A recent chart went viral on social media purporting to show the least attractive hobbies to women. It turned out that it had no source; potentially it was made up by a birdwatching group on Instagram as a meme. No shortage of polls have been done like this in the past. As such, we decided to collect a sample of men and women for our contribution.
We created a forced-choice survey of 74 male hobbies. Women could choose if that hobby was “unattractive” for a man to do or “attractive” for a man to do. Male respondents, on the other hand, were asked to indicate if they thought women believed a given hobby was unattractive. As such, we can compare what women find attractive (or unattractive) with what men think women find attractive (or unattractive).
No long article for this one — we will just share the results with a few comments.
When reading this, keep in mind that the only two options were “unattractive” and “attractive.”
The Most Attractive Male Hobbies
The Most Attractive Hobbies to Women
What Hobbies Men Think Women Find Most Attractive
Glancing at these two charts, we can see a good amount of congruence in what men and women both selected as the most attractive hobbies to women. Men were pretty good at picking what women liked. Out of the 74 potential hobbies, men and women tended to pick the same ones for the top 15 list. Men tended to underestimate the attractiveness of some hobbies to women (a trend across our data: men tended to be harder in assessments of attractiveness than women were).
In this data, “PlayingInstrument” was playing a musical instrument and “ForeignLanguages” was learning foreign languages.
Basically, women want a bilingual traveling blacksmith who does archery, gardens, and reads — or some combination like that.
The Least Attractive Male Hobbies
The Least Attractive Hobbies To Women
What Hobbies Men Think Women Find Least Attractive
We also see strong congruence in the bottom choices for men and women. The bottom male hobby to women, “manosphere,” was watching manosphere videos. “ComicBooks” was collecting comic books, “ArguingOnline” was arguing with people on social media, and “Funko” was collecting Funko figurines. The biggest difference that stood out was that men overestimated how attractive clubbing was to women.
A good way to understand the most unattractive hobbies to women: they look mostly like a collection of vices, niche nerd hobbies, and antisocial behavior.
Attractive Hobbies by Class or Category
We took the 74 hobbies listed and grouped them into categories. This section contains ratings from women only.
Nerd Hobbies
We grouped nerd hobbies by unattractive ratings, given that most received a majority of negative ratings. An exception was reading — this was a highly attractive male hobby to most women. Building models did pretty well, too.
In the meme chart that inspired this survey, video games was placed as the most unattractive hobby to women. It didn’t make the top list for unattractive hobbies in our survey. 61.8% of women said video games were unattractive while 48.2% rated video games as an attractive male hobby.
Athletic Hobbies
Athletic hobbies tend to do pretty well, with swimming topping the list. Golf is rated the lowest; it is the only athletic hobby where a slight majority of women found it to be unattractive. Boxing and MMA may be lower than you would expect. This is not entirely surprising from an evolutionary point of view, however. Fighting sports may be associated with lower status or may represent a trade-off between an ability to protect and an ability to harm.
Artistic Hobbies
Artistic hobbies also did well. Only cosplay, which was also included in our nerd hobby category, saw a majority of women rate it as unattractive. Theater acting and building models also got rated lower than the rest of the hobbies.
Vice Hobbies
Hobbies that we grouped into a category of “vices” did especially poorly with women. Here we report the percentage of “unattractive” ratings. Unfortunately, many of these hobbies are also quite popular. You can imagine a substance-using, video-game playing porn user who trolls people online and watches manosphere videos. In many individuals, the least attractive hobbies cluster together.
Cultural Hobbies
Cultural hobbies did well — even following politics didn’t do terribly. Birdwatching was perceived as a much more attractive hobby than the original meme graph depicted it.
Survival Hobbies
We grouped hobbies into what could be called practical survival skills. The most survival-y of these, hunting, fishing, and shooting, were actually rated the lowest. This is not surprising, given that these carry some political and cultural baggage. We tend to get a pretty even 50/50 split for political ideology in our samples, so about half of the sample finding hobbies that are right-coded as attractive or unattractive may just reflect culture and politics. Cooking, however, is attractive to almost all women.
Birdwatching made it onto this list because it’s a naturalist skill and you have to see a bird to kill and eat it.
Martial Hobbies
The martial hobbies of fencing, riding, and archery did better than boxing/MMA and shooting. Fencing, riding, and archery may be associated with higher social class than boxing and shooting, despite being less practical modern martial skills.
Consumer Hobbies
We coded hobbies as consumption-based; basically what was passive entertainment. Movies, seeing plays/musicals, going to concerts, and reading did well. The rest did poorly.
Misc Hobbies
“Mechanics” in our dataset was working on cars as a hobby: this got rated pretty well. Women were less impressed by magic tricks, bowling, and riding motorcycles.
