Real Men Eat Meat: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

That cow? Food. That dog? [[Eat the Dog|Food]]. [[Everything's Worse with Bears|That grizzly bear?]] Food. That roadkill? Eh... [[Extreme Omnivore|food]].

If you're a man, eat food. If you don't eat meat, you're not [[Rated "M" for Manly|manly]]. And eat red meat. Who only eats the white stuff? That's not meat; it's gotta bleed before it's meat. What are ya? Some skinny punk? [[Unfortunate Implications|A girl]]?

 

 

It never occurs to them that meat is simply part of a complete meal involving salad, meat, vegetables, dairy products, fruit, and [[Adjacent to This Complete Breakfast|this bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs]].

 

See also [[Real Men Hate Sugar]].

{{examples}}

== Advertising ==

* The Burger King "I Am Man" ads: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3YHrf9fGrw I am man, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore/And I'm way too hungry to settle for chick food...]

* The Burger Chef Rancher, basically a very large hamburger with no bun or condiments, with a side of "Texas toast" (regular toast sliced twice as thick as usual). The ads showed a big James Garner-looking guy coming in and going "I'LL HAVE A RANCHER."

* Speaking of James Garner, he used to voice-over those all-American "BEEF: IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER" ads brought to you by the National Livestock and Meat Board.

* When Wendy's introduced a new line of salads, their commercials addressed this stigma: a guy is taunted by his buddies for ordering a salad, until they see how delicious it looks.

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* ''[[Hajime no Ippo]]'': Ryuuhei Sawamura likes meat. Really, ''really'' likes meat. In a twist of the trope, it's used to emphasize on his insane tendencies. Oh, if I say he likes meat, I mean he also likes the meat of his enemies, strongly resembling cannibalism.

* The stage adaptation of ''[[Bleach]]'' has an extra song with Ikkaku teaching Hanataro how to be manly. Eating RAW meat is one of the things a real man must do.

 

== Comic Books ==

* Lance Blastoff (a politically incorrect parody character from [[Frank Miller]]) who converts a beautiful vegetarian to meat eating by the extremely manly act of killing and roasting a dinosaur.

 

== Film ==

* The fishing scene in ''[[Waterworld]]''.

* ''[[Zardoz]]''. The Exterminators are outraged when their god tells them to grow grain.

 

== Literature ==

* The warriors on [[Gor]] are quite fond of meat. In one book Tarl and his friend are at a fancy dinner party, but they both preferred a big steak to the delicacies being served. In another book he and his (different) friend take time out of their [[Quest]] to go hunting because they "need" to eat meat.

* Real [[Known Space|kzin]] eat meat. At least, modern male kzin do. The Kzinti have taken it so far, that as a [[Proud Warrior Race]] they went from ancestral omnivores to dedicated carnivores (except for ice cream).

* One of the most literal examples of all time in ''[[The Stormlight Archive]]''. Alethi men eat meat, spiced food, and other thick, hearty fare. Women eat sweet food, fruit, and other similar dishes. This is not a matter of choice. It is considered abhorrent in their culture for men to eat women's food or vice versa.

* Whenever a story has a scene where [[Conan the Barbarian]] is having a meal, he's usually eating a "joint of beef" and washing it down with either ale or wine.

* [[Discworld|Sam Vimes]] prefers his BLT sandwiches with as little L and T as possible, and with all the more B.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* Parodied in a ''[[Armstrong And Miller]]'' sketch where a King is hosting a massive banquet for the man of honor, but he doesn't really likes the food and so says he'll just eat his couscous he's brought in a tupperware box. He gets called out on his and says he'll gorge on the very next disk, a large roasted wild boar that has an apple in it's mouth. He leans over, grabs the apple and takes a bite, then complains that it's a Granny's Apple.

* According to one episode of ''[[The Red Green Show]]'', Dalton Humphrey only eats meat.

* Earl was astounded when his son, Robbie, became a vegetarian. Since they are [[Dinosaurs]], it is treated like a gay/fantastic drug sort of thing.

* [[Big Eater]] Ron Swanson of ''[[Parks and Recreation]]'' planned a junket trip to Indianapolis around visiting his favorite steakhouse. The discovery that it had been shut down sent him into full-blown [[Heroic BSOD]]. He consoles himself by eating his other favorite food, breakfast, ordering ''all'' the bacon and eggs in a diner.

{{quote|"[Y]ou're probably a vegetarian, you big flop-haired wuss."}}

* On several occasions the hosts of ''[[The Man Show]]'' would crack jokes at the expense of vegetarians.

 

== Music ==

* The Scottish folk song "Tatties and Herrin" can be seen as an inversion, though it also invokes [[National Stereotypes]]:

{{quote|''Fan the queen's wantin' men tae gang fecht wi' her foes''

 

== Newspaper Comics ==

 

== Video Games ==

* ''[[Rune]]''. Ragnar will pick up whole roast legs (not poultry, BIG legs, like lamb or venison probably) and strip them to the bone, or pluck giant lizards off walls and '''bite their head off''' in a single ravenous bite, then throw the bone/body over your shoulder? And wash that down with a flagon of mead, which you also casually toss aside to shatter on the floor. Oh, sure, there's sissy ''fruit'' growing on bushes occasionally. But aside from that, [[Health Food]] has never been manlier than ''Rune''.

