“I will say that “Get a salad or he’ll think you’re a fat pig!” is just as stupid as “Eat red meat or he’ll think you’re a prude!” Get whatever you want and eat it.”

I’d order a steak salad.

Heh.

A lot of vegetarians grew up in a meat-centered world and still LIKE those foods (taste/texture), but chose to stop eating them because a being shouldn’t have to die for their meals. Meanwhile, my family has a cookout: it’s a whole lot easier to pick up fake beer brats at the market and put them on the grill with everyone’s food than to spend hours in the kitchen to impress them with a recipe they won’t recognize. Sometimes I just want to eat, not make a statement.

Of course it is simpler to be omnivorous. I’m annoyed that I have to work hard to find something good at a standard restaurant where everyone else wants to go; if they offered something tasty or interesting I’d skip the veggie burger, but I’m lucky to get even THAT choice. I don’t see why I should have to “sacrifice” by abstaining from fake meat in addition to achieving my real goal of not killing the animal in the first place.

The latter. That is, they claim they are more worthy of male attention than women who don’t drink Jager and eat steak. They tend to be smug, but not so secure in their own wonderfulness as to intimidate anxious misogynists. They also seem to exist mostly in New York Times editorials.

That’s still an ambiguous phrasing; does “because their tastes are coded . . .” modify “they are more attractive” or “[they] claim that they are more attractive”?

If you don’t want to get into semantics, don’t get into arguments with bored writers who are stuck at home. Seriously, though, it makes a real difference—did I mention I’m specifically a copywriter? Image is as important as reality—in that if you mean the claim, it represents internalized sexism, whereas if you mean the tastes, it’s more societal sexism which for all you know the woman in question may be trying her best to escape.

My girlfriend’s tastes in . . . well, let’s go with in food: those are aligned with mine, or, venturing into other areas, she sincerely (as far as I know) likes wearing the sorts of clothes I tend to think women look good in—and I don’t pay attention to how much that overlaps with what our culture tells women they look good in, so I can’t really measure my pig factor. Be that as it may, I don’t think she eats masculine meals as a strategy to attract men; I think she does it because the foods she likes are seen as masculine.

The problem only comes if you say that there’s no way a vegetarian diet could be more expansive than an omnivorous one, because we all know you can’t have meals that don’t center on meat.

Well, yeah. Because that’s moronic. I can think of a few right off the top of my head, without even starting in on stuff used or intended to replace meat.

And refusing to even consider substitutes. I don’t understand the point of “not dogs” and such. If you want to eat franks, wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to abandon vegetarianism? If your personal ethics demand that you refrain from flesh, isn’t it worth the sacrifice?

(I’m bitter, no pun intended, because there are a bunch of foods I like that I can’t eat now due to drug interactions—all of them vegetables.)

That’s still an ambiguous phrasing; does “because their tastes are coded . . .” modify “they are more attractive” or “[they] claim that they are more attractive”?

If you don’t want to get into semantics, don’t get into arguments with bored writers who are stuck at home. Seriously, though, it makes a real difference—did I mention I’m specifically a copywriter? Image is as important as reality—in that if you mean the claim, it represents internalized sexism, whereas if you mean the tastes, it’s more societal sexism which for all you know the woman in question may be trying her best to escape.

My girlfriend’s tastes in . . . well, let’s go with in food: those are aligned with mine, or, venturing into other areas, she sincerely (as far as I know) likes wearing the sorts of clothes I tend to think women look good in—and I don’t pay attention to how much that overlaps with what our culture tells women they look good in, so I can’t really measure my pig factor. Be that as it may, I don’t think she eats masculine meals as a strategy to attract men; I think she does it because the foods she likes are seen as masculine.

The problem only comes if you say that there’s no way a vegetarian diet could be more expansive than an omnivorous one, because we all know you can’t have meals that don’t center on meat.

Well, yeah. Because that’s moronic. I can think of a few right off the top of my head, without even starting in on stuff used or intended to replace meat.

And refusing to even consider substitutes. I don’t understand the point of “not dogs” and such. If you want to eat franks, wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to abandon vegetarianism? If your personal ethics demand that you refrain from flesh, isn’t it worth the sacrifice?

(I’m bitter, no pun intended, because there are a bunch of foods I like that I can’t eat now due to drug interactions—all of them vegetables.)

And Dan: maybe the rest of “Bananas Foster” would fit if you abdicated from the “Really Good” part of your title–which wouldn’t really be a sacrifice, since there are no other kinds of Bananas Foster *but* Really Good.

That’s a very good point.

‘Of course, there are always those rare women who order what they want and to heck with what a man might think.’

And the one woman they put in this category strongly thinks about not eating what she wants. This certainly doesn’t seem like the typical person to me.
Anyway, I notice that the article works for me (since I’m a vegetarian):

‘Gentlemen, be careful. Real men, it seems, must eat kale.

“When a guy sits down and eats something fatty and big, you wonder if they eat like that all the time,” said Brice Gaillard, a freelance design writer. “It crosses my mind they’ll probably die early.”’

On the other hand, I’m not a real man if I eat quiche and certainly unmanly if I don’t eat beef (as noted in a near infinite number of commercials).