I’ve experienced this many times myself. Been vegetarian for almost 3 years now. Male co-workers make unsolicited comments towards it when they find out I’m vegetarian.
It’s happened probably a dozen times or more. I am probably one of the most casual and tolerant non-meat eaters you’ll meet. I’ll chat openly with you about hunting, guns, best ways to cook bacon, steaks, burgers, etc.
I never preach or shame people for eating meat. Still, when guys find out, it’s a lot of:
“You’re a vegetarian? Ha, your girlfriend doesn’t have to know, we’ll let you eat meat here.”
“No wonder you’re always snacking, you only eat rabbit food!”
“Yeah, my wife tried that crap with me once, didn’t work.”
I even had a co-worker get in my face because he, “thought I said something about eating meat being unhealthy.” I didn’t say anything of the sort, but it was ironic coming from a guy who was pushing 350lbs and pounded 3-5 Mountain Dews a day.
Assumptions that I was only doing it because a woman was forcing me, or that I was implicitly shaming them for eating meat, or that I wasn’t getting my nutrition, blah blah.
Well as another male vegetarian, good job, man. It’s tough to go against the grain with anything especially in the face of abuse. Keep it up!
Vegan here. I found that it’s exclusively those coworkers, that are really about their masculinity. It’s an important part of their personality to be a man. Those people tend to also dislike or don’t understand LGBT folks, and have strong feelings about the differences between man and woman and their places in society. They are not bad people. I like a lot of them. But it gets tiring and infuriating at times.
Sounds like some of my coworkers. I’m not vegetarian but some of the comments about the products in the warehouse are laughable. One coworker said he’d never eat fake meat. Same guy can’t understand how someone could be transgender. He’s a good person from all accounts I’ve heard but is stuck on that mindset. It’s nice to have something to snack on that something didn’t have to die for.
I watched Game Changers. They had a segment there where they did penis measurements after eating meat and after eating plant based, and the plant based penises had stronger and more often boners. So remind me again how it’s masculine to eat animal flesh?
It’s a bit diminutive and almost as near sighted as ‘masculinity is meat eating’ to equate masculinity to boner strength and frequency.
I think the idea is it’s a counterfactual. “if we buy into this traditional masculinity, then why is eating meat at odds with traditional male sexual performance”
My understanding of masculinity is that it is the characteristics by which other men rate a perceived level of attraction from females through which they determine a competitive standing. Men often think big muscles brings all the ladies to the yard, for example, so that is one possible display of masculinity, leaving “weaklings” to feel inadequate and of a lower standing.
My impression is that men generally believe showing off boners in public scares away the females, so it does not seem like a good candidate for being a display of masculinity. But if we assume that showing off boners is something men believe woos the women, is the aforementioned difference noticeable in practice? Science can reveal a lot of things that nobody would ever realize living out regular day-to-day life.
Citations Needed podcast had an episode about the link between the colonial settler myth and eating meat (episode 139) which was really good. (Summarising very badly) Eating meat became proof of the settler dominion over the land, animals and peoples (Native Americans) of the West and was pushed to maintain the narrative.
Edit: I also recommend a recent episode of Maintenance Phase where they debunk the paleo diet and have past episodes on Peterson.
Besides settler colonialism, there is something else going on with “meat and masculinity”: Hunting for meat was the favorite sport of the (male) aristocracy in most of Europe for centuries. The aristocratic desire to be seen as capable hunters had a unique influence on the development of masculinity, particularly in the 19th century when European aristocrats began to lose power to the rising bourgeois who - in turn - emulated the aristocratic lifestyle and adopted many of its habits.
