Real men don't eat quiche.
You might have heard this phrase before.
It was the title of a 1982 best-selling book of satire,
and it covered common stereotypes about masculinity.
And while it sounds like a joke, it actually
gives us two important things to think with.
The first is the concept of a real man, who is and who isn't.
Gender studies scholars give us the concept
of hegemonic masculinity to work through these cultural ideals,
how we come up with ideal forms of masculinity that come
to be culturally normative.
This is a form of masculinity that
maintains the dominant position of particular men in society,
while it subordinates women and men who aren't white,
middle class, or heterosexual.
In this way, it's a significant way
that power is organized in our societies.
But real men don't eat quiche gives us
one way of thinking about how hegemonic masculinity is
constructed, and that's through food.
My research looks at the connections
between gender and food, the body, and ideas about health.
But sometimes, your research is like a puzzle.
And when you study popular culture like I do,
those pieces are all around you in your daily life.
I find them in the grocery store aisle,
or I'm flipping through a magazine,
or another friend sent me a link on Facebook last night,
more dude food to include in my dissertation.
But my job is American studies scholar
is to be able to bring those pieces together, to interpret,
historicize, and theorize them.
So what I see is that food and masculinity
have been coupled in highly ambivalent ways
since about the year 2000.
Let me show you my puzzle.
There've been a slew of new products for men,
like diet sodas and yogurts.
Powerful Yogurt even has the tagline, "find your inner abs."
And just in case you can't, there's
a six pack chiseled to the side of the package.
There have also been a full corpus
of cookbooks just for men, with titles
like A Man, a Can, a Plan, and Dude Food.
We've also seen changes in food television.
I'm particularly interested in Guy Fiere,
and the particular kind of populous bromanship
that he performs in kitchens across America.
And it's only since the year 2000,
the commercial weight loss programs
have also developed programs just for men.
So it's here that I can give you a specific example of how
this connection between food and gender works.
Just like real men don't eat quiche,
the cultural refrain is that real men don't diet.
So Weight Watchers came up with their Lose Like a Man campaign,
and in the process, had to masculinize
and defeminize the act of dieting.
And they did it through overt depictions
of hegimonically masculine food, ways of eating,
and food environments.
And these become grossly apparent when
you compare the women's program right
alongside the men's program, which
is what we're going to do.
Here you see two former Weight Watchers
telling their success stories of how they
used the Weight Watchers tools.
The woman uses it to dine out and make
healthy choices, following a strained eating
pattern in order to lose weight, well our guy here
goes out to a sports bar.
And Weight Watchers tells him that anything
is on the plan, even man food.
That's actually what they call it-- burgers, beer, pizza,
and tacos.
Our woman takes her tools into the grocery store, a space,
since its inception in the post-war period, that's
been framed as a housewife's paradise,
while our guy takes it to the convenience store.
He's busy and on the go.
And he uses the barcode scanner on his phone
to buy a bag of chips-- again, not
a particularly healthy choice-- while our Fair
Lady uses it to buy a box of whole wheat pasta.
And she's seamlessly transported into her kitchen,
another conventionally feminine space,
where she prepares a healthy meal using the recipe database
on the website, while our guy friend gets
to eat his favorite food anyway, porterhouse state.
And he grills it outdoors.
So what does this puzzle tell us?
And why does it matter?
I look at cultural representations like this
to see how they construct new definitions of masculinity,
and how real men are supposed to act.
And while these forays of men into the world of food
could yield more progressive, fluid,
flexible, and inclusive definitions
of masculinity, what I see is a reinforcement
of hegemonic masculinity.
And this has real ramifications.
It influences, for example, how scientific studies
about weight loss are designed.
It impacts how public health programs and policies
are developed and implemented.
So when I tell people that I study dude food,
I'm using it as a lens to understand
the broader and deeper social anxieties of our time.
So when I'm studying dude food, I'm
looking at ongoing negotiations for power and authority,
for our identities, and equality.
Thank you.