A Grill-ish Figure

Perhaps even more than fireworks, the barbeque is the “tradition” most associated with the Fourth of July.  And grilling, apparently, is a man’s job.  The curious calculus that transforms a stereotypically feminine endeavor, cooking, into an uber-masculine pursuit is a topic for another post, but today what I’m thinking about is what we tend to put onto our grills.  If we’re men, we are supposed to cook animal flesh.  This idea is reinforced in hundreds of articles like this one.

What strikes me about the “real men eat meat” meme is the way in which it reinforces itself not only by exaggerating traditionally masculine traits like aggression but also by encouraging the objectification of women.  Our “manly” author, Joe Reagan, describes a wrestling match precipitated by a vegan’s audacious request for a Garden Burger at the author’s barbeque party.  In response to this “insult,” Joe’s friend Ted tried to “force feed” steak to the unnamed vegan, later saying, “he wanted to screw my day with his views, I thought I’d return the favor and shove some meat down his throat.”

The aggression here is obvious, but what’s more subtle is the implicit assumption that only men belong in the category of humanity.  Reagan uses the word “man” and “mankind” throughout the article; the “real” men (i.e. meat eaters) are given names while the vegan is nameless; and feminists (whom we must assume are women) are grouped with Nazis and religious zealots.  To be anything other than a meat-eating man is to be a target of violence and derision.

The violence in this article is also sexualized, which links it rhetorically with myriad examples from popular culture of women being objects of penetration in scenarios involving meat.  Perhaps the best noted recent example is this Burger King ad:

Another example, from another burger chain, is this gem from Carl’s Jr.:

In both ads, meat eating is equated with fellatio.  Here the meat becomes metonymically associated with the phallus, transforming the trite refrain into “Real men *are* meat.”  This is both a reinforcement of and a variation on Carol Adams’ core idea in The Sexual Politics of Meat.  The exploited woman is not so much a substitute for the exploited animal as she is exploited by the animal (its flesh, at least) and by the man (through a sort of quasi-transubstantiation?).

A final variation of the meat-as-masculine meme in popular culture is the woman who eats meat.  She must either find a “feminine” way to eat meat (i.e. meat is part of a weight-conscious diet, meat will make her family, for whom she is obviously the chef, happy, etc.) or engage in suitably “masculine” activities while eating meat and/or ways of eating meat.  In other words, she must become more like a man in order for her overt meat eating to be socially acceptable.

Even when women are permitted to eat meat with impunity, however, they are still not allowed to “man” the grill.  No amount of ineptitude on the part of a man will rob him of his dominion over the machine that makes fire: