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Defining the idea of a “hobby” is surprisingly hard For example you might think low risk is part of it but many hobbies are high risk, like sailing. More so than dangerous professions. Or low impact. Many of the biggest inventions came from hobbyist tinkering.
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There's an interesting argument that a lot of what we now see as hobbies were invented to divert and shape masculine passions as an antidote to a perceived crisis of masculinity (compare feminized cooking as domestic labor and masculinized hobby cooking)
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This is from Michael Kimmel's history of masculinity in the US - it's a smaller chunk than I remembered, part of his broader argument about all the work that had to be done to define "home" as a space that could also be masculine:
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Hmm interesting but not very salient I think. Since hobbies are primarily rooted in 19th century English-eccentrics culture. America didn’t get big in hobbies till much later.
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