Okay, is anybody actually falling for this? Let me know.

What I’m talking about is a graph that started trending on X, which shows a bar graph of what is supposedly the most unattractive hobbies for men, “according to women”. The chart is as follows:

I ignored it at first glance, but seeing as people kept giving it attention, I’ve decided to take it behind the shed. Spoiler alert, it’s coming back with some teeth missing.

First of all, Online Trolling is listed among the hobbies. That should be a powerful indicator of what’s going on, here. Hopefully, I don’t have to spell this out. Okay, I’ll do it anyway, because no reader left behind.

It’s bullshit. Someone came up with this graph just to mess with people. And it worked.

But it’s not the first indicator that someone is messing with you. That would be the fact that there’s no citations. And if there’s no citations, this means that there’s no study, no survey, no polling, or anything of the sort. If someone wanted their study to be at all respectable, there would be a citation, so that a person could look into the methodology to ascertain that the data has any value. There’s no citation, so there’s nothing of value.

Instead, every indication is that someone just pulled all this information straight out of their ass, and posted it on social media knowing that it would push some buttons.

Notice something else about the data? Conveniently, every data point on the bar graph decrements by five. Sure, it’s possible that if you survey thousands of people, it’s possible for the data points, when arranged in the form of a bar graph, would form a neat decrementation by fives. But it would be strongly unlikely.

Having said all that, the point that really pushes people’s buttons is the one about playing video games. I call BS, because women I’ve met play video games. In fact, the last woman I was with played video games. She had a big stack of them. But she hid them from me, even though she didn’t have to, and I ended up finding them accidentally.

Look, I remember a time when video games were the pastime of hobbyists who frequented Radio Shack. Back then, I would’ve understood if someone regarded them as some nerd hobby. But a lot has changed since then, and now it’s something that pretty much everybody does. It’s been decades since it’s been regarded as a nerd hobby, and if anyone today said that they didn’t play them, I wouldn’t believe them.

People need to stop falling for this stuff.