I don’t think that follows at all. It could just be that men’s hobbies lent themselves more readily to spectators and mass media. Baseball and football get a lot more coverage than gardening or quilting. Women wanting to participate in sports doesn’t mean they have any understanding of men (or willingness to try to understand); it could just be that they want to try the activities that they saw on television while growing up. I also think there are people who were inspired to try cooking after seeing Julia Child, woodworking after seeing Norm Abram, or painting after seeing Bob Ross.
Good point.
And also: as men’s activities have been presented by the culture as more important, it wouldn’t be surprising if more women want to take up the men’s activities than men want to take up the women’s: not because one set is more intrinsically interesting than the other, but because more people of any gender are likely to want to do the things seen as important than are likely to want to do the things seen as unimportant.
[ETA: which things are seen as important has IMO very little to do with which things are important, though that can have something to do with how one defines “important”.]
Speaking as a devotee of knitting, sewing, and other forms of needlework in addition to cooking and baking (as well as woodwork and other “traditionally male” mechanical arts), I call buuuuuuullllllshit on this.
You’re not wrong about the fact that “traditional male activities” have typically allowed more physical exertion and autonomy, whereas most “traditional female activities” are affected by the greater restrictions on women’s daily lives. So in that sense, male activities might be thought to offer greater scope for “fun”.
But when it comes to creativity, skill, knowledge, practical value, and artistic fulfillment, traditionally “female” craft is every bit as good as its traditionally “male” counterpart.
Ultimately, female-coded activities are stigmatized as less “fun” or more “boring” or “trivial” or “worthless” etc. etc. etc. not because they’re intrinsically inferior, but because they’re associated with women. Patriarchal society is built around the fundamental principle that female stuff is inferior to male stuff.
Nope. As thorny_locust and others have said, it just means that male activities are regarded by patriarchal society as higher-value than female activities, and therefore more desirable.
Traditional gender norms, like traditional etiquette, are not ultimately about logical consistency or common sense: they’re about the use of arbitrary rules to reinforce societal conformity. (See also: the discrepancy in the perceived “masculinity” levels of professional soccer, where you collapse in dramatic agony if an opponent grazes your leg with his sock, and a premier danseur role in ballet, where you radiate grace and serenity while holding an entire human woman above your head in one hand and ignoring eye-watering pain in your ankles and tendons.)
So not buuuuuuuuuullllllshit then. I accept your retraction.
Do you really not see the significant difference between the sweeping generalization “are more fun” and the nuanced qualification “in one sense may be thought to offer greater scope for fun”, or were you just so excited about a perceived possible “gotcha” that you replied without really thinking about it?
I mean, I explicitly pointed out the equivalence of the two types of activity in aspects such as “creativity, skill, knowledge, practical value, and artistic fulfillment”, which are a huge part of what makes doing things “fun”.
I figured you replied without thinking about it and then realized I was right. To think what I said was meant to be independently considered an unqualified statement shows that to be the case. So, yes, some things are more nuanced than they may appear to be.
I accept your retraction.
Uh, what? I think your last sentence makes sense, but that has almost no bearing on how fun something is. Whether something is desirable or worthwhile rarely has anything to do making it more fun - rather, the converse is true, things that are fun are considered more desirable or worthwhile. Are you suggesting that more women are being drawn towards traditionally male activities because they are seen as more desirable activities to be doing, rather than that they just enjoy doing the activity?
Prestige may be one reason that people will choose to do something (whether it’s an occupation or recreation), but it’s mostly orthogonal to how fun it is to do. People find things such as playing Dungeons and Dragons fun even though they make you a social pariah (though a lot of “nerdy” activities are a lot more mainstream than they were in the past). People find things fun because they enjoy doing it for whatever reason, whether it’s for the challenge, physical pleasure, use of skills, aesthetics, camaraderie, competition, or it resulting in a pleasing outcome of some sort. Nobody thinks masturbation is something highly prized by society but tons of people find it fun. I will say that there is a small component of fun that is related to how prestigious something is (ie. some people find attracting attention/gaining accolades rewarding, so the more prestigious the activity is the more fun they may find it), but I would say that is hardly the driving factor for most activities that people find fun.