* In ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'', Saxton Hale [http://www.teamfortress.com/war/saxtonhale/03.htm here].

* A gender-flipped version comes from ''[[Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories]]'', with Rozalin. During the beginning intro to chapter 7, as the team's getting ready to head to bed, she admits to wanting "a nice, bloody prime rib", and when Etna talks about the reason she ditched Laharl (him eating her pudding), Etna claims [[Sweet Tooth|sweets are a girl's best friend]], to which Rozalin shoots her down with "I really don't like sweets. I'm more of a meat eater." The manga adaptation explores this a bit more, as when she got a cake as a child, it was WAY too sweet for her, which lead to her dislike of sweet things altogether.

** {{spoiler|Might be intended a clue that's she's actually Zenon, whose original gender is unknown and might be masculine, trapped in the body she's using since [[Real Men Hate Sugar]] in Japan.}}

 

== Web Original ==

* James Lileks' [http://lileks.com/institute/gallery/meat/index.html skewering of a meat cookbook].

* ''[[Loading Ready Run]]''`s "Man Cooking" sections. In a nice case of deliberately [[Completely Missing the Point]], they once did a vegetarian episode, which involved making and cooking a giant mushroom shape. Out of meat.

 

== Western Animation ==

* Sokka from ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' is obsessed with meat (in contrast to vegetarian Aang).

* Lampshaded in ''[[Powerpuff Girls]]'' when a boy claims eating the flesh of lesser animals is manly. His father agrees, but then is made to eat his vegetables by his wife.

* In the ''[[South Park]]'' episode "Fun with Veal", Stan refuses to eat meat after saving some baby calves from a meat plant, which causes him to break out in sores that turn out to be miniature vaginas.

* ''[[My Gym Partner's a Monkey]]'': Made fun of when Adam invites Amazon Kevin to Darwin Middle School, a hyper-masculine rugged adventurer who advertises cereal made made of miniature pieces of meat that turn red when dipped in milk.

* Yam Roll of ''[[Yam Roll]]'' becomes quite offended at a restaurant when the waitress tells him that they don't serve short ribs and [[Real Men Hate Sugar|offers him strawberry shortcake instead]].

* ''[[Ren and Stimpy]]'' - Ren volunteers to be 'fake dad' to problem-child Kowalski, who looks like the scariest guy in prison. At a picnic, Kowalski requests a meat-on-meat sandwich washed down with a glass of meat.

 

* Vilhjalmur Stefansson experimented with the [[wikipedia:No-carbohydrate diet|no-carbohydrate diet]] after observing that the Inuit diet consisted of mostly meat and fish, since there is very little vegetation in the Arctic circle. [http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.htm Here is the article in question].

* The book ''The Sexual Politics Of Meat'' is about this from a female perspective, making the case for vegetarianism from a feminist perspective.

* A lot of evidence shows that the early Neanderthals had a mostly meat-based diet. Researchers also believed this carnivorous diet may have been partially responsible for their demise, as the end of the ice age meant there was no big game for them to catch and little knowledge on how to grow crops, unlike their rivals and human ancestors, the Cro-Magnon.

** [[Science Marches On|Recent finds]] suggest that the end on the Ice Age did little harm to the biosphere, and actually ''increased'' the biomass and biodiversity of the early European lands, which became a home to what is now known as a European megafauna. The lack of big game that brought the demise of the Neanderthals is entirely their own fault: they've simply [[Manly Men Can Hunt|hunted and]] [[Big Eater|ate it all]]. Similar situations repeated many times when the early humans arrived at the pristine ecosystems, like the Clovis culture in early North America and ancestors of the Aborigines in Australia and New Guinea.

* Another inversion: vegetarianism and veganism are very popular in the hyper-masculine [[Heavy Metal]] and [[Hardcore Punk]] scenes. Attila Csihar of [[Mayhem]], Gaahl of [[Gorgoroth]], Mark "Barney" Greenway of [[Napalm Death]], Geezer Butler of [[Black Sabbath]] and Ian MacKaye of [[Minor Threat]] are examples.

** See also [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeZlih4DDNg Vegan Black Metal Chef].

* Subverted by the tenth-century warrior-saint Gerald of Aurillac. Although he would eat meat, especially venison, he preferred fish and vegetables. This did not make him [[Church Militant|any]] [[Technical Pacifist|less]] [[Badass]].

* Subversion: Former Hockey enforcer Georges Laraque is a vegan ''and'' an active member of the Canadian Green Party.

* Several cultures, such as the Massai of Africa and the Mongols of Central Asia, subsist on diets that are almost entirely meat due to living in grasslands where there is little vegetation that humans are capable of digesting. Cattle, on the other hand, thrive on grasses.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Always Male]]

[[Category:Masculinity Tropes]]

[[Category:Food Tropes]]

[[Category:Gender and Sexuality Tropes]]