Feminism Friday entry.

Other feminist bloggers have written about this extremely silly article in the NY Times about a supposed trend of women eating red meat on dates to impress men. There’s no real way to measure these things, and since there’s nothing new about the various pressures that make even choosing dinner a gendered, sexualized act, I’m skeptical that there’s any such trend. But I do get why you’d want to write an article like this—first dates are situations where you’re trying to make pretty big judgments on people with very little information, so it’s not completely silly to suggest that people order dinner with an eye towards saying something about themselves to their date. (What my dinner choices always, always say: I am a vegetarian, a fact that gets over-analyzed to death.) That said, this article is a train wreck of stereotypes and plain weirdness, and it’s more evidence for the pile that Carol Adams wasn’t off-base to write about the sexual politics of meat.

Eating meat, particularly red meat, is gendered as masculine and being a vegetarian is gendered as feminine, I think it’s safe to say. With that in mind, this article reveals the sort of casual disdain for feminine things that puts women in such a bind, particularly when trying to fulfill our social role of being pleasing to men. You’re supposed to be feminine, of course, but you’re also supposed to embrace masculine things in a non-threatening way to be appealing. The movie There’s Something About Mary sent up these ridiculous expectations on women in an amusing way. Mary had the best of both worlds—rail-thin, beautiful, generous while also being big into sports and beer and man food.

Another example of the impossible expectations put on women to be “perfect”—the virgin/whore dichotomy. Or specifically the sense you get that you’re both supposed to be sexually modest and cautious (feminine) while still being able to be adventurous (masculine) to please your partner once you’re firmly placed in a committed relationship. This impossible dichotomy is on full display in the sexual “purity” movement—girls are told that they should not have sex and often not even kiss or hold hands until their wedding night, but the sex that happens within minutes/hours of having your first kiss ever is supposed to be amazing, because amateurs are just the absolute best at everything, apparently.

Unsurprisingly, the impossibility of expectation of being both a feminine woman with pleasingly masculine aspects shows up all over this article.

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 only reason to think that deliberately choosing steak on a dinner date to show off is unpretentious, down to earth, or unneurotic is that eating meat is considered a masculine behavior. In reality, I’d say that fussing over what you eat to impress dates is a good example of neurotic pretentiousness. I also like the virgin/whore dichotomy in food—you are both expected to eat like a pig while maintaining the feminine waistline of self-deprivation. It’s the exact same expectation as demanding that women be able to throw themselves heartily into sex after years of depriving themselves in the name of not being slutty. And of course her last statement echoes another impossible standard—you’re supposed to look pulled together and feminine, which is time-consuming and expensive, all while making sure that you come across as low maintenance, so your man isn’t ruffled by having to know about all the work you do to be pleasingly feminine. (Lynn Peril documents some of the lengths women were told to go to in the past in order to maintain the illusion of effortless beauty in her book Pink Think—I remember one advice book where women were told to get up before their husbands so they could sneakily apply make-up undetected, so that he never saw you without it or saw you applying it.)

The barely concealed throb of fear and loathing of the feminine continues.

But others, especially those who are thin, say ordering a salad displays an unappealing mousiness.

“It seems wimpy, insipid, childish,” said Michelle Heller, 34, a copy editor at TV Guide. “I don’t want to be considered vapid and uninteresting.”

There is nothing wimpy, insipid, vapid or uninteresting about salad. And since children tend to prefer the hamburgers to the greens, I’d say salads are more adult than meat. But salads are coded as girl food, and the stereotype that she’s running from is that women themselves are wimpy, insipid, childish, vapid, and uninteresting. But certainly, I understand the urge. Meat-eating seems like a good way to be pleasingly masculine without being threateningly masculine.

In fact, red meat on a date has become such an effective statement of self-acceptance that even a vegetarian like Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Random House, sometimes longs to order a burger.

“Being a vegetarian puts you at a disadvantage,” Ms. Crosley said. “You’re in the most basic category of finicky. Even women who order chicken, it isn’t enough.” She said she has thought of ordering shots of Jägermeister, famous for its frat boy associations, to prove that she is “a guy’s girl.”

If you’re eating meat to prove something instead just because that’s what you want, that’s hardly a sign of self-acceptance. Same issue with the negative stereotype of vegetarianism as a sign of finickiness. While there are certainly picky vegetarians out there, I’ve found that being a vegetarian has challenged me to be more adventurous in my eating. Most food you encounter is meat-based still, so vegetarians have to do some digging around and experimenting to get some variety in their diets. I hate the idea that being a vegetarian is weak—again, only because it’s coded as feminine. Because in the real world, being a vegetarian often requires willpower.

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