The Most And Least Attractive "Male" Hobbies

Post Reply New Topic

First thing I'd point out is that the "geeky" hobbies that got negative ratings are also associated with childish pursuits. Writing and reading, which would include the ever-geeky writing and reading of science fiction, got a very high rating of attractiveness. Having been in grad school, it was my experience that while even the ladies liked Marvel movies (movies getting a 77% attractiveness rating according to the article), it was perceived as different than actively collecting the print comic books themselves. They liked geeky stuff. Just not geeky "kids stuff".

I'd also point out that there's not a lot of "macho" hobbies at the top of the list, with things like dancing, cooking, painting, photography, and swimming easily overshadowing the attractiveness of hobbies like boxing/MMA, bodybuilding, or even blacksmithing. So while women may not necessarily want a (potentially immature) thundernerd, they also don't necessarily seem to want an uuberjock or a hyperchad, either, with swimming hiking and canoeing being the top rated athletic hobbies, which themselves are outranked by cooking, painting, reading, and gardening.

Lastly, as poorly as a small handful of "nerdy" hobbies rated, let's not ignore the data showing that those too were overshadowed by things like porn, gambling, drinking, smoking, arguing with people online, and manosphere garbage. Clubs also scored very low. Maybe those might be a bigger deal than the nerdy stuff. The article even states that the lowest rated hobbies can be summarized as a collection of niche nerd interests, vices, and antisocial behaviors. So maybe it's not just "the geeky stuff".

The article did point that all geeky hobbies rated low except reading and writing.

The hobby that caught my eye was blacksmithing; that’s usually a craft, not a hobby .

My point is that the general terms of reading and writing are functional tasks that most people do. One can be a writer simply necause one writes and may have never written a book. Reading as a hobby is even more vague. I read these sites and books. I read all the time when there are words I need to read, but I would not call my reading a hobby. I call it mors of a tool t gather information.
Some do love to go beyond that in specific areas such as my Dad (Who rarely read before he met my Mum as his family were Welsh) was always reading cowboy books as my Mum got him interested when he was in his teens. (My Mum could read and write from the age of two and a half and is an author. She loves words and thinks in words visually, so in her late teens to early 20's it was natrual for her to work in a library as she loved books... She has done many things since).

But what I am saying is that reading in itself is not really a hobby as one has to define it beyond that to be able to differentiate it from the majority of the population in any country who can read, and "If" one defines it as a hobby, one opens up a can of worms with the number one hobby on this planet by far would be breathing!
I could say that my hobby is "Seeing" and "Hearing" if one can define reading or writing as a hobby!
(Writing can be describing authors, but also can be used to describe all who can write. Term is far too vague).
I could say my hobby is "Watching things" and "Listening to things"... But unless one defines what it is I would like to listen to or to look at, the terms make no logical sense.

To define a hobby, one needs to be more specific before one can define it as a hobby.

