Worried Your Son Might Be... a Reader? Science Can Help

You!

Yes, you!

Are you a nervous parent who suspects that their son may be guilty of the sin of harbouring books? You are? Well, I have some good news for you! You see, there’s an actual foolproof test for it that’s been around since 1936. Lewis Terman (the Stanford psychologist who gave the world the IQ test and then presumably looked around for something else to ruin) went and teamed up with his assistant Catherine Cox Miles to produce a snazzy little tool called the “M-F scale.”

This is a proper pencil-and-paper instrument that can tell us all (with a seriously impressive number scale and everything) whether your lad is appropriately masculine or not. You can read the whole thing, all six hundred pages of Sex and Personality, if you have a free afternoon and are looking for new and exciting ways to destroy your remaining faith in the supposed geniuses of the twentieth century.

The test was seven exercises. Word association, inkblot association, a general knowledge quiz, an inventory of your likes and dislikes, and three more measuring introversion, emotional attitudes and opinions. Each of these scored your boy as masculine or feminine against the answers of ‘normal’ kids. And I have to say, I really like that word ‘normal’ in a science paper. Makes it feel especially rigorous, no?

Basically, the way it works is that your son is made to look at an inkblot, he says what he sees, and then somewhere a number moves on a scale. This test really, really helped all of those anxious parents everywhere to hunt for warning signs of failed masculinity ‘in foods, play activities, fantasies, and clothing’. In Kimmel’s summary of the experiment: ‘the books a child reads, his or her dreams of the future, level and types of knowledge, and interpretation of inkblots were all used to assess appropriate gender identity.’

For me, the best bit of the whole thing, and by ‘best’ I obviously mean the bit that made me want to immediately walk into traffic, is actually what, in their minds, scored as feminine. Because Terman and Miles established, scientifically and all, that ‘admissions of fear and of humanitarian tendencies, of care for personal appearance, or of liking for social gatherings are predominantly female’.

Which is... a thing isn’t it?

Because that seems to suggest that the profile of a failing boy, as per some proper SCIENCE, is a lad who admits to being frightened, cares about other people, washes their face occasionally, and also has friends. Meaning the ‘normal’ boy, by the process of elimination, must be a fearless unwashed misanthrope.

Worryingly, quite a lot of parents bought into this. Mind you, why wouldn’t they? This was not some sort of weird, fringe pamphlet! It was reassurance retail for the anxious mother and the absent father, and, I have to tell you, it’s the same product currently being monetised by every podcast bro selling jaw exercises.

“Someone has made your boy soft, and for a reasonable fee science will find out who!!!”

Now, obviously, you’re going to be thinking that we, in the enlightened age of 2026, must have moved on by now. You’ll be thinking that the M-F scale now sits in a museum next to all those phrenology heads, and, you know what?, technically you may well be right (Form B is in the Science Museum’s collection, catalogued, I kid you not, under Psychology, Psychiatry & Anthropometry) but it won’t be news to any of our boys that the actual process of masculinity testing itself has now transferred to the playground, where it runs continuously and is rigorously invigilated by a panel of experts, all of whom are twelve.

Because, as Kimmel outlines, men ‘are under the constant careful scrutiny of other men. Other men watch us, rank us, grant our acceptance into the realm of manhood.’ And before anyone blames the twelve-year-olds, they’ve obviously inherited the franchise from their parents. ‘Boys among boys are ashamed to be unmanly,’ wrote one educator, in 1871. The masculinity Gestapo were at the door sixty-five years before Terman even began printing his exam paper.

In 1936, a boy would lose marks for reading the wrong things. But in 2026 a man loses marks for reading at all. So here is my outrageous proposal to address this all, arrived at after a genuinely upsetting afternoon with the collected works of Lewis Terman.

If you’ve ever caught yourself judging a man by his bookshelf then you owe the estate of Catherine Cox Miles a licensing fee. Because ninety years of judging boys’ bookshelves has produced no readers whatsoever, so if your son is upstairs right now, secretly demolishing three hundred pages of something you would never have chosen for him, congratulations: the test says there’s something wrong with him.

And that’s how you know he’s fine.

Sources:

Lewis M. Terman and Catharine Cox Miles, Sex and Personality: Studies in Masculinity and Femininity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936), via the Internet Archive.

Michael S. Kimmel, ‘Invisible Masculinity’, Society, 30.6 (1993), 28–35 (the Terman and Miles quotations appear at pp. 33–34).

Michael S. Kimmel, ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity’, in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. by Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994). The 1871 schoolmaster is quoted there from E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood (1993).

Ronald A. LaTorre and William E. Piper, ‘The Terman-Miles M-F Test: An Examination of Exercises 1, 2, and 3 Forty Years Later’, Sex Roles, 4.1 (1978), 141–54.

Christina Clark, Irene Picton, Aimee Cole and Vedika Puri, Teenage Reading: (Re)framing the Challenge (London: National Literacy Trust, 2026).

Attitude-Interest Analysis Test (Form B), Science Museum Group Collection, object 1988-550/38.