A few months ago Hummer started airing commercials in which a vegetarian standing in a grocery store checkout line with his veggies and tofu checks out the groceries of the man behind him. He looks at his tofu and then looks at the other guy’s huge slabs of blood-red meat.
Cut to the same vegetarian, now purchasing a gas-guzzling, monstrous Hummer big enough to plow through dense forests with ease. “Restore your manhood,” flashes the screen (Hummer later changed the tagline to “Restore the balance” in response to complaints).
Men and meat-eating are as synonymous as Bert and Ernie. Watch any advertisement for meat-filled fast food and chances are, it panders to the caveman mentality. But when McDonalds advertises its new “healthy” salads, it’s almost always women who are shown chowing down on lettuce.
Even NutriSystem has a special diet plan for men, with retired football stars reassuring guys they can eat pizzas, burgers and even beer. Women, on the other hand, can enjoy chocolate every day and gush about now becoming their husband’s trophy wives.
The relationship between men and meat hearkens back to the days of hunters and gatherers. Women dug tubers and collected seeds; men brought back red meat from large kills. And although tribes usually subsisted on the foods women collected as they were more abundant and safer to collect – no one ever got gored by a Mammoth picking grubs – meat was the celebrated center of the feast.
Which is why I’m surprised that this “intrinsic” need wasn’t spelled out more so in the NY Times article, “Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye.” Thanks to Cthulhu’s Cafeteria for the link.
Instead, the article panders to the age-old caution heeded to us by our mothers to “eat something at home alone before a date, and then in company order a light dinner to portray oneself as dainty and ladylike.” The article expresses surprise that women are now eating foods which are perceived to contain substance – namely, meat.
Of course, it couldn’t be because a woman might actually crave a side of cow’s ass. No, writer Allen Salkin (as if you couldn’t tell by the perjorative of “girls” in the title) presents it not as a case of hunger, but as a new dating “strategy.” Ahh, of course, all the better to land a man. Isn’t that the goal of every sad, single woman?
Said one woman on a first date:
Red meat sent a message that she was “unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic,” she said, “that I’m not obsessed with my weight even though I’m thin, and I don’t have any food issues.” She added, “In terms of the burgers, it said I’m a cheap date, low maintenance.”
The article goes on to reinforce this correlation - that ordering meat on a date is much more acceptable if you’re a thin woman – not once, but twice. The only “curvy” woman mentioned in the article serves to reinforce the reference that fat woman still order lettuce, thus suggesting that unlike her flesh-eating thin counterpart, fat women do have issues with food.
The author does finally skirt around the association of meat-eating as masculine, but once again, falls flat. He recounts the story of a vegetarian, who wishes she could order meat. Instead she’s thought of ordering shots of Jägermeister to prove that she is “a guy’s girl.”
“Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson,” Ms. Crosley, 28, said.
Newsflash to Ms. Crosley: Not every woman.
Sigh, it’s a good thing both the husband and I are vegetarian so we don’t have to play these reindeer games.
Now the brewing baron is making ordering easier for perplexed patrons with its new 
