Macho-Man: Gender and Diet Stereotypes in Mass Media
Double-bacon chili-cheese fries and beer pair exceptionally well with heterosexual male pastimes, like eating steak, or watching Saturday night NFL football on the big screen.
On the surface, this seems to be a celebrated Western truth, but this is also a damaging stereotype with roots in mainstream news media.
We know the above to be true given that many mainstream news outlets tell us that junk food and macho-man activities tend to go hand-in-hand (think Mario Batali beef rib-eye grilling recipes, the superbowl and Nacho Cheese Doritos, or, my personal favourite, American presidential candidate Ted Cruz cooking bacon with a machine gun).
We also know that the gendered stereotyping of food is probably true since machinegun-bacon and beer do not seem to go particularly well with a stereotypically-feminine (or homosexual) activity, like sewing, ballet, or fingernail painting.
A 2015 University of Manitoba and Yale University study only confirms this by showing that gendered stereotypes affect our food choices. In “Why Eating Like a Man Could Be Making You Fat”, Cheat Sheet columnist Megan Elliot references this study and others to reveal some troubling connections between gender stereotypes, cultural assumptions, and poor eating habits.
For me, upon reflection of the above, questions immediately arise:
Do so-called health foods like soybeans, bean burgers, and fruit and oatmeal really have anything in common with women or gay men, or are we being misled? Do seemingly effeminate people really hold the secrets to green (clean) eating? And is eating meat really a masculine activity, does it really fulfil our natural carnivorous desires for flesh?
Most important of all, perhaps: upon who can we lay blame for these cultural assumptions?
Let us try to blame our mainstream online media, at least in part, for so strictly categorizing our dietary options, for seeming to limit our dietary alternatives, for feminizing plant-based lifestyles, and for strengthening our apathy toward conventional animal agriculture.
Is this the future of journalism?
It is with these final four questions in mind (mostly) that I begin my research into clean eating and mainstream media’s role in misrepresenting all things green. The hierarchy and labeling of food, as well as the media’s role in it, must be exposed.
With veganism and vegetarianism on the rise, a rejuvenated clean-eating movement can be seen to be taking place (The National Post’s Sarah Boesveld spoke on the clean eating movement in May here), and so mainstream media’s representation of green-eating (as well as green farming) must evolve in order to squash stereotypes and better inform the public.
Boesveld’s piece is an example of good journalism since it challenges our dominant values by posing dietary questions and referencing credible research from the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences conference this past May at the University of Ottawa. Boesveld does not merely reinforce dominant attitudes about diet, and instead her article looks at the ethics of eating sans stereotyping.
When the well-documented health and environmental benefits of plant-based lifestyles are kept hidden by mainstream media, the range of dietary perspectives becomes constrained, and vegetarianism and veganism seem weird, always on the fringe of what matters, and thereby misrepresented—these, of course, are problems, but these are also reasons as to why my argument matters.
In “To Meat or Not to Meat?”, part of the University of Iowa’s forum on the rhetoric of food, Beth Jorgensen reveals the complexities behind on-line vegetarian/vegan community’s motivations to go meatless.
More importantly, what Jorgensen’s study implies is that people who are inclined to critically think beyond our cultural assumptions are looking to online alternative media for green eating rhetoric, and mainstream news media is not a particularly handy platform for independent thinkers when it comes to exploring our dietary choices.
Dominant ideas concerning meat consumption are reinforced, it seems, when meat eating is characterised as a masculine activity, and when eating green is seen as more feminine (think salads for lunch, and cucumber slices and lettuce for dinner) by the news outlets that we trust.
This very idea was explored in 2011 when Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan examined the stereotyping of veganism in UK national newspapers. In “Vegaphobia”, the pair reveal how “newspapers tend to discredit veganism through ridicule, or as being difficult or impossible to maintain in practice”—perhaps something only an overly health-conscious female would be interested in (p. 134).
Simply put, as the media enforces stereotypes that shape the way we think about our food and our gender, dominant narratives about food and gender identity are bolstered, and so traditional ideas go unchallenged. Our apathy to animal agriculture, clean-eating, and green lifestyles can also potentially be strengthened as a result.
In the 2015 study “Food Advertisement and Gender Stereotypes on Austrian Television”, Benjamin Missbach and Siegfried Allemann explore how modern media contributes to dietary stereotypes and to the construction of gender identity.
