Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - “Ladies Eat Salad, Men Eat Steak and Burgers” - Exploring Gendered Eating Tropes in Media & Marketing with Dr. Emily Contois

Starting point is 00:00:00 This goes back to the patriarchy. Something as small as you should control your appetite and you should be thin and you should eat in a particular way, maps onto those exact same dynamics of power when we think about how women fit into, right, the various societies that they're a part of. Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. Now, heads up to everybody, this is our last episode of the season.

Starting point is 00:00:35 And after today, I'm going to be taking two weeks off for the holidays. So I hope you can all take some time to just like really enjoy the season, maybe catch up on some of our episodes, do whatever feels good to you. But I am so excited about today's episode because we are going to be talking about a very special interest of mine, gender and food. So I don't know if you guys know this about me, but here's a little fun factoid. In my previous life, I was awarded a full grad school scholarship all the way through PhD that I bravely dropped out of to pursue this career in nutrition communications. And honestly, I'm so grateful that I did because I love my job. But my proposed research was actually looking at gendered food choices, which is exactly

Starting point is 00:01:29 what my guest today, Dr. Emily Contois, is an expert in. Emily is an associate professor at the University of Tulsa, specializing in how identities are formed at the vital intersection of food, the body, and ideas about health. She's the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets, How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture, and the co-editor of Food Instagram, Identity, Influence, and Negotiation. In today's episode, we're going to be discussing how we as women versus men are socialized to choose salad versus steak respectively. We're also going to be talking about the sneaky ways that diet culture and the food industry

Starting point is 00:02:10 plays into these norms. We're going to be talking about the cool girl trope in TV and film and how that can be really damaging to young women's relationship with food and their body. And I'm going to leave you guys all with some actionable tips on how to reject these gendered food expectations, which may specifically come in handy during the holidays when let's be real, food judgment be raging. Now, quick disclaimers, we're going to be briefly talking about eating disorders in today's episode. And also my general reminder that this information in this episode is never a replacement for personalized healthcare.

Starting point is 00:02:46 Also, I would love if you would follow or subscribe to the podcast and also leave me a quick little review as this is a new podcast and it really, really, really does help me out. amazing well thank you so much Emily for joining me I am so excited to jump into this learning because this is just such a special interest of mine so thank you for joining me you're so welcome I'm really looking forward to our conversation yeah okay so just to kind of catch folks up to speed here um you know because 15 years, in my grad school sociology courses, it was drilled into my brain, that gender is a social construction. And you know, as philosopher Judith Butler suggested, it's not something that we necessarily are, but something that we do, and perform. Can you kind of give listeners some examples of the ways that we are taught to kind of perform

Starting point is 00:03:46 gender from a very young age? Absolutely. Think about the kind of baby clothes we put a boy in versus a girl, the kind of messaging and colors that they have. Think about how we tell boys to be rowdy and to get dirty, right? While we encourage little girls to be prim and proper, to be dainty, to be motherly towards their baby dolls, right? There are tons of things from childhood on up where we instill these ideas about this binary understanding of gender as masculine and feminine. But our food lives are also a really powerful way that these ideas about gender come to us. Things like flavors supposedly mapping onto gender, right? Think of men challenging themselves to eat something really spicy as sort of a challenge and defense of their masculinity

Starting point is 00:04:30 versus the idea of sweetness, right? Being mapped on to femininity and to women. The steak salad dichotomy, we can go on and on and on. So flavors, foods, ways of eating, ways we think about our body, they're all tied up in these ideas of how we perform gender and the way that we're taught to by institutions, media, our family, so many different aspects of our lives all around us. Yeah. So like, let's talk a little bit more specifically about how that kind of performance specifically looks for food and our food choices. Can you kind of give more examples? You alluded to the kind of salad, steak, that kind of thing. Can we talk a little bit more about that? Absolutely. So thinking about when a man and a woman go on their first date, right, of like the pressure some women feel to order in a particular way. And then some women

