Item — HN Reader

I like the idea, on principle, any attempt to build community should be supported.

I'm may not be the target audience if this is recently post-college, but the thing that strikes me is these activities feel a bit performatively male.

I guess my hot-take is there are certain things that people genuinely love (e.g. improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing) perception be damned, and there are certain things that people do because they are socially acceptable stereotypes for males: drink craft beer, whiskey, poker, grilling, sports? And that it's about 20x easier to make real friends from the former than the latter.

My experience has always been if somebody says "Come over for poker night," it's gonna be much more awkward than if somebody says "Come over because I'm gonna play video games on the couch and smoke a joint and it'd be fun to have somebody to chat with while I do that." [I'd be curious to hear where other people fall on that topic]

Anyways, not to discourage your current tack, nor even say you should do a blunts and video-games event, but I just think some of the activities on the website seem branded to a very narrow type of guy (business majors? for lack of a better stereotype)

2 comments

I assure you that people really do love these things. The idea that men truly love video games but are actually just experiencing shared psychosis when playing or watching sports is wild to me.

No playing sports for sure is fun and normally authentic behavior. Especially if it's not a particularly "cool" sport (e.g. pickleball). Though of course you definitely do find those people who make "Playing a sport" their personality and spend a ton of money on all the clothes and equipment and never seem to actually be out there doing it, especially if it's a "status" sport like polo/golf.

I don't mean to present this as entirely black-and-white. But also if you think that the interest in poker in college-aged-boys spiking after Casino Royale is a coincidence I think you're kidding yourself.

Maybe I am kidding myself. But I think that these are all things that you just don’t like.

> I guess my hot-take is there are certain things that people genuinely love (e.g. improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing) perception be damned, and there are certain things that people do because they are socially acceptable stereotypes for males: drink craft beer, whiskey, poker, grilling, sports? And that it's about 20x easier to make real friends from the former than the latter.

Brah that's just your experience. The activities that you described as `socially acceptable stereotypes for males` haven't been popular for longer than any ancestor you've spoken to has been alive as a conspiracy theory.

Some people legitimately like these activities and have the same reaction to `improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing` as you do to the stereotypically male activities

> conspiracy theory

We all live in this interconnected thing called a "culture." Maybe you've heard of it. It affects what we all do it at all times, the clothes we wear, what we value, who we strive to be, and where we spend most of our money.

In fact, some people would even give up their lives if the cultural pressure told them to. I bet most people are so heavily subjected to the pressures of cultures that they wouldn't violate harmless cultural norms for $1,000 a day (e.g. crossdressing).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

Do you legitimately believe people only pretend to enjoy those activities because of peer pressure?