It needs to be defined in such a way, that differentiates that one has gone beyond the stage of the ability to do it. I other words, one could be a carpenter by profession and be excellent at ones work, but not include carpentry as ones hobby, because unless one had a specific carpentry task one needed to do while not in work, one may not want to do carpentry for pleasure.
Yet another who would not neccessarily be skilled enoughto be employed as a carpenter could absolutely love the concept of working with wood, and though one would not be qualified, would list carpentry as a hobby because one loved doing it. One does not neccessarily have to be good at something to love the subject! (Thisis something I want to encourage people in whatever creative ways they love... One does not need to be good at art to love art. One meerly needs to enjoy it and let the rest follow as one develops ones skills and learns ones abailities and adaprts to the areas one prefers in the general undefined subject of "Art" which covers a huge variety of different specific areas where I would challenge anyone to be an expert in all areas of art! (I am probably a general expert in Railway modelling because most of my life has been devoted to it, BUT many specific areas I am an ammature in though I would know how to do the basics... In other words, if one examined my achievements in the hobby, in some areas one would say I am an expert. In other areas one would point to some other modeller who concentrates more in that area because their expertise is within that area. If we have a love for it and an overall love for the other aspects of the hobby we can declar ourselves under the broad term of railway modellers.
Yet if we worked in a model railway shop as a job and happened to be good at certain specific tasks and also broadly knowledgable as part of our job, but when we wen home we separated ourselves from our work and were not interested in the subject other than it being a means to earn us our money, then we can not claim we are railway modellers as we have no love for what we do.
Same as working in bicycle shops. While most employees who may be experts in their field (Or be learning in the trade as it takes a number of years to become a good bicycle mechanic even though one can be trained in a few weeks... One can't really call oneself a bicycle mechanic unless one has worked a few years into the job no matter what certificates one may have achieved...)... BUT one will find that most working in the profession as it is generally low paid, will be enthusiasts and call it a hobby because few enter a profession that is low paid unless they love their bikes! BUT there are a few and I am not questioning their personal abilities as I have met a lady on a training course (Was compulsary and the trainers were what I would not call experts by any means as their mechanical knowlwdge in setting up bikes was basic and I could tell, BUT they did know how to train staff how to set up bicycles in a safe way as they were looking for unsafe practices in order to correct them, as safety in setting up bicycles is vitally important as they are legally road going vehicles). But this lady from another store who had been employed on the tills found herself on the training course, and I was watching her learn. She was older than me so probably only had a decade and a bit left before she retired, but she just had the natrual ability to pick up the bicycle mechanical principles and apply them in a physical way. Though I could tell she had never tried it before, but she was a natural! I told her she needed to learn more and practice because I saw how easily she took to it and the results of her work on that bike she was training on were just about spot on! I asked her if she cycled or liked bikes and she did not ride them which came as a surprize to me! I told her she could do with riding bikes nowand then to give her the ability to hone in her mechanical skills, as most of us started through our childhood love of riding them and starting to learn how to fix them even before we entered the trade to find out more, and I encouraged her to take up the bicycle mechanical side of things (Along with test riding them to pick up on faults) as she was a natural! But would I call it a hobby for her? No! She didn't have an interest in that side of things!
On the other side of things I know of people who go deep into cycling, but I would not really let them work on my bikes and want to ride them! Someone I met about two decades ago when he kept coming back and fore into the store I worked in to look at the bikes and I got to know him and we have been in touch since (Am certain he is very much on the spectrum despite having the ability to natrually talk to strangers as if he had always known them, but he"doesn't believe me when I tell him he needs to be assessed. He has so many obvious traits!) But while I may look for a suitable part for a bike that fits and does the job it needs to do to get the bike fixed, and I will only really be bothered with part names if I need to order them, he will remember the exact codes of the parts that the bikes origionally came with... But if I look at his bikes (He goes buzzerk if a bike has the slightest scratch) as if I need to ride one, and look at one I would think is safe enough to ride, I would struggle to find one! He bought most of his bikes in the box and most have not been outnof the box. The ones that have been are like new. His house is full of bikes. Outside his house there are newly bought bikes having been carefully leaned up to avoid scratching them rusting away with growth going through them and he does not seem to think that is unusual. Before he had to give up cycling half a few years ago due to cataracts so he could no longer see, (He has een waiting six years on NHS waiting lists to have them done in the hope he can ride again and he is struggling in daily life but can get no help so he risks his life to travel the two miles to shops as he can't see vehicles to cross roads etc (As he goes out to get food, the NHS won't provide carers to do shopping for him.. Yet if he didn't go out he would starve. He is dead skinny as he is!)...
But his knowledge on paint colours and part numbers etc etc etc... When he could see he could not see in slightly darker areas but he could see a bike he had not seen before, I could drive him 50 or 100 miles away to a shop, he could buy some touch up paint through memorizing the colour, and I could drive back and it would be spot on! It often took me several tries of testing paints working in a bicycle shop which also sold a big range of paints intended for cars, to get the right colour! How he did that first time the exact shade half a day later after having seen the colour and get it spot on I don't know! Yet at dusk he would be using his hands to feel walls to get around! Amazed me how he could do it. (His Dad was killed as he was partially sighted or blind, and while doing his job as a road sweeper, he walked out in front of a car he didn't see and was killed. He has always had issues when it starts getting dark ever since I have known him. I never met his Dad as his Dad died when he was a teenager)).

Sorry. I am going off on tangents. For him bicycles are a hobby, but bicycle mechanics he gets by on but not really his thing! But the opposite of him.is that lady who has little interest in bicycles but has the natural ability if developed to be a great bicycle mechanic! To her it would not be a hobby.

Hope I make sense?

I think it’s a possibility. Maybe women who pursue STEM degrees are more likely to get involved in nerd culture than those who go into education, nursing, or social work. Of course, I didn’t pursue a STEM degree but find nerd hobbies attractive and engage in some of them myself. Being interested in something enough to have a hobby is usually attractive to me. Well, within reason. Hunting is a popular hobby among men where I live, but I find the idea of killing stuff for fun extremely unattractive. I don’t like guns unless they are in video games.
Yeah, I was just commenting on the US because it’s where I think the survey took place. I might’ve pursued a STEM degree if my science and math background prior to college wasn’t so poor.