Starting point is 00:05:18 totally buck that, right, and order the steak anyway, to be able to say, yes, I have an appetite and I like to eat and maybe I have an appetite for things more than just what's at the table, that that effort to control women's appetites and women's bodies, right, is really interrelated. But these lots of different ways, right, that femininity is this expectation for pursuing lack, for not having a big appetite, for thinking about thinness, for calorie control, that that's instilled in so many different messages, whether it's for girls, for teens, for women, that a lot of it is about that restraint. So I had one paper that I wrote where I was comparing, like, how does media talk about

Starting point is 00:05:57 salads differently to men and women? And so for women, we see sad salads, right? It's like, let's make these as calorically not dense as possible, right? To make these just- Just iceberg lettuce. Yes, right? They're the negative calorie lore kind of meals where we're just chewing air and a little bit of water and pretending that we're full and happy.

Starting point is 00:06:17 Well, for men, right? Salads are about adding in protein, adding in healthy fats, adding in little bits of texture and crunch, that we see a totally different discourse when we think about masculinity and eating well as being fulfilling and meeting your appetite where it is instead of trying to control and deny it. So sometimes you can see those differences between how we talk about masculinity and femininity in food when you compare them side by side. Oh, so fascinating because yeah, I mean, and this is really, you know, part of my food philosophy is about fullness and feeling that satisfaction. And, and like women are not fucking rabbits. Like we need and deserve to feel full too.

Starting point is 00:06:56 And we need fiber, we need protein, we need healthy fats and all that stuff in our salads. And obviously the socialization begins so early, especially, you know, even with the food, like you mentioned that the clothing and the shows when the, and the toys were allowed to use, but with food too. And I'm sure folks who are listening, who maybe grew up with a sibling or cousins of the opposite sex may recount family members treating kids differently at mealtimes where you know boys might be encouraged to have that second helping and third portion and praise for having this good hearty appetite whereas the girls maybe serve lighter portions or smaller meals or encouraged to eat

Starting point is 00:07:36 more vegetables um and it's crazy like when we look at the cross-cultural studies we can see that kids are aware of their quote-unquote gender roles by like two or three and like very, very young. And I'm sure a lot of families who are listening right now who are victims of diet culture, generational diet culture, may be trying to push back against some of that. But it's just so hard when, you know, kids go to school and daycare in the playground, and it's just reinforced there. Do you have any kind of tips for parents with young kids who are trying to kind of push back against some of those those gender norms? Yeah, I think the first thing is trying really hard, right, to treat all of our children, regardless of their gender, the same, and how

Starting point is 00:08:18 we think about what foods we're giving them, the way we encourage them to try lots of different foods, and then to listen to their own tummies, right? To learn how to listen to their bodies of like, I've had enough, or I like this, or I don't. And to let your children have agency in that process so that they, regardless of whether they're a boy or a girl, feel that same sense of power and autonomy, that they're a part of the family and they get to have some input on their food choices. A lot of us grew up with, you know, finish your plate, right? And, you know, there are starving people elsewhere, that letting children listen to their own appetites can be really powerful. It can be

Starting point is 00:08:53 really meaningful for girls, especially given the other messages that they're getting throughout culture and media. Such an important reminder. Now, aside from like the obvious problem with these gendered messages around food, which, you know, to me as a dietitian is ultimately that it just often leads women to kind of chronically not eat enough or fear fatness and therefore be at heightened risk of eating disorders, etc. What are like the big picture dangers for women here that kind of can be traced back to a lot of these gendered eating expectations? Absolutely, that This goes back to the patriarchy. This is about being able to control women's rights, women's roles, women's opportunities, women's belief in themselves to

Starting point is 00:09:36 achieve any level in society or any job or any possibility. Something as small as you should control your appetite and you should be thin and you should eat in a particular way maps onto those exact same dynamics of power when we think about how women fit into the various societies that they're a part of. So it isn't some small, silly thing that women are worrying about on their own, in their personal lives. This is about women's power writ large across national scales and on an international one as well. Right. And, you know, I spoke about this on another episode I did about diet culture in the workplace and the intersection between diet culture and hustle culture. And, you know, the ways in which for women, their bodies are still very much their business card, whereas we don't see those same expectations, you know, of male CEOs to be

