Calico Rudasil is a feature columnist for Sssh.com, the award-winning porn site for women & couples. With over 18 years’ experience under her belt, writing about and for the adult entertainment industry, Calico qualifies as something of a Web Porn Dinosaur; similar to a tyrannosaurus, only with far more attractive arms and a less pronounced overbite.
For some reason, these days people seem to love taking online tests and quizzes – especially ones offered via Facebook which grant total strangers access to your profile data, presumably including every time you’ve posted something freaking out about the NSA spying on American citizens, or maybe microwaves which turn into cameras.
It’s odd to me people like these tests, considering back when I was in school, tests were something enjoyed only by the sadists who administered them (also known as “college professors”) and the occasional student/masochist who thrived on the validation which came from wrecking the curve in her mechanical engineering courses.
Of course, it’s also true the tests people take on the internet tend to skew in favor of convincing people they’re geniuses because they can do things like correctly identify more than 12 states on a blank map of the U.S., as opposed to making them feel like they’re going to disappoint their parents by dropping out of college, after failing their humanities course because they couldn’t memorize every column-inch of H.W. Janson’s History of Art.
I guess the real charm in these online quizzes comes in people being able to share the results with their friends – or to pretend they got the highest score possible, at least, without providing any real proof of such.
The quiz which caught my eye today doesn’t have much prospect for having its results shared on social media to impress one’s friends, though, unless of course it has become impressive and laudatory to publicly declare “This test proves it: I’m a porn addict!” while I wasn’t looking.
Was I Supposed To Die Before Taking This Quiz?
As the test is explained, subjects are to answer the questions listed, “rating them by how much you feel they apply to you from 1 to 7, where: 1 = never, 2 = rarely, 3 = occasionally, 4 = sometimes, 5 = often, 6 = very often, 7 = all the time.”
OK, that’s clear enough, until I look at the list of “questions” which are, in fact, statements and not questions at all. (This may seem like nitpicking on my part, but in the context of something which claims to be “scientific” I think a little nitpicking is in order.)
Setting aside my semantic quibbling, one of the first questions on the list reads “I felt that porn is an important part of my life.”
The first thing which jumps out at me about this porn-question is its odd use of past tense in the context of something ostensibly designed to tell me if I’m currently a porn addict. Or was I supposed to have died before taking this quiz? Perhaps my widower is supposed to fill it out later?
Beyond the odd temporal arrangement, how is the word “rarely” even a remotely coherent answer to such a question?
Imagine if this statement was offered in the form of a question and someone walked up to you and asked “Hey, do you feel porn is an important part of your life?” and you were to respond by looking him straight in the eye and saying “rarely.” No other words at all, just “rarely.”
I suspect the person who walked up to ask me this rather strange question (I assume he’d at least be holding a clipboard and wearing a lab coat in order to assure respondents he’s not just some creep walking around asking random strangers questions about porn) would jot down some quick note on his pad, like “simpleton” or “crazy woman” and move on to the next subject, hoping to elicit something more revealing than “sometimes” or “all the time” to his subsequent questions.
This Seems More Like A POST 12-Step Quiz, To Me
The more I read over the questions, the more this quiz seems like something which assumes you’ve already been ‘diagnosed’ as a porn addict, and the test is designed to gauge either how successfully you’re combating your addiction, or whether the diagnosis was legit to begin with.
Take this statement, for example: “I resisted watching porn for only a little while before I relapsed.”
In addition to wondering how in the hell the word “sometimes” could ever work as a rational, valid response to a statement phrased in such a manner, the statement also seems to assume I tried to resist watching porn at some point, then “relapsed” into watching it.
This raises another question for me: Can a person who has never been addicted to something have a “relapse” with respect to the same substance or activity?
For instance, I smoked a cigarette once in high school (more accurately, I unsuccessfully tried to smoke a cigarette, stopping after about three drags), but this one partial cigarette doesn’t indicate I was ever a “smoker” as most people would define the term. Well, if I decide to smoke another partial cigarette tomorrow, roughly 30 years after my first partial cigarette, does this constitute a “relapse,” or just a regrettable choice which will instantly remind me how much I loathe the taste and smell of tobacco smoke?
My Questions In Response
After reading over the whole test, I decided not to go through the mental exercise of scoring myself on the proscribed porn-addiction scale (a “score of 76 or higher suggests problematic levels of pornography use,” they say). Instead, I’ve come up with a handy quiz of my own, which I’d like the authors of this quiz to take at some point.
Answer the following questions, rating them by how much you feel they apply to you, where 1 = sometimes, 2 = always, 3 = dishwasher and 4 = used band-aid.
I am have written questions which are not making sense.
I tried to stop reading the President’s tweets, but soon relapsed.
A priest, a rabbi and a porn producer walk into a bar; how many of each does it take to replace a lightbulb, if the rabbi leaves on a train going west at a rate of 22 miles an hour, but the other two stay and get drunk?
If you score higher than a 12 on the above test, congratulations: Your internet quiz-addiction has ruined your ability to simple math.
Calico Rudasil is a Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen) columnist and Sssh will be on Peeperz for fun times again in the near future, meanwhile why not check us out:
