I’m like you: most of my life revolves around my job and my husband. My main hobby is probably reading; I usually read a book or more a week, sometimes two or three. Aside from that, I blog and read design blogs; cook, often very elaborately; and do yoga. Sometimes I jog, though it’s been too icy and I’ve been getting lazy. Sometimes I craft–I just sanded, painted, and reupholstered a chair from a flea market last month. I watch a lot of movies, including “arty” and international films, and my husband and I critique them together. I play scrabble online (and in person sometimes). I also love to travel and spend a fair amount of time researching different destinations and hanging out on travel forums, even when I’m not actually headed anywhere. I enjoy going out for lunch or dinner with friends and colleagues, and I’ve been doing so about 2-3 times a week lately.

Still, I disagree with jigg’s hypothesis overall. I think that there’s no gender difference in the number of “hobbies,” only male prejudice as to what a “real” hobby is. (For every vapid and stereotypical woman who’s only interested in shopping and beauty, there’s a boneheaded stereotypical man who’s only interested in sports and sex. Yet shopping is dismissed, and following sports isn’t.) Second, I don’t think people with hobbies are more interesting. I think intelligent people with a variety of interests are interesting. For example, someone interested in politics, media, or culture wouldn’t qualify as a person with “hobbies,” since they are not “doing” anything other than reading and thinking, but those people are often able to have some of the most interesting and stimulating conversations…. assuming, of course, that they are intelligent enough to actually analyze and discuss the ideas, rather than simply spout back the shallow and contradictory rhetoric that’s so common in our culture. (Pseudo-intellectualism drives me crazy.)

A hobby, on the other hand, does not necessarily make someone interesting. I doubt many people would be interested in hearing me talk about a “hobby” such as cooking or reupholstering a chair, unless they were also fond of such pursuits. Likewise, few people would be interested in hearing me talk at length about a book unless they’ve also read the same book. “Hobbies” may make someone less clingy, but only because the person is busy. I think any busy person–whether the time is occupied by work or activities or friends–has less time and therefore less opportunity to be clingy. I also think that men are as likely as women to be clingy; it just manifests in different ways. (With men, I think it’s more often expressed in controlling and jealous behavior, which I’d argue is worse.)

Finally, I thought “expertise” was far too strong of a term for jigg to use in relation to a hobby. A person might develop a certain level of skill, but rarely would it qualify as true expertise. We are too quick to judge someone an expert in our society, something that I think comes from a shallow understanding of what it is to really *know* something. For example, although I know much about linguistics, the origins of language and words, and language acquisition–something I have studied passionately as an English teacher, as a graduate student, and as a true word nerd–but I would not call myself an expert in any sense. I probably know more about these issues than the vast majority of the population, and I could talk about them for some time and in some depth, but the term “expert” rightfully belongs to someone like Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics. Similarly, I am a foodie and a good cook, but I am still not an “expert,” a title reserved for someone with an extraordinary skill and knowledge level, such as Charlie Trotter.