Starting point is 00:10:25 rail thin. You know, and obviously, I don't want to dismiss the dangers of this for men too, even though it does present in many different ways. And you've got a whole book on this, Diners, Dudes and Diets. So if you can kind of give us a little bit of insight, what's happening to the men in our life with these gendered messages? Yeah. So what I say is that patriarchy screws all of us, right? Not equally, right? Like women and non-binary people, we're still, right, subordinated and have more problems under this system and experience more oppression. But men suffer under it too, right? The ideal of, you know, a real man who's tall and muscular and has a six pack and a big chest and giant biceps, right? Like you can't change

Starting point is 00:11:12 your height in the same way that we can't really change our breast shape or how long our legs are, right? Like men are trapped in similar, right, physical ideals that they see held up in media or see, you know, other men sort of try to force on each other that this is what they're supposed to look like. So we have both media studies and psychological studies that men experience really similar amounts of discontent with their bodies, whether they're high school, college age, and all through the life course. It's not to the same extent that women feel it. In the 1980s, there's a trio of women psychologists who coined the term normative discontent, that it's literally just a

Starting point is 00:11:49 condition of womanhood, right? To be dissatisfied with your body, to not think it's enough, that's a part of being a woman under patriarchy. But for men, it's starting to look really similar. And so there is a little bit more flexibility, right? There are more bodies that are considered quote unquote good bodies for men versus for women. But a lot of these pressures are truly intersecting and overlapping. And so when my book came out, some of my favorite conversations were with, you know, like feminist men's groups where they wanted to figure out how do we have peace with our bodies and good

Starting point is 00:12:19 relationships with food and to be good allies for the women in our lives who we know, right, face these pressures in a far different and more extreme way than we do. Right. And, you know, obviously, historically, we've treated eating disorders as a quote, unquote, like female problem. But in the last 40 years, the number of men with EDs has actually grown faster than the number of women. And, you know, I often think that, you know, the, the, it's very likely

Starting point is 00:12:45 the part of the reason for the discrepancy in eating disorder diagnosis rates between women and men is because there's gendered stigma around eating disorders still being this kind of woman only issue or female issue. Um, so the problem is probably there. It's just that men may not actually be getting the recognition and help that they need for it. Not that women are also not really getting the help that they need for it because so much of these behaviors are normalized by our culture, but there's still that discrepancy there. Absolutely. That for men, part of masculinity is to be individualistic, to not need help, to not seek it out. And this is a problem for so many different health behaviors, right? Not just eating disorders. But the fact that men often suffer and can suffer

Starting point is 00:13:29 from different kinds of eating disorders, whether it's, you know, protorexia, where we're just drinking protein shakes, right? Like it might present differently. And similarly with steroid use, right? This another destructive sort of behavior to try and achieve what's held up as this good body, this attractive body that men are supposed to have. And that there isn't a lot of discourse about, you know, how many men in Hollywood, for example, have these incredible physiques for these superhero roles or other positions that they're playing in films. That it's not just working out hard in the gym. It's more than that. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:14:02 Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, diet culture obviously takes advantage of a lot of these gendered expectations in, you know, how it attempts to just rope us in and sell us something. Can you give us an example of how the diet industry exploits these ideals? Absolutely. I say it's one of my favorite papers that I wrote, but it's also so infuriating that back when Weight Watchers Online comes out with a version just for men in the mid to late 2000s, they had these how does it work videos for Weight Watchers, which was like default for women and then Weight Watchers for men. And so side by side, you see them talk about the exact same tools that help you count your points and use recipes and understand what's in the grocery store, but they talk about it totally

