)

I also posted this to Ask Lemmy, but I am interested in specifically other women’s perspectives as well.

I have a bunch of hobbies, which range from female dominated to a solid mix of participants. However, for a hobby that has a good number of both men and women involved, there seems to be a gap in the participation and achievement levels in a way that mostly aligns with gender. A friend of mine mentioned we would have to look at how men engage with hobbies.

Do you feel that the ways men and women engage with hobbies generally, but especially when they share the same hobby still differs?

  • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
    30·
    1 month ago

    I do many “masc-coded” hobbies. I was even a mod on reddit for one. It was an outdoor hobby that could take a person far from rapid response range so my perspective on safety was quite different than my fellow mods who were men. That’s actually one of the reasons they invited me to join the mod team.

    E.g., someone posted about a missing person and asked if anyone had details, to DM them. I locked the post and pinned a mod message that any details need to go to law enforcement and not reddit users. It escaped my peers that while the request could be legitimate, it could also be an abuser looking for their victim trying to evade them. Minds blown. They never even considered it while it was glaringly obvious to me.

    Unfortunately, with the reddit changes, that sub turned bad really quickly. Take the “man or bear” meme where there is no winning answer for a woman and that’s what the sub became. Concerns over womens’ safety? They should just stay home. Woman got attacked in the backcountry? Her fault, she should have had a gun or a man with a gun to protect her, or better yet just stayed home.

    On trail I very rarely run into IRL men with that sort of unhealthy view. Most are fine, even keen to see women enjoying hobbies in common. But that takes us right back to the “not all men” thing where yes, not all men but you can’t tell by looking at a man which bucket he belongs to.

    Beyond that, I look at hobbies often from a lens of skill acquisition. I don’t know that’s a men/women gendered thing so much as a process engineer/optimization/continuous learning thing.