Man Test was a U.K. TV show where celebrities, such as Werner Herzog and Steve Buscemi, were asked a series of questions about their private lives by a clinical psychologist and asked to rate their feelings on a range of topics on a scale of one to seven. The overall score would be used to determine whether a particular interviewee falls more into the "masculine" or "feminine" category. In 2000, Henry Rollins sat down to take the test, answering very direct queries about his childhood and adolescence, love life, attitudes about violence and intimacy, and other personal subjects, as well as drawing "a human figure," which was then analyzed. What results is a fascinating, revealing, at times poignant and at other time hilarious portrait of the former Black Flag frontman, who is remarkably candid over the course of the in-depth session.
"If I were a woman, I would want a man. I would want a man who would listen to me, not hit me, be smart, know about poetry and literature," he says at one point. "Not be like this guy with his knuckles scraping the ground, like some drooling Neanderthal.
"I'd want an articulate, sensitive man ... who could whoop that ass. I'm not interested in the pseudo-intellectual man who can quote Proust, who has soft hands, and when the heavy stuff comes down, he's gonna be like, 'But Plutonius said!'"
Word.