Starting point is 00:15:00 differently, right? For women, there's this expectation that we're going to internalize the rules of dieting, that we're going to change our behaviors, going to eat nothing but low calorie, healthy food, and that we are going to transform ourselves, right? Into this better mother, better daughter, better person, right? Who has this whole trajectory ahead of her because she's finally lost weight and become who she's supposed to be. For men, the promise is like, you're just going to eat dude food, right? You're going to eat tacos and beer and hot dogs, and you're just going to track the weight and it's going to fall off and you're going to be this better athlete. And then you're going to be more successful at work, right? Like it's a very different kind of

Starting point is 00:15:36 promise, but very different in kinds of foods that we talk about, the expectations for behavior change or thinking about, you know about food or eating or your body in a different way. For men, there is no expectation for any of that. So a lot of the destructive diet culture messaging is very different when it's being targeted to men. Right. There isn't that kind of restrict, restrict, denial, denial, active willpower, like that kind of narrative going on. Yeah. No, your appetite deserves to be satisfied, right? And you're going to eat plenty of delicious food and the weight's just going to fall off.

Starting point is 00:16:09 Such a sham. In my next life, I want to be a man. Right? For so many reasons. And it's obviously not just diets. The food industry reinforces and plays into this as well. So can you give us an example or examples of foods that are virtually the same, but have been tweaked or the marketing has been tweaked to just kind of reinforce some of these gendered eating tropes? Oh, absolutely. So one of the favorite chapters that I got to write in Diners, Dudes, and Diets looked at diet sodas and yogurts, right? And how were those two foods in American culture, right, conceived as feminine and feminizing. And so when they wanted to target men, what do they do? What are the strategies that

Starting point is 00:16:50 they employ? And so Coca-Cola, right, goes back to the lab to develop Coke Zero. They come up with a different artificial sweetener that they call Ace K, which sounds like a winning quarterback or like a Bond villain or something. And so part of it is like this assumption, right? That like men aren't going to drink something that has that acrid aftertaste that saccharin does, right? Or aspartame, right? These, you know, artificial sweeteners that women have been eating, you know, and drinking for that point of 50 or 60 years for the history of diet soda. So for men, we literally, right, go back and create a better tasting sweetener that

Starting point is 00:17:25 tastes more like real sugar. It has that lovely round mouth feel to it. And so Coke Zero does really well because women are also buying it because it tastes better. But they also eventually launch it in a black can. They have totally different fonts, choices. Think about how the diet on Diet Coke is that sort of cursive font, right? And then it's come to be understood as really girly. So Coke Zero tried to establish itself in all these different material culture, semiotic, taste-based ways. And then in their advertising campaigns as well, that this is for men, right? And that you can drink this diet soda. And then similarly with yogurt, right? To go from something like, I don't know if you remember Yoplait, right? Like all the dessert flavored, you know, 100 calorie ridiculous

Starting point is 00:18:09 little yogurts. This is like your substitute for actual cake or actual Boston cream pie. And so then Greek yogurt, right? Starts to become more popular in the United States. I remember when I studied abroad in Italy, right? And had like a Greek yogurt for the first time. It's like, what is this marvelous substance? And so it finally breaks into the market here. But because it's higher in protein, there's this opportunity to latch on to that sort of athletic fitness-based trend that lots of people cared about, but specifically men, right? To say this is yogurt for men that packs this protein punch. It can also be low in fat.

Starting point is 00:18:42 And so it can be this, you know, perfect fitness sort of partner for your diet life. And so again, there are crazy brands like Powerful Yogurt comes out. It's a gigantic size. It's like eight ounces. It's like this really, really big yogurt for an individual serving size. But it literally has six pack abs chiseled into the side of the cup that is made with a much heavier weight plastic compared to like a tibia that like collapses in your hand. So again, the plastics, the shapes, the color being black, there's, you know, a bull's horns are a part of the iconography, right? This is how we sell yogurt to men versus to women, right? That it's about sweetness and low calories and being thin and having this instead of desserts. While for men, it's protein and manliness and owning the world, right? It's these very different messages.

