As a writer, I frequently lament the sample populations of studies and how woefully heteronormative they tend to be. One Tumblr user has successfully flipped those odds by polling Grindr users for his informal survey on Brexit, The Daily Dot reports. Sure, it's not a sex study, per se, but how often do we get an exclusively queer sample population on a sexually non-specific issue? And how often do we get exclusively or disproportionately straight sample populations on literally everything? Exactly.
Thanks to John Oliver's most recent episode of Last Week Tonight , the issues surrounding Britain's referendum vote on whether or not the United Kingdom should withdraw from the European Union are a bit clearer to those of us who live stateside. In fact, the pro-Brexit faction strikes a familiar, xenophobic chord with those of us enduring the current U.S. presidential election, even though the idea is dressed up in claims of "independence" and bootstrapism.
So a Scottish Tumblr user named Tom Court took to Grindr to try and parse out the gay community's feelings on the matter. He actually managed to put together some pretty impressive numbers — that is, "before Grindr moderators intervened," he says on his Tumblr.
Of the 327 people he messaged with the question "Do you believe the United Kingdom should withdraw from the European Union?", 151 users responded! Out of those responses, 108 of them had a definitive yes or no answer. About 81.5 percent believed that the United Kingdom should remain in the EU, and about 18.5 percent believed that they should withdraw.
The varieties of indirect answers ranged from "undecided" and "too bewildered to answer" to "miscellaneous evasion" and "too horny to engage politically."
Of course, the direct quotes were too hilarious not to share, so Court generously screencapped them for his Tumblr post on the informal survey.
Some folks gave impressively (and sexily!) engaged answers:
Others answered the question, but kept it light:
Then, there was the group who didn't lose sight of what they were on Grindr for in the first place:
And finally, there were users whose responses were somewhere on the spectrum of "weirded out" to "outraged":
Honestly, this is the second-most engaging piece of Brexit content this week.
Images: Fotolia; Courtesy of machotrouts/Tumblr (23)
