M/M Media Survey
We’re conducting a survey to learn about the demographics and motivations behind Male/Male media consumption. Many of the articles on this website pertain to this subject and many of our readers and writers are active participants or viewers of this type of media. Once we’ve hit a large enough sampling or an extended period of time has passed, we’ll be gathering the results of the survey and publishing a piece with our findings. There have been numerous studies in the past that have focused on specific types of media (slash fiction, yaoi) or primarily on demographics (age, gender, etc). We hope to encompass many forms of media, extensive demographics, as well as motivating factors behind the consumption of this media.
FAQ
Q: Will my identity be revealed if I write in comments?
A: Only if you specify in the comment that you want to be credited. We may use portions of your comments anonymously if you have not specified your name or online handle. If you don’t want your comments used at all, please specify as such. We are also tracking IPs, but that is merely to prevent repeat voting and will not be using that material for any other purpose. You are free to use an anonymous IP switcher if this makes you uncomfortable, but please only answer this survey once if you choose to do this.
Q: Why isn’t my country listed for demographics purposes?
A: We have selected a small sampling of countries based on our website readership and the expected readership of certain types of media (Japan for yaoi, for example). We didn’t intend on slighting any specific country by leaving it off the list. Feel free to specify your country in the comments of the survey!
Q: The gender and sexuality questions are confusing. What do I choose if I’m [insert gender/sexuality]?
A: This is entirely up to you. We did not delineate between cis gender and trans gender individuals, but if you feel that it is relevant you are welcome to leave a comment to that specific survey question. Likewise, we know that there are many different sexualities in the world and we may not have included yours. We’ve left a comment option open for that as well. Basically choose what you feel most comfortable with. You are the one who defines your own gender or sexuality.
Q: Do I have to answer every question?
A: No, but we strongly encourage you to do so. We will be comparing data based on certain factors and if you leave a question blank, your answers won’t be included in that data pool. For example, if we wanted to see if Tumblr users consume more yaoi, slash, or canon queer media, but you left the Social Media question blank, your answers would not be included.
Q: When will this survey end?
A: We do not have an end date, but we have a target of at least 5,000 participants with an automatic cut off at 10,000. Please spread this survey far and wide so that we can reach as many corners of various fandoms as possible.
Q: Is this a random sampling?
A: No. This survey is being primarily spread through social media, therefore it is heavily slanted towards social media users. Also, the majority of our readers live in English language countries, so they will be overly represented in the data. This is why we’ve set up the social media and country questions so that we can at least narrow down results to possibly smaller samplings for data purposes. You can help us reach a larger audience by spreading the survey or even translating the survey into other languages.
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Thank you for participating in this survey!
Author: Angel Wilson
Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.
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The last question, on f/f romances, could have used a free-answer section. Also, the proffered answers to the question on “why do you read m/m” were too few and too stereotypical; you could have asked, for example, about feeling restricted by the way women’s traits, personalities and sexuality are depicted in het romances, or about identifying more with the traits and roles typically assigned to male characters, or being attracted to sexually receptive men, or liking the gender fluidity of yaoi.
Nitpick: Line 2 in question 6 should have been “Yaoi/BL (includes shounen-ai)”. BL is the top-level term for Japanese m/m romances for women, and is either equivalent to yaoi or includes it as a subcategory, according to your preferred usage.
Many people have included responses about the portrayals of women in the comment box for #7. That’s what the comment box is there for. So that you can add things we did not include. You can also check the boxes about preferring stories without women for this reason and include your explanations in said comment box. You prefer these romances without women then comment: because of how women are portrayed. The comment box is there for this very reason.
And there’s no comment box for F/F because this survey is about m/m, not f/f and we merely wanted a statistical relationship between f/f readership and certain demographics. When/if we do a survey about f/f, there will be a comment box. As for right now, that’s not what this poll is about and we are merely looking for correlation based on things like age, gender, sexuality, etc. We aren’t looking for why you read f/f at this point in time. That would be a separate poll.
The problem is that in a multiple-choice design providing a comment box doesn’t fully compensate for a poorly-designed question; the options that are presented will consciously or unconsciously bias the subject’s response, and not everybody is going to use the comment box. Unless you are not interested in responses that don’t fit the provided options (which is fine, as long as you’ve designed it that way), you want to try to provide options that are broad enough to cover every eventuality you can think of. There are already several surveys of various types of m/m readers that indicate that gendered elements are important to their readerships; assuming that you are equally interested in all reasons, providing four questions regarding queer representation and none on gender is unbalanced. If you also want fine-grained information on readers’ desire for queer representation, that could have been a follow-up question.
And the f/f question suffers from the same issue as the last two options on the “why” question; it does not distinguish between the absolute (I am inherently less interested in f/f, all else being equal) and the conditional (I would be equally interested in f/f if it were not for the ways that the characters are presented). The options are presented as absolutes; if you intended them to also capture the conditional case, as it appears from your reply that you do, they should have been differently worded, as currently this is not clear. A comment box would have helped, although a better-designed option list would still be preferable.
I’m assuming that the people who wrote this survey were laypeople without experience in survey design, which would be fine if it were a “just for fun” thing, but your intro suggests that you have at least semi-scientific motivations. Survey design is a science; if you want to be able to draw any kind of conclusions from the responses you need to think about the design. A poorly-designed survey is only going to give you misleading or uninterpretable data. There are many freely-available resources covering demographic surveys; the Pew Research Center has a good one that I’m too lazy to Google for. It spends a lot of time on topics that aren’t applicable to this kind of survey, but skimming over the relevant bits might be helpful for designing future ones.
Noted and thanks for your feedback. We will consider it for future surveys. The cment box was designed to help cover areas we didn’t cover and the two female questions included were meant to be broad. We will be including a lot of commentary that people have given us on the “why” as many of the answers to that are not things we’d thought to specify. This includes all of the responses, including the two gender related questions, but also the sexuality and the sexual desire related questions. If you feel you did not provide adequate feedback when you took the quiz feel free to email us at TheGeekiary@gmail.com with your commentary and IP address so we can match it to the rest of the demographic material that you’ve given us.
We plan on having an extensive article that will expand on the why using quotes, as well as using demographics date for things such as age, gender, and sexuality. The additional commentary will be taken into account.
Also we did put a disclaimer that this is not a random sampling and that the responses will be heavily influenced by the sampling we have access to. We are not a PEW statistical research organization. We are bound by out readership and those whom they choose to spread it to. We’d like to expand beyond that and have more input from other demographics. We also love the commentary provided as it’s helped us gather information for things we hadn’t considered before. These are our restraints. We hoped we’d made that clear before, but if not, hopefully I’ve cleared up the confusion.
If you don’t want to spread the survey because you feel it’s poorly designed, that’s fine, but we were hoping to reach beyond our readership and get more opinions, especially for number 7.
Have a wonderful day.
-Admin Angel