Starting point is 00:19:29 But to go back to our earlier point, it's not just about flavor or nutrients or thinness or muscularity. It's about power, right? And taking up space and honoring your appetite and what you want to do in the world. Yeah. And isn't there like an Oikos or like a, like a, there was with the NFL is just like their whole logos on there. I mean, obviously they're speaking to a different demographic than the like 0%, no sugar, no fat, no flavor bullshit that we've had to consume as women. So it's so interesting. And Oikos triple zero,

Starting point is 00:20:05 did have all those zeros, right? But like they talk about zero in a very different way for men, right? It's the undiet diet for men, but it also like infuses it with like value and power and the idea that this is something extra and special and that you should be consuming. Well, for women, it's always like, this isn't there. This isn isn't there so you won't be there so everything will be okay oh my gosh yeah the front of label packaging is so interesting to me because i you see it over and over again the women foods marketed to women are always calling out the calories and it's light or it's guilt-free and then for men like you say it's it's the protein is displayed front and center and it's the words like power and fuel.

Starting point is 00:20:45 Apparently women don't need fuel, I guess. Is that what we're being taught here? But I always think of like 100 calorie packs when those were really popular back in like my eating disorder days. And they were like, we're going to make you pay more money to get fewer cookies in the bag. And that's how we get, that's what we get, that's, that's what we get as women. We just have to pay more money for less.

Starting point is 00:21:09 And when you think about it, it's crazy. Absolutely. And it's one of those, again, like the side-by-side comparison. Like I teach it with my students. I'm like, let's look at a lean cuisine and put it next to a hungry man dinner. Right. The way we photograph the food, the way, I mean, they don't do that anymore, but like hungry men used to be like XXL, like it was a gigantic, you know, Jersey size. And you see like one and a

Starting point is 00:21:29 half pounds of food, right? Like it was about weight. It was about volume. It was about like, this is going to satisfy you versus right. Very different messaging to women. Totally. And you still see that, right? The grocery store, like you could be an anthropologist every single time you go shopping, right? Of like, how is my world trying to construct gender and masculinity and femininity at me? I hope people when they go to the grocery store, they start to start to kind of realize these things, because it is actually quite fascinating. But let's talk about TV and film, because I'm a millennial, and my teen years were really defined by the toxic 2000s diet culture, which played into these tropes

Starting point is 00:22:06 quite heavily. Do you have any like media, strong media examples of gender diet and food behaviors that immediately come to mind? Yes, I think one that I always think of is Sex and the City, right? It was like so transformative for so many women, like in positive ways. I have so many friends that I made, right, by like watching them on DVD together. But at the same time, right, how Carrie looks the way that she does. Maybe the same way we don't understand how Sarah Jessica Parker, right, has looked that way, you know, even on to, you know, this recent reboot of the show where the women are significantly older, where finally we have a little bit of conversation in some of those newer episodes.

Starting point is 00:23:01 There's an episode where Charlotte's character, right, talks about how she can't, you know, just lose weight like that when she wants to for a particular event or something. It's harder as you age. But again, it's a frustration with her body's ability to be thin, not with wanting to shirk those ridiculous ideals, which sometimes as women age, right, they feel more of a freedom. I remember my mom, when she turned 50, she's like, I want to give you this feeling, right? She would never use this language of like giving no fucks anymore, but it was just, she felt that finally, right? I don't have to feel all of this or to feel like I'm not measuring up to it. Like, I wish I could give this to you at a younger age so you could live your life that way.

