Oh, stop beating around the bush

Various scholars agree that eating meat promotes “toxic masculinity”, but now someone is claiming that giving up meat leads to “white masculinity”.

Ever get the feeling that they’re just avoiding coming out and saying the problem is masculinity in any form?

For my part this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” approach to men has me to the point that I just don’t care anymore. This is just further proof that I literally cannot make everyone happy, so I may as well just give up and be happy my way.

But seriously, this study, “Meatless Meals and Masculinity”, by Mari Mycek is being touted as a scientific article. But based on what I was taught about science, that’s a rather dubious claim. Let me explain.

According to the article (granted, from FoxNews, which undoubtedly means Mycek and her report are entirely fictional):

After Mycek conducted 20 in-depth interviews with self-identified vegan and vegetarian men, she concluded they “uphold gendered binaries of emotion/rationality and current ideas of middle-class, white masculinity.”

“Gendered binaries”? Is Mycek is claiming that women are emotional and men are rational? Apparently so.

She argues the meatless men contribute to unnoticed inequality and fall in line with a masculine identity because they used “masculine-coded discourses” by making a rational decision to avoid meat “based on scientific research rather than personal opinion or emotions,” which she argues would be expected from women.

Ouch! She expects women to act based on personal opinion or emotion? And somehow acting from rational choices is somehow bad? It must be so, because science! (Never mind the irony of a scientific study getting down on people making decisions based on scientific studies.) But in what world is twenty men even a statistically significant sample?

To continue:

Before starting her research, Mycek thought vegan men would base their decision to give up meat on emotion and receive negative feedback for the switch; however, her findings were the opposite.

Huh. She’s a vegan herself, and she seems disappointed that men are become vegan for reasons other than, presumably, her own! It’s not enough that we’re becoming vegan, we have to do it for the right reasons?

I’m afraid her assertions sound increasingly weird as she goes on:

“The men effectively engage in a feminized practice (eating only plants) but masculinize it, rather than feminize themselves and their consumption identities,” Mycek wrote, further arguing “masculinity receives its prestige, privilege and power in the US at the expense of women and femininity.”

Exactly who is she to lay claim to eating plants as a “feminized practice”? It is a practice, pure and simple. There’s no gender to it. There’s no species to it. She’s setting up an argument where men only have two options: be toxic or be women. I reject that false dichotomy.

But wait, there’s more!

She concludes veganism is a form of “cultural capital” or food choice privilege, where they symbolize social and cultural prestige at the expose of people in less privileged positions.

“It is evident that a certain amount of privilege is needed in order to eat a [vegan/vegetarian] diet,” Mycek said.

So after getting on men for being men, she finally admits that she’s privileged too? She doesn’t really address whether or not “white femininity” is also a problem (I’m guessing it’s not, since she remains a vegan).

She does, at least, admit to some bias in her approach.

Mycek admits that her choice to identify as a woman and as vegan may have influenced her data collection interviewing the men for the project.

She argues more research should be done with less economically advantaged people with diverse race and ethnic groups.

I’m left to wonder why she didn’t do that “more research” herself. I mean, how long could it have taken to interview only 20 men? But at least she’s resourceful. Having failed to prove her hypothesis she still manages to get a paper out of it, even though the only real scientific conclusion she could have reached is that the men in her sample did not choose to become vegan/vegetarian for emotional reasons. I mean, she had a backup plan in case she found that they did choose based on emotion (“but it’s only because they’re privileged!”).

To be fair, I’m not going to argue with her that eating a vegan diet implies a certain level of privilege (as she calls it) or income (as I’d call it). Vegan food tends to be a little more expensive, and so it would be more difficult for the economically disadvantaged to justify that expense, let alone the difficulty of finding and/or learning to prepare vegan foods.

On a final note, I’m left to wonder just how she selected her study population. She says she chose those who self-identified as male, which is fair to a point. But did she interview any vegan/vegetarian women to determine if any of them had actually chose that lifestyle based on rationalism over emotion? Did she interview any carnivorous men or women? Her methods of selection (fliers in coffee shops asking for people willing to be interviewed about their vegetarianism) may have also tainted her sample. Based on her statements and conclusions I’m left to assume she set out to prove something very specific which was not the null hypothesis, and completely failed to provide any control group against which to test her data. (The null hypothesis would have been “there is no statistically relevant difference between how men and women choose to become vegetarian/vegan”.)

The sad thing about this study is that her social agenda gets in the way of what could have been a fascinating look at veganism and personal interactions. Could it be, for example, that male vegans tend to use rational arguments for their choice because they’re most often defending themselves against men, and therefore know that an emotion-based defense won’t work? While I do get negative push-back from women, I’ve found it’s much more common from other men.

In any case, she stated that in most instances the men showed up not knowing if the interview would be pro or anti-vegetarian, and a fair number of the men she spoke to came with a defensive mindset. They likely came prepared to debate, which would normally rely on rationalism over emotion. Also, if they were the type of men who have only emotional reasons, would they be as likely to volunteer for such an interview in the first place?

Oddly enough, the majority of the pro-meat arguments I hear in such discussions tend to be emotion-based, which she completely doesn’t consider her study (for, I suspect, obvious reason). She didn’t attempt to speak to any meat-eating males to see how they justify their choices. She clearly went into this with the assumption that male vegetarians would choose to be so for the same reasons she is and, when failing to find what she expected decided to simply base all her conclusions on that instead of backing up, refining, redefining, or expanding her study and trying again like we’re taught in every science class I’ve ever taken. As a result she misses a tremendous opportunity to really learn something rather than just create a new form of masculinity to despise.

But overall, I have to question the “scientific” moniker attached to this study (granted, that may have been entirely FoxNews’s choice of words). I saw very little to suggest any real scientific rigor. What’s worse, I saw nothing to suggest that, for someone who is supposedly pro-vegan, she was looking to make veganism more inclusive. I suppose it’s human nature, but in my own experience vegans are not overly inclusive. Far too many see it as another opportunity to virtue signal and exclude. You have to do it for the right reasons. You have to be 100% compliant. You have to share other similar, yet unrelated, beliefs.

They’re not all that way, of course. But enough are to a sufficient degree that it turns people off. And, quite frankly, I don’t see a purely emotion-based appeal as being effective. If it were, there’d be a lot more vegetarians. Rather than excluding male vegans as impure, Mycek and others should be welcoming everyone who chooses the lifestyle, regardless of their reasons. Unfortunately, Mycek seems mostly to be interested in complaining that men aren’t women.