Skepticism

Soy Boy Santa? Debunking the Gender Neutral St. Nick

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Transcript:

Oh my goodness, people want Santa Clause to be gender-neutral, what is this world coming to, oh my, we truly live in whatever the non-binary version of a patriarchy would be. Enbiarchy. Welcome to the enbiarchy.

This news got everywhere, like a herpes outbreak at an orgy. It’s in the New York Post, it’s in the Sun, ABC, it’s even got Gamergaters like MundaneMatt crying out “But what about Mrs. Claus!” Seriously, he thinks this is so real that he came up with a “solution” to just better develop the character of Mrs. Claus. But it’s not real, which should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, which is why you’re seeing outrage about it from mainstream news desks and Gamergaters, I guess.

This is one of my favorite viral “science” studies — the kind in which no science is done and it is actually just a PR push from a shady marketing firm. In this case the firm in question is GraphicSprings, and as you might guess from their name they make infographics. If you don’t have a website you might not know this yet but infographic companies are the fucking worst. Half the spam I get is from assholes like this begging me to write a blog post about the graphic they made about the top ten movie farts of all time. Get bent.

So these assholes made a survey in which they asked 4,000 people to choose from a list of options to “rebrand” Santa. Right off the bat you may see an issue here: this isn’t a bunch of people coming up with an idea that Santa should be female or gender neutral and then launching a campaign to make it happen. Like, there’s no Society for the Feminization of Santa, campaigning for everyone to leave cookies out made with soy butter in the hopes of making Santa a soy boy.

No, this is 4,000 people (who, by the way, we have no information on aside from 18-64 and in the US and UK, but no idea how they were chosen and whether they represent a diverse group of people) who were told that they get to completely makeover Santa from scratch and pick from various options to update him. One option was gender, and the vast majority of people (72.2%) said they’d keep Santa male. 10.6% (108 total people) thought a lady Santa would be fun, and

17% would make Santa gender neutral. Though again because this is not real science, we have no idea exactly what they were asked and what they thought that meant — for all we know, those 174 people just didn’t want Santa’s dick to be a topic of conversation.

For the record, more people wanted Santa to have a hoverboard than for Santa to be a woman.

And the more interesting stat from this survey is that even though 10.6% of people wanted to make Santa a woman, only 3.7% wanted to shave her beard. So I guess even if we do make Santa a woman she’s still going to look pretty much the same.

Yeah, it’s all bullshit. It was a badly designed survey for everything except for its true purpose: to get people talking about this shitty infographic designer. And it worked! Here I am talking about it. Don’t anyone else fall for it, please.

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor. Twitter @rebeccawatson Mastodon mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson Instagram @actuallyrebeccawatson TikTok @actuallyrebeccawatson YouTube @rebeccawatson BlueSky @rebeccawatson.bsky.social

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One Comment

  1. I got it! Female for all things related to children, male for all things related to pawn shops. (That logo on pawn shops? That’s St. Nicholas’ three sacks.)

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