Sex Differences in Perceptions of Male Hobbies As Attractive
The take-home from this chart is that women perceive many hobbies as more attractive than men think that women do. There are only two exceptions where men over-perceived women’s attraction to male hobbies: riding motorcycles and boxing/MMA.
There is a debate in evolutionary psychology over traits like behavioral aggression, dominance, and physical robustness: are these attractive to women (and sexually selected for) or were they selected for via male-male contest competitions (physical fights). What we see here may be men overestimating how attractive women find hobbies that are essentially attractive to men. Riding motorcycles and fighting are associated with a certain image that signals dominance and status in male intrasexual competition. Men may overperceive how attractive these are to women.
These more perceived “bad boy” hobbies may be more of a signal to other men whereas, although women do prefer a man who can defend them, they also desire a soft side. This may also reflect a desire for men who have hobbies that women can share with them.
The chart above shows the hobbies that men and women agreed upon most: men’s most accurate predictions of hobbies that women find attractive.
Discussion
The average difference between men and women’s assessments of what hobbies women find attractive was 12.06%. Overall, across 74 hobbies, men were pretty good at predicting what women found to be attractive and unattractive.
Given this, what hobbies should men pick? Well, they are ultimately your hobbies, so whatever you want to do. If you pick hobbies that you don’t like just because they are attractive to women you may not stick with them at all, particularly if they have a steep learning curve (e.g. woodworking or salsa dancing). You need to find hobbies that you enjoy.
That said, there are clusters of hobbies that women like and that women do not like.
In fact, there are a lot of hobbies that women seem to like. There are hobbies for introverts and extroverts. There are hobbies all across the board. Even hobbies that have mid-range ratings (50% or so) mean that you will be able to find a lot of people who share your interest.
Consistently across these results, women mostly don’t like hobbies that are vices and antisocial behaviors. Women do like hobbies that showcase physical and practical skills, humor, and intelligence. Entirely expected from an evolutionary perspective. Some hobbies are beneficial to you and others, while some hobbies are mostly cost-inflicting.
One thing to keep in mind is that some hobbies will put you into contact with women in ways that others will not. For example, video games, in addition to not being highly esteemed by women, also mean that you won’t be in live social groups with women. Dancing, on the other hand, is a hobby that will put you in contact with many women. You may want to consider the potential sex ratios when selecting hobbies, if a secondary goal is to meet opposite-sex friends or potential romantic partners.
Limitations
Our sample was a convenience sample of 814 participants (48% female). Consistently in the samples that we run we see a pretty even split for politics and feminist ideology, so we don’t expect much political ideological bias. However, our samples skew disproportionately toward women of high social status, high level of education (45% had a Master’s degree in the previous survey), and who are predominately White (> 90% in the last survey). Popular hobbies like “clubbing,” which was rated low in our sample, may be perceived as more attractive in other populations.
17 comments
Listen to what women do, not what they say.
Definitely. For someone in the field of evo psych, I am profoundly baffled that you would interpret women’s responses here as
“If I see a man doing this I get emotionally and physically excited”
As opposed to the rather obvious
“Based on the aesthetics and cultural practices of my tribe and desired status within it, these are what I want other people to see me as liking, and even what I would like to see myself as actually liking”
Good point..
I think, though, that simplest and most accurate way of understanding what they mean when they mark something as attractive is simply: “Yeah, i like that” / “Yeah, i like the sound of that” / “I believe I´d prefer that over this”
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Getting emotionally and physically excited from knowing someone´s hobby? No, I don´t think so… Definitely not if that someone is but an abstraction!
Basing it all off of her (probably) unconscious cultural programming and perceived social status games? God help us!
Altough “What i would like to see myself as liking” makes sense, still – she´s a person, she most likely does actually like certain things and has personal preferences. She´s a real person, remember.
Actually I recall RobKHenderson reported on a study relevant to MMA: apparently there was no difference in a man’s number of sexual partners over a period of time as a function of women’s attractiveness ratings, while there was a positive relationship between the number of sexual partners and the rating other men gave on the formidability of that man as an opponent in a potential fight.
“61.8% of women said video games were unattractive while 48.2% rated video games as an attractive male hobby.”
Seems like a goof – I imagine only 38.2% of women were hot for gamers?
If you don’t understand why “punching and kicking other humans” and “firing guns” might be less attractive “martial” hobbies to women, it’s because you don’t want to understand it.
Part of evolutionary psychology is surviving in the first place.
“Unattractive hobbies tend to cluster together” where in the data do you see that?
Missing some normal responses as can be dancing and surfing… looks like a random statistic