JOSEPH GELFER

With all these meaty posts around recently I am embarking on a new journal article entitled, Meat, Masculinity and Men’s Ministries (or, for added alliteration and oral satisfaction, Mmmm: Meat, Masculinity and Men’s Ministries).

I’ll be consolidating and expanding some previous observations about meat in men’s ministries in America, Australia and the UK, and how these operate as signifiers for normative masculinity. Theoretically, I’ll be mobilizing Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory to highlight how this feeds the masculinist agenda of men’s ministries. I’ll also be using David Grumett and Rachel Muers’ recent Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet as a base for some theological reflections on the matter. On a foody point, I was just looking at Angel F. Mendez Montoya’s The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist. Am I the only person who sees a eucharistic pair of genitalia in the following cover image?

After recent postings here and here about the supposed connection between men and meat comes a press release from Meatinfo.co.uk, which talks up a new study that shows:

Male meat-eaters are seen as more masculine than their vegetarian counterparts, even by steak-dodging females, research from British Columbia has found.

Vegetarian men are seen as wimps and less macho than those who like tucking into cooked animal flesh, according to the study, although non-meat eaters were seen as being more virtuous.

I went and had a look at this study, “Meat, Morals and Masculinity” in the journal Appetite. This four page “short communication” offers a good example of the absurdity of the socially-constructed nature of gender. Summarising other research, the authors describe “pancakes and syrup” as a “masculine food” and “bagel with cream cheese” as a “feminine food” (working on the assumption that high fat content is masculine).

This is the kind of thing that annoys me about a certain way of doing social science: supposedly commonly-held “perceptions” are presented in studies with no critical framework. How can someone seriously perpetuate such nonsense that a pancake with syrup is masculine and a bagel with cream cheese is feminine? Perception it may be, but science it is not: however, many social scientists would paradoxically argue that the way a humanities researcher might deconstruct such a statement is itself unscientific.

The article concludes:

Through purposefully abstaining from meat, a widely established symbol of power, status, and masculinity, it seems that the vegetarian man is perceived as more principled, but less manly, than his omnivorous counterpart. People may benefit from knowing about this consequence in how their diet affects the way that others perceive them.

I would argue that people would benefit more from a study that critiques these ludicrous perceptions, rather than perpetuating them. I understand that the authors may not consider this to be the business of their research, but presumably neither is being fodder for meat industry marketing.

There’s a lesson there for all researchers and writers: it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see how our work may be mobilized by others in ways we do not intend.

Yesterday I posted about the story “Women Prefer Meat Eaters” in Australian Men’s Fitness, and finished with a reference to a 2008 article in Sydney Anglicans about Australian men’s ministries and their use of meat-eating and butchery to appeal to men. I recently wrote about this in a new research article I have under review called “That’s Not How We Do Things Here: American Men’s Ministries in an Australasian Context.”

Clearly the universe is sending me some kind of meaty message, as there is another story along these lines this very morning in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled “Parishioners in for their chop, chapter and verse,” with the following lovely picture:

The article states:

The men watched as half a cow was cut up and were given the chance to put their barbecuing skills to the test and to sample some of the several different cuts of meat. After a hearty three courses, including steaks, pork ribs and lamb leg, Mr Taylor said the only thing left over was salad.

In the past year, Men and Meat evenings have become increasingly popular events at churches around Sydney. Mr Moore said he has held similar events at a number of venues and has another few in the pipeline. The turnout at All Saints in North Epping was 168, he said.

I originally started writing about Australian men’s ministries because theologians and clergy alike had been complaining about my representation of American ministries as if they were typical of those in Australia. Their argument is twofold: First, I present a caricature of evangelicalism that does not bear witness to its diversity; second, I do not acknowledge that evangelicalism (and therefore evangelical men’s ministries) looks different in Australia compared to America. Australian ministries, these critics claim, are more subtle: less prone to soft patriarchy, less prone to appealing to sport and military images to entice men, and consequently less prone to the problematic masculinities they promote.

My general argument is that Australian ministries do little but repeat the many problematic aspects of American ministries. However, I have never seen American ministries appeal to meat and butchery in quite this way, which suggests Australian ministries have their own unique way of asserting normative masculinity alongside the imports from America.

I often browse men’s fitness magazines in the hope of becoming fitter through osmosis. I usually manage to ignore the volume of normative masculine signifiers in these rags, but this news item from Australian Men’s Fitness really stood out to me as being especially dishonest (via phone camera):

First, how inclined are you to believe an item called “Women Prefer Meat Eaters” based on “a study commissioned by Meat & Livestock Australia”? Second, check out the statistics from which the magazine deduces that women prefer meat eaters:

• “nearly 50% of single women assigned negative personality traits—such as ‘finicky/fussy’ and ‘boring’—to men who show a preference for the vegetarian option on the first date”
• “among both sexes, over a third of singles would prefer their first date to order a steak over the pasta or salad options”

WTF? Unless I’m mistaken, this suggests over 50% of women do not assign negative personality traits to such men, and two thirds of singles have no preference for dates choosing steaks. The real headline is “Women Indifferent to Meat Eaters.” This is a classic piece of Orwellian Newspeak on behalf of the masculinity conspiracy: you deserve the sausage-guzzling beauties that accompany this “news” item if you swallow it.

If you want a more nuanced report on how gender plays out in regard to meat, I’d recommend the recent article in Feminism & Psychology by Annie Potts and Jovian Parry, “Vegan Sexuality: Challenging Heteronormative Masculinity through Meat-free Sex” which makes some interesting points about how vegans naturally enough prefer sex with other vegans. More worryingly, it highlights the rage this fact seems to incite among meat-eaters:

particular aggression was evident in online comments by those positioned as heterosexual meat-eating men. In this article we examine the hostile responses to vegansexuality and veganism posted by such men on internet news and journalism sites, personal blogs and chatrooms. We argue that the rhetoric associated with this backlash constructs vegansexuals — and vegans more generally — as (sexual) losers, cowards, deviants, failures and bigots. Furthermore, we suggest that the vigorous reactions of self-identified omnivorous men demonstrate how the notion of alternative sexual practices predicated on the refusal of meat culture radically challenges the powerful links between meat-eating, masculinity and virility in western societies.

Interestingly, this also intersects with my recent men’s ministry research which shows how Australian men’s ministries reinforce normative masculinity through the use of meat-eating and butchery to appeal to men, as highlighted in this Sydney Anglicans article, “Men Meat the Challenge.”