Meat Makes You a Real Man

Marin Urrutia Perez

Introduction to Psychology

October 10th, 2014

Meat Makes You A Real Man

It is proven that the only way of becoming a real man is by eating meat, eating animal meat does not only prove a man’s masculinity but also implies no suffering to the animals being slaughter for consumption. If you read that twice and still can’t believe it, then you are right, it was an exaggeration.  However, this is not what the majority of men stated in two studies realized by the Bellarmine University. In fact, the results showed that the majority of men compare to women think that by eating meat makes them feel like real men, as well as they denied animal suffering.

        Consumption of meat has increased dramatically in the past years. The United Nations had stated that livestock production contributes 40% more to global warming than all the transport combined. Methane produced by livestock is 23 times more harmful than carbon dioxide and generates more than 65% of human-related nitrous oxide. This gives as a result that meat eaters contribute 7 times as much green house emissions as vegans do. Eating meat does not only kill livestock in a cruel way but is also killing our biodiversity, degrading our land, finishing up our supplies of water and polluting our planet. If humans don’t do something to stop this, as our populations keep increasing we could experience a chaos of a worldwide starvation.

Knowing the consequences of meat consumption and the numerous benefits that a vegetarian diet has, it is surprising that only a small percentage of the worldwide population (3% in the US) identifies themselves as vegetarians (according to a Harris Interactive Poll made in 2008). As environmental problems and vegetarianism become more pronounce and visible, more people has become more supporting of following a vegetarian diet. Nevertheless, they fail to continue following it. Gender appears to play an important role on this, while females are more concerned about animal compassion and the health benefits of not eating meat, men don’t consider a meal to be “real” unless it contains meat (accordingly Sobal, 2005).

A hypothesis made in this relation is found in Adam’s Theory, linking meat and masculinity from history. Meat-eating societies were characterized by patriarchy where women had the least power, and man ruled. Meat raised the men power. Even current media and major fast-food chain restaurants suggest that real men eat more meat and is a way of achieving masculinity by the increasing their muscle strength.

Because opposing to a vegetarian diet could have potential consequences to our planet, two studies were made. The first study would look for two principal objectives: the justifications that meat eaters use, and to examine how gender correlates to the consumption of meat. One hundred and twenty five undergraduate students participated on this study, from which 73 were woman and 52 were men. The majority of them were White (90%), 6% of them African American, 2% Asian and 2% Hispanic. Both male and female participants were asked to score different justifications for meat consumption. All items were on a 9-point Likert scale that indicated low or strong agreement (1=strongly disagree; 9=strongly agree). Justifications on eating meat consisted in religious, hierarchical and health reasons. The goal on this was to identify the reasons of why the participants follow a meat-eating diet. Nine strategies or reasons were identified: (a) pro-meat attitude, (b)denial, (c) hierarchical justification, (d) dichotomization, (e) dissociation, (f) religious justification, (g) avoidance, (h) health justification and (i) human destiny/fate justification. The second part of the study consisted on asking each respondent two questions. The first one was to find out how often they eat a different meat product or a vegetarian one, and the second one how many times in a week they eat that product.

Results of this study showed that male students used more direct responses to justify eating meat. Justifications included pro-meat attitudes, denying animal suffering and believing that humans are in a superior hierarchy than animals and because of that we were destined to eat them. In the other side, female students used indirect reasoning, avoiding thinking about the treatment of animals and even dissociating animals from food. Also, as it was foreseen, males consumed the greatest percentage of meat products compare to females that opted for eating less meat and more vegetarian foods.