Unrepresentative education levels aren’t the only limitation with the study, though.

The article pointed out some SPECIFIC nerd hobbies that ranked low. Specific (niche was the term they used) nerd hobbies that also carry a stigma of immaturity. There are hordes of unlisted geeky hobbies that weren't on the list (robotics, computer sciences, science fiction / fantasy), and a few that were, and ranked rather high, like astronomy. It seems like, you can be a science geek, or an intellectual geek, or an art geek, or a music geek - it's just the comic books and magic cards and funko dolls that aren't popular, from what I can tell.

The article also pointed out a list of "hobbies" worse than "geeky" kiddie past-times. Are we still just gonna ignore those? And are we also going to keep ignoring that "macho" hobbies also don't score great? Cooking and gardening are much more popular than shooting, bodybuilding, or MMA - more popular even than blacksmithing.

Woodworking is also a craft. And it ranks higher than blacksmithing. And a craft (or profession) can also be a hobby, cos things can be more than one thing. Crafting can be a hobby in and of itself, with no specificity as to what medium is employed. I personally work with wood, metal, plastics, and polymers - between welding, machining, carpentry, epoxy work, and 3d printing. I'm a welder and a mechanic, which are occupations, but I also do them for fun in my spare time, which makes them hobbies, too.

Anyways, in my personal experience, my more childish pursuits get overshadowed very quickly, by the fact that I can cook, sew, garden, sing, dance, build / fix a wide variety of things, including cars / engines, home electrical / plumbing, carpentry, welding and soldering, computers and simple electronics, and other various hobbies and skills I've picked up over the years.

The last point I'd make is, even though 75% of women polled found comic books unattractive, 25% of them DID find it attractive. Sooooo... Go find THOSE women. Like at a comic-con. I've known many women that did cosplay, or collected funko dolls, or played video games - just not in grad school, though still quite often in undergrad. If ya'll are so confident in these stats, and are willing to assume that the sample represents the whole in any meaningful way, then of the 8 billion people alive, and the 4 billion who are female, a billion of them statistically like comic books. Or, to put another way, you statistically have a 1 in 4 chance of finding someone who likes comic books.

Doesn't sound nearly as damning when you put it that way.

Just in my personal humble view I don't let these type of articles be a deciding factor in my hobbies based on "attractiveness". While it's useful information to consider I don't want to change who I am to fit a narrative. Don't intend this to sound negative either but it's just how I feel. I appreciate you sharing this nonetheless The Face of Boo as it's always interesting to see what these types of articles say Forging swords and shields would also be cool! I have a close friend who said he would be a weapon forger if he lived in earlier times

Last edited by Brian0787 on 05 Sep 2024, 6:08 pm, edited 3 times in total.

beating it

If two thirds of women don't like the playing video games as a hobby based on that article then one third dont care, I'm ok with that

Interesting data on special ed teachers broken down by gender.
Females - 6248
Males - 0

Damn...UD can cook? And dance ?

We have comic-con in the Melbourne convention centre. Sat there and observed hundreds of attractive cosplay girls in skimpy female cinema/anime outfits. For the few who are not there with friends or boyfriends, going up to up them when they are wearing something link this
[img]{redacted}[/img]

Is equivalent to hitting on girls sunbathing on the beach. Not sure its going to end well.

Last edited by Cornflake on 22 Sep 2024, 11:23 am, edited 1 time in total.: Unnecessary, highly sexualized AI-generated soft porn image removed

^ Many women don’t dress like that at comic-con. I certainly didn’t. It is often a bit easier to talk to people when it’s over a shared interest. It’s not like doing the cold approach on the street or at the mall.

Some men go into special education. Just not enough to make the top ten on the list I posted.

"The Special education teachers workforce in 2022 was 400,545 people (85.5% women and 14.5% men)"

https://datausa.io/profile/soc/special- ... is%20White.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 22 Sep 2024, 10:20 am, edited 2 times in total.

^ This is a typical « magically-enchanted » powerful female Full-Body Armor.

Yeah, pretty much.

In Lebanon (a decade+ old tho):

In my experience the women cosplaying like that often do want to talk, at least as much as anyone else you might encounter.

What they typically don't want is to be touched by strangers or have their tits stared at by weirdos who can't approach them but also can't divert their attention.