So I turned the Test for Husbands and Wives into an online quiz thingy, and posted it on TotalFark this morning (and then, after it passed the server stress test, I posted it to my LiveJournal account, where it started propagating pretty quickly). It's been fun watching it spread, of course, but one fact about it became immediately clear:

It's much harder to get a good score as a wife than as a husband.

Dr. George W. Crane, who created the test, polled six hundred husbands and six hundred wives, asking for the "chief merits and demerits" about their spouses, then collected the top fifty of each. So although there is some overlap in the questions, there are some praises and complaints unique to each test, which reflect his respondents' expectations on what makes a good or bad husband or wife.

For example, men seem to have complained frequently that their wives squeezed the toothpaste from the top; women complained about their husbands reading the newspaper at the table. (Shockingly, men leaving the toilet seat up didn't make it into the top fifty complaints about husbands.) So the nature of the questions is somewhat inequal between the genders.

But then Dr. Crane weighted the questions to give more importance to the things he thought made for a better relationship. Most questions netted only one merit or demerit point, but some were worth five, ten or (in one case, whether or not the husband brought the wife to orgasm during marital congress) twenty points.

A perfect husband, who'd got no demerits and every one of the merits, nets 131 points. There's no top score for a perfect wife, since one of the questions ("Has minor children to care for") is worth five points per child. (Obviously, any wife who has not given her husband a child is imperfect.) With only one child, her score is a mere 105. If she has seven kids, she can beat the score of a perfect husband.

There's a similar disparity in the demerits. A husband can have a total of 90 demerit points, but a wife can rack up 102 negative points.

Yet both are gauged according to the same scale: below 24 points makes one a very poor spouse (or "Failure", as Dr. Crane kindly comments); 25-41 points is poor, 42-58 points is average, 59-75 is superior, and 76 or higher is very superior.

The scale for a husband gives him a much better chance at being "very superior" - a full quarter of the total point range (-90 through 131) lies in "very superior" territory. For woman with only one child, however, only the top fourteen percent of the point range is "very superior". The "failure" range is similarly disparate; only the bottom 51% of a man's range is "very poor", whereas a woman has to get above 60% before she's not a failure.

Societal attitudes aside, no wonder the guys taking this test today are scoring so much better than the women. It was weighted against the distaff sex from the start.

But hey, it says I'm a "very superior" husband, so I think I'll enjoy my male privilege for a while. Karen, get into the kitchen and make me some pie! And for God's sake, don't do it in your stocking feet this time!