Survey Claims Women View Anime, Comic Books, And ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Among “The Least Attractive Male Hobbies” – But It’s Complete Bullsh*t
Over the last few days, readers who happen to peruse any given social media platform may have caught wind of a specific survey whose results reinforce the absolutely tired stereotype that straight women look down upon any and all potential romantic partners who participate in ‘nerdy’ hobbies like comic books, anime, or even Magic: The Gathering.
However, as happens to be the case with most headlines that attempt to shame people for simply engaging with a harmless hobby that has been deemed ‘childish’ or ‘immature’ by insecure and self-hating older generations, said study is 100% full of crap.
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: “Ah, People can come up with statistics to prove anything.“
Despite its coming to popular attention thanks to its sharing by the anime news-centric Twitter account Anime Updates (@animeupdates_), the survey in question is actually about a year old, having been conducted in Summer 2024 by the website DatePsychology – which rather than any sort of accredited research or news outlet is actually a now-seemingly defunct, independent blog run solely by one individual, a purported Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience graduate student at an unidentified university known only by his first name of ‘Alexander’.
In seeking to collect the relevant data, Alexnader divided respondents along male-female gender lines and presented each of them with “a forced-choice survey of 74 male hobbies”, with women being invited “to choose if that hobby was ‘unattractive’ for a man to do or ‘attractive’ for a man to do” and men conversely “asked to indicate if they thought women believed a given hobby was unattractive.”
To this end, the survey found that there was a “strong congruence in the bottom choices for men and women,” with such ‘unpopular hobbies’ including (from most favorably looked upon to least) ‘Comic Books’, ‘Magic: The Gathering‘, and ‘Anime’, with ‘Porn’, ‘Gambling’, and engagement with ‘Manosphere’ content coming in at the very bottom.
“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,” argued Alexander.
Following a further breakdown of the positive outlook women had towards other activities like ‘Archery’, ‘Blacksmithing’, and ‘Playing An Instrument’, Alexander ultimately concluded that “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.”
“One thing to keep in mind is that some hobbies will put you into contact with women in ways that others will not,” the grad student advised his male readers in conclusion to his report. “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.”
On its face, the claim that over 65% of women are all of a sudden romantically put off by men engaging in ‘nerdy’ hobbies is understandably quite worrying, particularly as it would mean that the recent gains made in mainstream understanding towards things like video games or comic books were nothing more than a marketing narrative pushed by corporations at the expense of the ever-worsening worldwide ‘relationship recession‘.
Yet, while Alexander’s findings make for good pull quotes and headlines, these bombastic excerpts do not tell the full story of his ‘research’.
Aside from how such a ‘fact’ would run counter to the endless real-world examples of both women who have fallen in love with a man of his genuine passion for his nerd interests and who partake in such hobbies themselves, Alexander fails to offer any specific clarification towards his methodology until the very last paragraph of his write-up.
It is therein that he buries the rather important detail that, rather than any sort of majority population or actual random sampling, his information was instead gleamed from “a convenience sample of 814 participants (48% female)” which “skew[ed] 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)”.
This means that rather than a truly random representation of any majority population (such as ‘women in the US’, ‘women in the West’, or ‘women in general’), Alexander’s claims were based on the responses of 391 white women from within DatePsychology’s orbit, their demographics ostensibly including the site’s readers, Patreon subscribers, and people inside his own immediate social circles.
Thus, instead of ‘65% of the world’s 49.7 billion women, a total of 32.3 billion individuals per the most recent data provided by the World Bank Group, finding it unattractive when men engage in nerd hobbies’, it’s far more accurate to say that this sentiment is only held by 254 of DatePsychology’s female readers.
In other words, to all the men out there who are currently experiencing self-doubt regarding the dating scene because of years and years of such stereotypical ‘ew nerd’ bullsh*t being forced upon the public consciousness, fear not: Not only are they full of it, but confidence in one’s love of nerdy hobbies will inherently translate to confidence in oneself, and that’s what women really want to see.