Starting point is 00:23:38 Yeah. I mean, that's amazing that you were able to, that your mom kind of came to that realization. That's so, so so powerful but like you mentioned earlier with the women and sex in the city I think it's very rare for women to talk about the struggle of being or staying or wanting to be thin out loud um and it's I always I think of that you know I think about the Barbie movie and when America Ferreira in her like epic womanhood monologue she says you have to be thin but you can never say that you want to be thin. And you have to say you want to be healthy, but you still have to be thin. And I think that even though in Hollywood, like thinness is basically a prerequisite, it has to appear to be effortless and unspoken of. And this always reminds me of this like, quote, unquote, like cool girl trope,

Starting point is 00:24:25 which, you know, basically portrays women as being just one of the guys and how they dress or how they eat or their interest in hobbies, but they're simultaneously like smoking hot and effortlessly thin. So I often think of like Rory and Lorelai on the Gilmore Girls, for example, where a huge part of their story arc is around them having these like massive appetites and they even call themselves like competitive eaters, basically for all this like, quote unquote, unhealthy food, while obviously staying thin. And we love this. We love this kind of cute little fun quirk about them. But I often think about how differently that behavior would be interpreted

Starting point is 00:25:05 if they weren't thin. Absolutely. Then it would be slothful. Then it would be sinful. Then it would be wrapped up in all the fat bias and stigma that our society exerts in a really strong way. As much as the body positivity movement has opened up different kinds of conversations, as much as we see brands starting to have different size models and different bodies in their clothes. We still, right, live in a country where fatness is feared, and fat people, right, are stigmatized in significant ways. Totally. And, you know, why, how do you feel, or why do you feel that this kind of seemingly impossible expectation that women can eat the burgers and fries, but they don't gain weight. And we don't kind of like see that happen, because it's behind the

Starting point is 00:25:49 scenes. Why do you feel that that expectation can be so dangerous for women? Some people are just really thin, of course, right? And like, they can eat, you know, whatever, lots of different reasons. But there are also plenty of people in the media's eye who are out there all the time, or influencers who are in that body that people think is this ideal. And when you don't talk about how this is really hard, it makes it seem like there's something wrong with the rest of us. And that like not only are our bodies not good, but all of our habits and everything we might be trying to do if we have goals, that we're all doing it wrong and so like to go back to men i think this is actually one of the interesting parts that like the men will not tell us about their steroid use which like we know is happening but they will talk about how all i get to eat is

Starting point is 00:26:35 chicken and broccoli for like this four months before this movie and this is my workout routine and it's grueling and like you know i think I think like the Gladiator 2 coming out, right? Like people talked about sort of the effort they had to put in to create these bodies. Or going back to Tarzan, like Skarsgård was one of the first to really talk about how he felt so much pressure to achieve the body of that character.

Starting point is 00:26:57 And like men's health really does, right? Like they just, you know, get these abs, right? Like all you have to do is follow this routine. It's like, no, for some of us, just not possible, no matter how hard you try. And that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with you. 100%. Yeah, no. And I often think about, because I live, breathe social media, and this is a lot of what my kind of daily analysis comes down to is like, and you talk about this in kind of food Instagram, which is the book that you co-edit that co-edited um but where you're studying kind of social media influencers in the wellness space and in the book you wrote about how women influencers

Starting point is 00:27:36 kind of conveyed an effortless but clearly rigid attitude court towards their food preparation ingredients and portion size that, again, concealed the likely extensive invisible labor that the followers don't see. Whereas the men that you were analyzing kind of emphasized flexibility in portion sizes and breaking the rules and things like that. So again, I see this as that cool girl trope that apparently men don't have to engage in. But can you talk a little bit about what you observed in the content that you analyzed? Yeah. So I think you're speaking of one of the awesome chapters in our book that are from some contributors coming out of the university at Stetson University. And so for them, they were looking at influencers of various

Starting point is 00:28:19 different scales. So that's also something that's interesting, right? People who have small but loyal followings and going up to these mega, mega influencers who have millions of followers and thinking about the various ways that they talk about their expertise and how they connect with their audiences. the logics of food Instagram more broadly, right? That we're showing life as more curated, more beautiful, more successful than it ever really is, right? When you think about all the different social media platforms, Instagram is perhaps the most guilty, right? Of this sort of a representation. That's quite false, right? To something that would be perceived as authentic or showing, right? Sort of behind the scenes of like how difficult things can be. But also of this idea of food labor, another sociological term, right, of like all the effort that goes into finding recipes that your family will eat and shopping the grocery sales and going to the different stores and bringing it all home and putting it in the pantry, managing the pantry