I am very skeptical of your position that how fun things are perceived to be is somehow based on whether they are coded as masculine or feminine activities. How fun something is to someone is mostly a matter of personal taste (take reading - some people find it fun while others find it boring). However, I do agree that many people will not even try an activity based on how the activity is coded and how that will affect other people’s perceptions of them. But I posit that this is in spite of how fun that activity might be to any individual person, not that it is actually any more or less fun.
So what I’m saying is that if a boy says that they find playing with dolls boring, it is very possible that they are saying that because they are afraid to admit they have fun playing with dolls (because of patriarchical societal pressure), but they might also just not enjoy playing with dolls. If you were able to observe kids playing in an environment where they aren’t judged you’d be able to find out what they actually find as fun.
EDIT: so I think TriPolar has a point that a lot of activities that perhaps didn’t see many girls or women participating in the past are actually fun for all sorts of people (including women), and that women were just prevented from partaking in them due to social pressure. I think the converse is also true - there are probably a lot of activities that are traditionally female-coded that a lot of men would have fun doing that they are just afraid to try. Society just hasn’t gotten to that point where men feel comfortable trying these feminine activities, or admitting that they have fun doing them. I do think it’s also possible that a lot of traditionally feminine activities simply ARE less enjoyable to a lot of people - as much as I appreciate the aesthetics of knitting I don’t enjoy it. I don’t think there’s such a thing as an objectively fun or unfun thing to do, but on a population level, there are going to be some things that lots of people have fun doing and some things that fewer people find fun. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of historically male-dominated activities are fun for more people than historically female-dominated activities - simply because I think men have been a lot less restrained about what they can do in society in the past.
Ok, We good now?
Distinction: That’s the chief reason that women are being drawn towards traditionally male activities (TMAs) more than men are being drawn towards traditionally female activities (TFAs).
The point is that whether you personally find an activity enjoyable is largely influenced, for human beings living in a society, by whether you’ve been socialized to think that that activity is desirable.
I am not at all denying that both male-coded and female-coded activities have a lot of intrinsically fun aspects, and that both men and women can enjoy doing them, and that there are lot of people among both men and women who do enjoy doing them. All that is quite true.
But people generally don’t enjoy being laughed at and despised. And the fact that society considers TFAs to be lower-status than TMAs means that men get laughed at and despised for showing interest in TFAs a lot more than women get laughed at and despised for showing interest in TMAs.
Well, as long as their enjoyment isn’t turned against them as a subject of mockery and disparagement. Plenty of little boys, for example, enjoyed playing with dolls or wearing pink, right up to the point where other children (and many adults, even in this day and age!) started laughing at them, because dolls and pink are “girly” and it’s contemptible for boys to like them.
Well, go ask Spoons why all the boys he knew considered it acceptable to find ice hockey fun, but not ice dancing. Is it just because all those boys, by a remarkable coincidence, happened to have the same personal tastes? Or is it because they were heavily socialized by gender norms that label ice hockey “manly” but ice dancing “girly”?
And why is it that men are “afraid” or “uncomfortable” about that admission? Because, as I said, society traditionally grades TFAs as inferior to TMAs, so it’s ludicrous or contemptible for men to like them.
I wonder if there’s any info we could look at, or even hypothetically look at. Like, consider the stuff of a Psych 101 experiment: make sure half of the participants are male, and make sure half of them get tasked with lying and half with telling the truth; and make sure half of the female participants get tasked likewise — and then have the participants watch the interviews, and see if women prove better at realizing what other women are up to, as well as better at realizing what men are up to?
I mean, sure, play with those details until you get a test you’d like; but I’d like to think that some test of that sort could get slapped together, and I’d hope that something in that line had already gotten designed by experts and tried repeatedly and written up in this or that journal…
Everyone knows that a Canadian small town can be divided into hockey players, skids, hicks and Christians. At least that’s what they say in Letterkenny (pop.5000).
