I had to think long and hard on how I feel about this topic before I committed to write My Take on it. The origin post’s headline read: “Men are picking up ‘attraction hobbies’ to get dates. Does it work?” It kind of rubbed me the wrong way…
This whole approach to meeting women brought to mind the zany 1950s masterwork of American satire,
Remember, it was satire
Mead dove deep into the gender stereotypes of his day to come up with a mock guide for men trying to get dates.
As Amazon relates, it covers, in neatly compartmentalized sections, “How to be irresistible in short pants – How to break-up – How to avoid marriage until marriage can help you – How to select the first wife – How to keep your wife in love with you – How to handle money in marriage – How to select the second wife…”
But that was intended as satire. Not like the new(-stalgic?) notion of adopting certain ‘hobbies’ in an attempt to attract members of the opposite sex.
But the recent USA Today story I saw suggests a growing number of men are picking up hobbies they think will be attractive to women. The implication is, these guys wouldn’t choose these pastimes if they weren’t trying to get dates. The phenomenon is called performative dating.
Numbers don’t lie
A survey commissioned by language platform Babel and executed by Talker Research found 22 per-cent of ‘young men’ asked said they’ve engaged in performative dating, about double the rate of women.
‘Attraction hobbies’ can be anything: tennis, creative writing, pottery. Whatever a guy thinks will make him seem more appealing. Ideally, it’s something the women he’s targeting will also want to take part in. Cooking gets special mention, because it’s not only prime performative material but also invites ‘audience participation’.
Videos of so-called ‘performative men’ have recently gone viral on TikTok. Specifically, “guys who go to great (and often cringe-worthy) lengths to signal how sensitive, intellectual and emotionally at-tuned they are − without actually being any of those things,” USA Today contributor Charles Trepany reports.
And guys trying to make women think they’re adept cooks make up an unequal proportion of the videos’ ‘stars’.
Not going away…
Turns out, the trend also reveals something deeper about the misguided strategies men – in fact, all people – use to attract partners, Trepany notes. “Therapist Erik Anderson previously told USA TODAY: That there will always be a subset of people willing to engage in any behavior, no matter how ridic-ulous or inauthentic to them, so long as they think it will make them more attractive.”
My take
Phoney will always betray itself. Especially in situations where somebody is trying to be someone they really aren’t.
But Anderson points out there are good reasons folks ‘perform’ for others: “One of the ideas here is this wouldn’t be behavior that we would see in humans if it wasn’t something that had worked over our ancestral history.”
“There’s nothing inherently terrible at wanting to conform to what you think women would like in a man. But some of these guys really go [too] far,” he adds.
As I suspected all along, Anderson suggests that these ‘performers’ will sooner or later become objects of ridicule. Their response will be to either ‘drop the act or pick up a new one’.
And performative dating could easily having the opposite effect to that which a guy planned.
“If it becomes something that’s socially lampooned − basically, if something’s treated as extremely socially undesirable − suddenly you become an outgroup to a lot of people,” Anderson reminds us.
This whole issue just reinforces what my Mother told me when I was feeling crappy about not being asked out. “Just be yourself!” she insisted. “And when the right guy comes along, he’ll ask you out…”
It works the other way, too, guys!
~ Maggie J.