Men Seek Women Who Eat Dead Cows
As promised, here’s the official Animal Person deconstruction of "Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye," by Allen Salkin in the Fashion & Style section of yesterday’s New York Times:
- The first woman mentioned was a vegetarian in her teens but by her 30s was eating meat. "By the time she placed the personal ad, she had come to realize that ordering steak on a first date had the potential to sate appetites not only of the stomach but of the heart." So the heart, of all organs, of a man finds the idea of cow slaughter satisfying. Interesting.
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.”
Having a moral compass that tells you that killing cows when you don’t need to is a "food issue?"
- Women are using the ordering of meat while on dates as part of their strategy to make them more appealing to men. Ordering a salad “seems wimpy, insipid, childish,” said Michelle Heller, 34, a copy editor at TV Guide. “I don’t want to be considered vapid and uninteresting." Ah, Michelle, where to begin . . . Salad is insipid? Childish? Michelle has one thing right: what you order says something about you. Where she goes wrong is that she isn’t ordering for herself, but to coax a man into finding her appealing. How insecure is she? And where she got the salad equals vapid equation I don’t know.
- Another vegetarian says “Being a vegetarian puts you at a disadvantage. You’re in the most basic category of finicky." I was sort of thinking the most basic category of healthy or ethical. Apparently those are two components of human life that aren’t important for people looking for mates. And what could be worse, rather than wanting to date someone who is discriminating and thoughtful, today’s 20 and 30somethings want to date people who don’t care about silly things like their own health, the health of the planet, and a decent set of morals.
- The final example in the article starts out promising:
"Of course, there are always those rare women who order what they want and to heck with what a man might think."
Great! A woman who’s gonna order that dish that doesn’t include dead animals and not give it a moment’s thought. But then we discover that when she recently found herself attracted to a man, she wanted to order a burger but started to rethink her order because she "didn’t want to appear too much of a carnivore [which] might be off-putting." Which is it, girls? And I mean girls, as there’s an appalling lack of maturity in this bunch. (She ordered the burger and the guy was impressed, by the way.)
- The clincher is that the boys implied in this article are playing this ridiculous game, as well (after all, if they weren’t, the girls wouldn’t be). And the rules for the boys make as much sense as the rules for the girls. Sixty dollar burgers were created for men who want to impress women. Meanwhile, on the first date, "real men" should order the salad.
“When a guy sits down and eats something fatty and big, you wonder if they eat like that all the time,” said Brice Gaillard, a freelance design writer. “It crosses my mind they’ll probably die early.”
Does it cross the minds of the boys that the girls might die early given what they’re ordering?
This is insanity. What we need to remember is that this article is in the Fashion & Style section, and this is just a trend. Not a healthy one, not a promising one, not one to be proud of, but a trend nonetheless. I can only hope that some of those in a position to change this embarrassing trend (daters who have their own minds) decide to stick to their principles (or get some) rather than play the game. Remember, nearly a decade ago it was none other than yours truly who spent a year eating filet mignon in order to bolster my social life. I’m in a position, then, to tell you what happens. Playing the game doesn’t pay. Disrespecting your own ethics does have some short term benefit (if you are really good at denial, which I was), but it makes your life more difficult than you can imagine in the long run.
I really should do my own entry on this topic since it's so vast. I think there are several things going on here, that are getting lumped into one topic.
The first as you point out is the confusion of being vegetarian or vegan as an ethical lifestyle with just being picky. I don't not eat the steak because I'm so picky I can only eat plain lettuce, but because as much as I might like the taste I have an ethical objection to it.
The second consideration is that thing that happens every single time I as a vegan dine with meat eaters, they talk non-stop about my veganism and make excuses for themselves, even though I tend not to bring up veganism except in my order at the table, or saying what foods taste good. This is because being around somebody living their own ethics makes people intensely uncomfortable. People start to wonder if they should be vegetarian/vegan too, and often react defensively. This is of course not a good reason for a woman to order a steak, it's just an acknowledgment that sometimes our own food choices make others uncomfortable, though that's really their own problem. If you're meeting someone who's going to have to say "what about your shoes? And do you shop at walmart?" each time you sit down to dinner, better to know up front so you can cross them off the list.
The next thing is this strange phenomenon where sometimes women think they should pretend to be someone else when they meet men. This isn't a vegan or non-vegan issue, just a WTF. My own mother always used to tell me I shouldn't eat when I went out with a guy, but should only pick at my food or order a salad, so I wouldn't give the impression I ate a lot. So, in general, yes, I think women should order what they want and eat however much they want on a date. However, what they want should be vegan because they should also be compassionate and care about animals and the planet.
People also like people who reinforce their own bad habits. Smokers seek out smokers, drinkers seek out drinkers, and apparently the artery-clogging I-care-only-about-me crowd seeks other burger eaters?
I think there's this weird thing that happens where women think that somehow love is so difficult or hard to find that they need to compromise who they are on a basic level to "find a man." My mother was very opposed to my becoming a vegetarian and later a vegan. She said one day I'd meet a man and fall in love and he wouldn't be vegetarian so I'd give it up. She also kept saying that if I gained weight I'd never get married. Sometimes she just predicted the lack of a spouse on things I couldn't necessarily control like lack of basic attractiveness or an inherently bad personality… Anyway, the point was that I made peace with the idea that I might not get married, but also held onto this concept that I didn't want to marry someone who only wanted me if I compromised my values and became someone I wasn't. My situation was fairly extreme and forced me to confront some of this BS, but I've had a lot of very intelligent friends who still seem to think somehow they should be right for everyone. Or that if a guy doesn't like them because they're vegetarian, then that's something wrong with the guy, not with them and not with vegetarianism.
Although this works the other way too. Guys fall victim to silly thoughts they turn back on themselves as well. When my brother was single years ago he dated a woman a couple times and then she broke it off with him saying "I only date guys who make six figures." My brother actually got down about this and said "I need to make more money if I want to ever meet someone." Um, no, the only response to "you don't make enough for me" is "thank you for showing me what your values are early on, before I started caring about you too much." And that's the response to a guy who doesn't want to date a vegetarian: "thanks for showing me what you're really like."
I mean, imagine if you ended up married to someone that stupid and shallow!
I think it's absolutely shocking what lengths women will go to to feel loved and/or accepted by a man. Why would you want to be with a person – man or woman – who doesn't accept you for who you are and what you believe?!!
The fact that articles like this are published is – in my opinion – violence and oppression toward women. Women need to take back their power! We are amazing, intelligent, strong, compassionate creatures. When we listen to crap like that article, we lose our power, we become oppressed, just as animals are oppressed.
Right on. If eating a salad is "childish," what is eating animals so you can impress your date?
I agree this is a trend, but it's also part of a much larger and long-term psycho-pathological condition in which we make one pathetic rationale after another for killing and eating animals.
Colleen's comments strike a chord, also. "Eat what your man would have you eat" is repulsively sexist.