. Just as we got the peculiar “anti-semite”, instead of juden-hasse / jew-hate.
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“This homophobia quiz, though, …. could develop negative feelings”
That’s the point of course. Divide and conquer. Artificially praise and elevate a group (that doesn’t necessarily want it) in order to feed resentment in others.
Very transparent tactic.
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The test is administered to people who are the least likely to beat gays or destroy their property (which are actual questions on the quiz). The idea of destroying anybody’s property sounds outlandish to me. But the people who might engage in such behaviors never get quizzed.
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This sounds like a variation on “Let’s you and him fight.”
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“You are supposed to agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘I enjoy the company of …'”
Nope, gonna stop you right there.
If your personality meets up with INTJ or INFJ, that’s an absolutely huge ask.
Ideally most people should regard indifference as a positive sign, because the scariest thing for them may very well be having that kind of attention.
Here, let me do the INFJ in unsolicited counselling mode, then tell me I’m wrong. :-)
“… is your gay identity thing and how you push it on others like some kind of over-compensation scheme where you don’t really know who you are but you want to make people engage with your chosen identity construct like it’s a sock puppet, because I could totally see that as good for building critical distance and I won’t ask you if you’ve washed the sock lately … oh, oops … wait, where are you going?”
I am a horrible person and you can too! :-)
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With intrusive pseudoscientific “tests” like this, if they are on a scale of agree/disagree, I sometimes answer right down the middle on everything. That’s my form of protest.
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These questions are horrible. The contemporary world is awash in terrible questionnaires and surveys because computers and the internet have made it far too easy to set up and administer these things. All of the staff and administrators at my university love to set up surveys and web forms for every conceivable thing, most of them are unnecessarily long, poorly worded, and full of redundant questions.
The worst was a minor issue that could have been handled with five minutes of discussion in a meeting, but instead there was a survey. There was an announcement that there would be a survey at a meeting, an email with the link to the survey was sent out, there was a reminder about the survey at the next meeting, there was an email reminder to complete the survey, and a short presentation on the results of the survey at a third meeting. This presentation was was followed by the five minute discussion that we should have had at the first meeting.
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So true. We are evaluating job candidates. Normally, we’d get together with colleagues, discuss and make a decision. But the new procedure is that every faculty member completes a Qualtrics survey. I as Chair receive the results of the survey and then complete my own survey based on those results. The results then go to the Dean who – guess what? – completes a bloody survey.
This is all very stupid.
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It’s not even limited to job stuff.
You should have seen our last round of rental applications:
Q: Do you have a dog?
Yes or No (no)
Q: Is your dog over or under 35 pounds?
Over 35/Under 35
(no other options, and you have to answer to continue to next page)
Q: Has your dog been trained to attack?
Yes or No
(I don’t *&%#$ have a dog but if I did I would train it to attack web developers and landlords)
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OK, I didn’t know about this innovation. Jeez. So dumb.
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So excruciatingly dumb I wonder if it is simply a secret sorting hat. The rental goes to the customer who says “f*&k this” and goes to the office in person. Then the office lady can look at you, see if you pass the “responsible human being” sniff test, and give a totally undocumented thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the boss without being accused of illicit discrimination. I mean, if you’re a landlord, there are all sorts of rules telling you you can’t discriminate against anyone– but in reality, you cannot afford to rent your property out to drunks, white trash, unmarried parents of several dirty children, people covered in dog hair who “don’t have any pets”, recent immigrants who will immediately move in 15 of their nearest kin, toothless meth chefs, etc. They will cost you so much in damage you get no profit for years to come. You can’t really get that intel from an internet form, but you can grok a lot of it in person.
Or, the forms are just incredibly dumb and nobody ever bothered to do any QA on them.
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