Feminist writer Jill Filipovic thinks that Republican policies kill people and that any media outlet that covered Hillary Clinton’s email scandal should do some “soul-searching”.
Her upcoming book The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness is predictable in some respects- she reckons, for instance, that “riding a wave of largely white, largely male resentment aimed at women and people of color Donald Trump won this election for president of the United States.”
However Ms Filipovic makes some eyebrow-raising claims in her chapter on food in the book which is out May 2. Celebrity chefs, it turns out, are perpetuating gender inequality through their Mother’s Day and Father’s Day recipes.
She writes: “Our bodies aren’t universes we alone occupy, they’re objects for male aesthetic approval and vehicles for male pleasure. This, of course, extends to food and the gendered ways in which we eat (or don’t). Men certainly diet and try to lose weight, but not nearly in the same numbers as women. And for men, denial isn’t glorified; consumption is.”
Filipovic then approvingly cites 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams which showed that “meat is seen as manly, and women’s bodies are often depicted as pieces of meat fit for consumption. Animal protein is tied to strength and virility, which men need; women, whose goodness comes from denial and fragility, are left with the vegetables.”
As The Sexual Politics of Meat, Filipovic compares Father’s Day and Mother’s Day menus: “Online collections for Mother’s Day versus Father’s Day recipes are surprisingly unchanged,” she notes.
“Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s Mother’s Day Recipe collection is mostly cakes, tarts and a few dishes with salmon or shrimp. The Father’s Day collection, by contrast, is a festival of red meat: sausages, burgers, steaks, venison.”
She then moves onto M. Diddy as she was known during her stay in prison: “Martha Stewart’s collection of thirty Father’s Day options are nearly all meat, whereas of her thirty Mother’s Day recipes, only one has meat as a main course, and it’s lamb; most of the rest are vegetarian, although a few have a bit of bacon, fish or chicken.”
Filipovic concludes celebrities are contributing to a culinary conspiracy: “We have cultural images of the vegetarian woman as slim and healthy and of the steak-eating, whiskey-swilling woman as cool and desirable- the first more traditionally feminine, the second respectable because she’s doing guy stuff.”
Clearly selective with her recipe citation, Filipovic unsurprisingly does not mention the latest U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey which found that men eat 57 percent more meat than women or the European Health Interview Survey which consistently finds that women have a higher intake of fruits and vegetables.
So Martha Stewart and Jamie Oliver might be catering to market forces rather than consciously perpetuating gender inequality.
The H-Spot clearly won’t be to everyone’s taste but Filipovic might have gone even more off the reservation had she examined Trump Steaks: