Professor Says You Must Stop Eating Meat Because it Promotes ‘Hegemonic Masculinity.’

05 Dec, 2017 by Sierra Marlee

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Do you like steak, sausage, hamburger, chicken, turkey, elk, or any other kind of meat? Do you eat them with pleasure and find yourself going back to the barbecue for seconds?

Congratulations! You’re perpetuating “hegemonic masculinity,” “gender hegemony” and and helping to stabilize the gender binary! And if you don’t know what any of these things are, don’t feel bad. I don’t either and I’m a perfectly happy person.

Pennsylvania State University sociology professor Anne DeLessio-Parson recently published a piece in Journal on Feminist Geography in which she declares that refusing to eat meat is a political act and a way for women to get back at a patriarchal society. She came to this conclusion after interviewing 23 Argentinian vegetarian women about the reason they have switched their daily diet in such a “meat-centric” society.

“The decision to become vegetarian does not itself destabilize gender, but the subsequent social interactions between vegetarian and meat-eater demand gender enactment—or resistance,” she noted in her article.

Yes, apparently because men eat meat, it enforces gender roles and the only way a woman can fight back is to eat nothing but lettuce and tofu. Yay feminism!

“Refusing meat therefore presents opportunities, in each social interaction, for the binary to be called into question,” she noted, saying that men who are vegetarian may spend more time in the kitchen as opposed to at the grill, which is a spit in the eye to your gender norms. (Well duh, it’s hard to conventionally barbecue broccoli.)

“Women, one of the ways they push back against patriarchy, they say, ‘This is my body. You don’t get to tell me what comes in and out,'” she said. Well to be fair, I’ve never had a man tell me what to put in my body, with the exception of my boyfriend who tried very hard to convince me to drink water after a long, hard night of alcohol. I choose what I eat and if I want a thick, bloody steak, the only thing a man can tell me is “Ma’am, please, it doesn’t come anymore rare than that, unless it has hooves.”

Here I was thinking that vegetarianism and veganism was just a way for people who don’t like the way cows and pigs are slaughtered to keep from endorsing that kind of action with their wallet. Apparently everything is a feminist issue these days.

Well, if this article has done nothing else, it’s made me hungry for some wings.