I’m sure you know other people spending thousands on their gear. Anyhow, many of these hobbies can be done relatively cheaply, but I imagine the woman picturing the man doing it as someone who wasn’t going the ultra-cheap route.
Nice picture btw. How far do you have to travel to get somewhere where there’s a low enough level of light pollution that you can take a picture like that?
A lot of these hobbies are wealth-adjacent.
Playing an instrument: a good instrument isn’t cheap, and music lessons can be pretty expensive.
Woodworking requires a lot of fairly expensive tools, and a space to do it. You can’t really have woodworking as a hobby if you live in a small studio apartment. You basically need a house, either one with a basement, a shed or a garage.
Gardening: requires a garden, something you’re unlikely to have unless you have your own house.
Photography: I don’t know anybody who is into photography who hasn’t sunk a lot of money into the hobby. There’s the cameras, the lenses, and even the software these days.
Astronomy: see above.
Hiking: not expensive on its own, but in North America it means being able to drive to a wilderness spot outside the city, so you pretty much require your own car.
Archery and blacksmithing: again, requires a specialized space
Now, I know that there are cheap options for a lot of these. A musician could be someone drumming on an upside-down pail. Someone who only has access to a hotplate could still experiment with food. Woodworking could be just whittling sticks found in the park. Gardening could just be tending to a small houseplant. But, are these the version of the hobbies the women are picturing when they’re imagining a potential mate doing the activity? Probably not.
Meanwhile, a lot of the stuff at the bottom of the list are very cheap hobbies. Like being influenced by the “Manosphere” just requires access to social media, same with porn and “arguing online”.
Honestly, it looks to me like if you sorted the list by “dollars per hour someone invested in that hobby is likely to spend” you’d get many of the same things at the top and many of the same ones at the bottom. Some of the few exceptions are writing and reading, which can be pretty cheap hobbies, but are still apparently very attractive.
Some masculine traits in women are accepted to some extent. But, look at the backlash against that Algerian boxer.
For someone who really cares about fitting in with society, the pressure to conform can be pretty brutal. There’s probably more freedom to be who you want to be now than ever before. In the past not only gender roles, but every role in society was extremely rigid. People didn’t even have the freedom to decide whether or not to wear a hat outside. The expectation was that everyone wore a hat, and if you didn’t you were a real oddball.
I strongly suspect that some of the people who think they’re trans are just people who have interests/passions/attitudes/personalities that don’t conform to their stereotypical gender roles.
Cool stuff, I live in a city. Not a huge city, but big enough that I only see the major stars at night. It would probably take me at least 45 minutes of driving to get somewhere dark enough to take a picture like yours (assuming I had all the equipment and skill to take that kind of picture at all).