Starting point is 00:29:21 in your head, knowing that you've picked recipes that every picky eater at your table will eat, trying to manage the food waste, trying to make sure it's healthy enough that everyone's getting something, but yummy enough that people aren't going to complain, right? Like all this labor, right? And then you have to clean up and then you have to put it in the fridge and try not to waste the leftovers, right? It goes on and on and on. That it's so different than saying, you know, you do dinner tonight, just go pick up a pizza, right? Like mostly women in our society are taking on all that food labor. And so for that to be invisible, for that to never be talked about, is to not honor, right, this gigantic effort that women put into this. Mostly women, right,

Starting point is 00:29:59 in our country, they're definitely awesome feminist dads who take some of this labor on, but all of our sociological data shows women still do more of this labor, even in the most equitable marriages and families. And so the fact that this labor isn't compensated, you know, with industrial capitalism, we only have wage labor outside of the home. So all this stuff that if we hired other people to do for us, right, to shop and cook and put it all away, it's incredible value, right, that's being generated into the home by women. And when we don't talk about it, it doesn't acknowledge all that effort, all that contribution, and the political power of it. For sure. No, I mean, I talk a lot about on my channel, kind of the What I Eat In A Day videos that we on, on, on social media. And they are obviously

Starting point is 00:30:47 performative. Like everything you see, I always try to remind people, like what you see on social media is not life. It's a highlight reel. It's a snippet. You have no idea how much work goes into styling that or setting it up. Like I always joke, like when, when influencers share their like day in the life, it's like like do you think that they just woke up and the camera starts rolling like no they had to wake up get themselves looking good set up the camera put the lighting get themselves miked and then oh like pretend to wake up in their bed like that's not real life um and so yeah i just think it's very interesting like there was there was a point in uh the analysis that said something like, you know, influencers

Starting point is 00:31:27 would say something like, don't let anyone tell you that you can't have the food you want. But then they would proceed to share, you know, describe why their vegan, gluten-free, vegetable-based cookie that they're promoting is, you know, healthier than all the others. And it's just so confusing to the average viewer to get those competing messages. But again, that's kind of like playing into that cool girl trope that like, yeah, we can eat what we want. Like this is intuitive eating.

Starting point is 00:31:50 This is like fueling my body because it feels good. But then like there's actually all these like restrictive rules coming afterwards. And I see this often with the kind of other extreme, which is the mukbang eating challenge that we're often seeing a lot online, which I'm always kind of like, oh my gosh, this is just glorified binge eating folks. But if a thin person posts a mukbang, the comments are all like, oh yeah, get it girl. Like this looks delicious. So fun. But if a larger body creator eats so much as like a sandwich, never mind a mukbang, the comment section rips them apart, calling them disgusting, like you're killing yourself. You're like, you know, why aren't you taking care of your body?

Starting point is 00:32:35 So I just think that that that dichotomy is just so toxic. And back to the kind of Lorelei kind of, you know, example, like we wouldn't, we wouldn't have, we wouldn't see those things as quirky and fun if those girls were in larger bodies. No, unfortunately, no. It's so frustrating that like, we're still in that place of like, how do we have a culture that is far more equitable and inclusive when we think about body size? body side. Totally. Now, so much of what I'm kind of trying to do here at Bite Back is really pointing to the dangers of social media and how healthy eating and nutrition messages are portrayed and spread en masse, especially those that are grounded in pseudoscience.