Even though Missbach and Allemann focus on television, the media’s troubling portrayal of “archetypal masculinity and femininity” remain an underlying theme that extends to mainstream news and online media (p. 60). In both cases, it is implied that ethical and fair journalism ought to take the place of traditional modes of gender and dietary communication.
More problematically, perhaps, is how it seems that both meat eating and the engendering of diets is rarely deemed a morally-problematic issue by mainstream news outlets—these are also reasons as to why my argument should be taken seriously.
In any event, I am thankful to find that The Huffington Post and The National Post, are critically examining our tendencies to rely on animal agriculture, and they are exposing the far-reaching consequences of subservience to the meat and dairy industries.
Prior to my research, it appeared that only underground, anti-disestablishment sectors of social media, those hidden compartments of our online galaxy, would ever voice concerns over the flesh-eating status quo.
Today, even though they are harshly criticized, green YouTube channels like Durianrider, as well as the vegan blog 30 Bananas a Day, both backed by animal activist Harley Johnstone, are challenging the traditional feminine status of veganism, and illuminating ethical, green eating. Both platforms accumulate millions of monthly views from all walks of life, and from all corners of the globe.
Harley is not your conventional macho-man, and a quick viewing of one of his many YouTube videos might lead you to believe that he perfectly fits the militant vegan stereotype that we are familiar with.
A close inspection of his blog, and a study of the ideologies that his brash attitude exemplifies, however, reveals that he is interested in spreading alternative ideas, the truth, that mainstream media tends to neglect.
It is clear to me now that the clean eating movement has roots in alternative online media, and that unconventional social media channels (particularly Harley’s YouTube channel) is the platform upon which our traditional dietary and gender ideologies are being destabilized and broken down.
These social media sites appear to be the vehicle by which green eating ideas and alternative gender identity theories are being promoted, exchanged, and consumed first, before being picked up and front-paged by more mainstream outlets, like The National Post and The Globe and Mail, in 2015.
To be well-informed about diet and gender requires a will to see beyond unpopular ideas and mainstream stereotyping.
References 30 Bananas A Day. (2015). Homepage. Retrieved Aug 2, 2015. From http://www.30bananasaday.com/
Batali, Mario. (2015, July 25). Rib eye will be the star of the cookout. TribLive. Retrieved Aug 2, 2015. From http://triblive.com/lifestyles/fooddrink/8732524-74/rib-eye-degrees#axzz3hh9WZuqA
Boesveld, Sarah.(2015, May 30). The new religion: How the emphasis on ‘clean eating’ has created a moral hierarchy for food. The National Post. Retrieved July 5, 2015. From http://news.nationalpost.com/life/food-drink/the-new-religion-how-the-emphasis-on-clean-eating-has-created-a-moral-hierarchy-for-food
Cole, M., & Morgan, K. (2011). Vegaphobia: derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in UK national newspapers. British Journal Of Sociology, 62(1), 134-153. doi:10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01348.x
Elliot, Megan. (2015, Aug 1). Why Eating Like a Man Could Be Making You Fat. Cheat Sheet. Retrieved July 31, 2015. From http://www.cheatsheet.com/health-fitness/why-eating-like-a-man-could-be-making-you-fat.html/?a=viewall
Jorgensen, B. (2015). To Meat or Not To Meat?. Poroi: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Rhetorical Analysis & Invention, 11(1), 1-19. doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1220
Kanner, Ellen. (2014, Aug 4). Meatless Monday – ‘Cowspiracy:’ The One Thing No One Talks About.The Huffington Post. Retrieved July 5, 2015. From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-kanner/meatless-monday-cowspirac_b_5634983.html
Kerr, Jolie. (2015, Jan 30). meet your ultimate superbowl snack: nacho cheese doritos. Deadspin. Retrieved Aug 4, 2015. From http://foodspin.deadspin.com/meet-your-ultimate-super-bowl-snack-nacho-cheese-dorit-1682801220
Missbach, B. et al. (2015). Food Advertisement and Gender Stereotypes on Austrian Television. Ernaehrungs Umschau International, 59-65.Retrieved from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/275027501_Food_advertisement_and_gender_stereotypes_on_Austrian_television
Youtube. (2015). Durianrider Channel Homepage. Retrieved Aug 2, 2015. From https://www.youtube.com/user/durianriders
Youtube. (2015). Making Machine-Gun Bacon with Ted Cruz. Retrieved Aug 4, 2015. From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiLTWVIRm3I
