Celebrate Father’s Day this year with the weird American habit of gendering food!
(source)
Let us not forget that steak = manfood. Like catfood and dogfood, manfood must be carefully produced so as to cater to man’s natural diet. His ancestors hunted the wild baked potato, the shy ale, and the feisty tenderloin. Today, Manfood Inc. scientifically calibrates each and every Father’s Day dinner to man’s instinctual stomach, so you can treat your man to the best. We call it a MENu.
For more, see this vintage Campbell’s ad marketing meat for men, the gendered menu at Brick House, this ad campaign warning of sissified dogs, and this extensive collection of gendered and sexualized food. See also this counter-example: a vintage ad arguing that vegetables make you tough and strong.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 24
Willow — June 19, 2011
You know, without identifying the specific meat pictured in the ad...
Aoirthoir An Broc — June 19, 2011
Yum!
Christina — June 19, 2011
AHAHAHA. MENu. *eyeroll*
Candice — June 19, 2011
http://www.amazon.ca/Sexual-Politics-Meat-Feminist-Vegetarian-Critical/dp/0826411843
Renee — June 19, 2011
Actually it's called menu because it's a french adjective for detailed and small and that came from the word minuere.
Wonder how many guys would want to be associated with a French word for small.
Anonymous — June 19, 2011
Hey! At least we're not like those crazy Romance Languages in which every single noun, [animate or inanimate] has a gender.
Greta — June 19, 2011
Reminded of the old joke - Mental breakdown, mental anxiety, menstraul cramps, menopause, ever noticed how all our problems start with "Men".
Jamie — June 19, 2011
If this was for any occasion other than Father's Day, and if Morton's sold any food other than steak, I'd see your point.
ikkyg — June 19, 2011
In my house, me (a girl), my mum and my sister all love steak more than my father. Maybe in our house, steak should be on the WOmenu... :P
Paul Jonker-Hoffrén — June 20, 2011
And let's also note that the meat in the picture is SQUARE (almost) and RED-BLOODED.
Michael — June 20, 2011
not just an American habit. A steakhouse in Germany had, a while back, a "man's steak" and a "woman's steak" on the menu. naturally, the woman's steak was smaller, the man's steak was huge. It's a wise marketing move: it certainly keeps a lot of men from just eating the smaller one. Can't order a woman's steak, after all...
Lillian — June 20, 2011
A hotel in a nearby town was offering (presumably as a way to widen the audience for Father's Day, or to defeminize the concept) a "Man Brunch." A Man Brunch! (I couldn't help but wonder if someone involved with it noticed the unintentionally campy nature of the event's name, because the ad I saw in the paper later mentioned their "fabulous entrees.")
Bon Mots and Silly… « Gucci Little Piggy — June 21, 2011
[...] a link session with this paragraph: Father’s Day was yesterday! Did you celebrate it with meat? Meat is very manly. Or perhaps you just purchased your father a very manly card, praising his manly [...]
Patti — June 18, 2012
I am vegan, and over the three years we have been together my partner has been more and more understanding of my point of view, and eats less and less meat. He has moaned that whenever he is out with some of his male friends he gets teased and grilled when he orders vegetarian food because, apparently, it's not manly enough. You know, as if they all went out like men and hunted the animal and killed it with their bare, manly hands and thus they are proving their strength by eating it. It's so bizarre, but it really is a strong influence in the decisions people make.