More realistically, at that age there is a lot of emphasis on cliques, false divisions and mocking others. Sensible people outgrow this - or never bought into it. Gender expectations might exacerbate these things, but they often occur anyway. It’s not a sophisticated or nuanced age.
We were just ignoring the misogynistic troll.
Well, perhaps, but for every one at that extreme you have the traditional male activities of stamp collecting, train-spotting, bird-watching, angling…plus many other sedentary, “nerdy” hobbies.
If you want to insult someone, take it to the pit. If you think a post is trolling, report it. This is a formal warning, not just a mod note, that this is not an appropriate post for IMHO.
Tennis. Golf.
Almost certainly true. The female brain is more complete than the male brain, which is why we frequently think with our auxiliary head.
LPGA championship had 840k viewers in 2020. The PGA championship in 2020 had 5.15 million viewers.
For tennis the only grand slam event where the women draw better than the men is the US open and in 2018 the women’s championship drew 3.1 million compared to 2.07 for the men.
So we can add tennis to the list but certainly not golf. We’re up to 4 sports world wide at this point where they are compatible none of which have much of a crowd in high school (maybe curling is a Canadian high school sport).
Just like @MandaJo said if everyone from the high school was going to the play the boyfriend would be at the girlfriend’s play. When everyone from the high school is at the football game the girlfriend would be at the boyfriend’s game. When no one is going to the choral competition or the debate club championships then the boyfriend/girlfriend isn’t going either.
Nailed it. Men are socialized to be disinterested in women’s experiences. “Women’s Fiction” is an actual genre category. Like women’s experiences have to be shunted off into some separate category so men don’t accidentally read about them. We are not mainstream. We are other. Understanding us is optional. Meanwhile, women comprise the majority of readers and read fiction written predominantly by men.
Men aren’t any more simple than women. Women are not more complex unknowable creatures. Men are not less emotional than women. Men have been socialized only to express certain emotions. The real problem is that some men close down entire parts of themselves that society tells them should not exist. Women know this.
In my experience (mostly hanging out in mothering forums where women complain freely about men) it’s less “I just can’t understand him!” and more “Why isn’t he different?”
“We can dispense with stories centered on women’s emotional and sexual fulfillment …” Thanks for proving my point. Pissing all over the romance genre is a favorite pastime of men despite the fact they have no experience to judge. It’s not enough that it doesn’t interest you - you have to designate it as inferior. You’ll find a lot of shallow bullshit like any other genre, but there are thousands of romance novels out there tackling all sorts of complex character issues. I know because I actually read - and write - the stuff. Romance covers were created by men, by the way.
And fuck Ethan Frome. I was forced to read that stupid book over twenty years ago and I still remember how much I hate it.
This tidy little false equivalence is completely ignoring the rest of what MandaJo said on the subject of who shows up to support whose events in high school, along with another response to it:
So no, Oredigger77, you can’t handwave this discussion away by trying to distort it into a neat little artificial balance where “everyone goes to the play, everybody goes to the football game, nobody goes to the choir or debate club”.
The experiences that people are describing here reflect a distinct imbalance, where girls are expected to go watch their boyfriends play sports (and not just the main-event whole-school football games either), but boys are criticized for going to watch their girlfriends play. Moreover, girls are expected to go watch their boyfriends perform in other venues, where there’s likewise no equivalent expection that a boy would go to support his girlfriend’s performing.
In short, there’s a general trend of higher expectations on girls to support their boyfriends’ hobbies as attendees and spectators, and lower expectations on boys to support their girlfriends’ hobbies in the same way. As opposed to how you mischaracterized the situation, where all the differences can be explained away by the overall size and popularity of the different events irrespective of gender factors.
I mean, duh, folks, it’s sexism. Why do some people have such a hard time admitting that a lot of human social patterns are significantly shaped by sexism? Did you think that somehow they wouldn’t be? Sexism has existed for at least thousands of years but somehow it has no effect on the modern world except when people deliberately and consciously endorse sexist positions? That’s delusional.