He's just not that into your vegetables

'Cause you know I wanna date that guy right there. Eww.

It's sorta become part of my morning ritual: orange juice, toast, the eternal wash-hair-or-don't-wash-hair debate and a batshit crazy offensive article from the New York Times. Whether it's a piece on which outer borough neighborhood a trendy lady should gentrify (to save money for shoes, natch!) or Pulitzer Prize winner William Safire doing something straight up racist (I know the guy's gone now-- but tell me how someone who writes a column called "On Language" and doesn't think to look up the word "Womanism," which he had apparently thought he made up... for a *terrible* punchline no less) I can always count on The Paper of Record to remind me why I need to get out of bed and go yell at some people.

Anyway, today brought us "Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye" which is actually not about being yourself at all (least of all us vegan girls) but instead how to trick men into thinking you are going to be the least amount of hastle for them. Oh and clogging your arteries while you do it. Sexy. Excuse me while I get all Carol Adams on you NYT but I really do think that the fact that beef (especially the $$$ steak) has been fetishized and imbued with such meaning ("eating this dead hunk of animal means i'm 'one of the guys!' dontcha know?") is indicative of just how troubled we are by eating it. Certainly there are less conflicted food choices. No one gets too worried about pasta or curry for instance. I do not think it's a coincidence that we choose to read manliness into steak either. Beef is the *one* animal food that I've never heard a "vegetarian" say they eat (we all know those pesky pesce- and pollo- people). It's just uncompromisingly dead, red, bloody animal and we know it. To justify this then there is then an ethos of; "Hey, look, I had to kill it and eat it because my raw, violent masculine energy DEMANDED it." Right. Women then, according to the NYT can borrow a bit of this manliness (an ironically homosexual tactic to bait/hunt/catch a man) since it's you know, that particularly narrow vision of masculinity is so entirely unproblemmatic and all.

Insert mandatory self-deprecating vegansexual joke here.

Be Yourselves, Girls