Starting point is 00:33:31 What is your biggest fear as we move into the next phase of social media, whatever that looks like? And is there anything you can recommend that we do to resist it? Yeah, I think what I'm most writing about is how all these platforms were created, which was based on the logics of an attention economy. And so the things at the extreme that arouse offense or disgust or strong emotions are the things that the algorithms have literally been created to amplify and to spread. And so those are things that could be regulated, right? Like there could be a sort of social conscious way of thinking about what kind of content do we want to amplify? What kind of cultures and

Starting point is 00:34:18 communities and possibilities, maybe even like radical, welcoming, wonderful communities do we want to try and build on social media? And that's not what we've seen happen, right? That outrage and rage and all these other negative emotions, right? That's what draws eyeballs, gets clicks and makes money. And that's the end game of all these platforms. And so like, I would love to see thoughtful regulation. I don't see the United States government being proactive enough to actually bring about something like that. And so that puts an unfair expectation on individual users to shape their experience, to make sure that it's a healthy one. And so I disagree with that.

Starting point is 00:34:59 I think that there should be regulation. There should be structural change around these. But until we have that, all we can do is guide our own use and put those guardrails on and shape the communities that we want to be a part of to step away from it when we don't want to be a part of it. I teach an intro to media studies course here as a professor. And so my students do a media diet, they analyze all these different aspects, not just their digital sort of consumption with social media, but everything that they consume. And this semester I added in these media wellness days where it was like, see what it feels like to step away,

Starting point is 00:35:34 you know, for this hour that we should have been in class, right? Step away from your phone and don't look at it at all. Or watch a film and don't multitask. Really sink into it. Enjoy every second of it, right? Don't be on your phone or on your laptop. Just watch it. Sink into it. Truly be closely watching and reading and paying attention.

Starting point is 00:35:54 What does it feel like to read a book that's made of paper? Go find a magazine and flip through it. What does it feel to read the newspaper in newsprint? To connect with your material world, or to do anything with somebody else? But I think social media has incredible potential to bring us together, but it still isn't the same as in real life and all together. And so I think some of the things that I'm so honored to do in my role here as faculty in residence is inviting students over for dinner, right? And we all get to sit around this beautiful 10 person table and eat meals together. And so one of the

Starting point is 00:36:29 food studies concepts, it's my favorite, it's commensality. These social bonds that we form that are totally different when we sit together, whether it's over coffee or tea or a full meal, or just a little treat that we literally connect with one another differently when we're breaking bread and sharing that vulnerability and that specialness and that wonderfulness of food and drink with one another as we have a conversation and form those bonds. And so those are some of the little pieces of wisdom that I would try and share. That's so helpful. And I mean, it's like we all know that we need to do these things, but as a professor and obviously kind of a role model to so many of your students, I think that's so powerful to kind of be like, this is your assignment.

Starting point is 00:37:11 Get off your phone, kids. And yeah, the idea of those kind of shared meals, you know, back to what we were talking about earlier with for parents, like so important to make time for those kind of shared family meals. We've got ample evidence of the benefits of that. China, like what matters is that you gather together and you eat and that it's as nutritious as it can be. Like that's what you're aiming for. So don't put those unreasonable pressures on yourself and your family. A hundred percent. A family meal together, you know, sitting at the table with ordering pizzas is far better than like everybody sitting at their phone with like a three course super healthy meal, like, you know, scrolling or watching a show, but not actually interacting. So I think that's a really great reminder. So thank you so much, Emily. That was so fascinating. I literally

Starting point is 00:38:11 could talk to you all day. And I'm going to be leaving some links in the show notes to your books, Diners, Dudes and Diets and Food Instagram. So very amazing, insightful read. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. This was so much fun. Oh my gosh. I loved that conversation. I honestly had so many things I could have talked to Emily about, so we might have to have her on for like a part two at some point, but I really feel that this conversation is so important to just understanding why diet culture and fat phobia are able to continue to thrive. Because in a lot of ways, you know, diet culture functions as a tool to regulate femininity and sexuality, where

Starting point is 00:38:58 ultimately women's bodies are expected to conform to this narrowly defined standard of beauty that is obviously often thin, toned, and petite. And as Emily touched on earlier, there is a historical context to this control. So women's bodies have often been used as sites of moral and social policing, where thinness is often used as a proxy for self-control, virtue, and social conformity. And yes, of course, men are subject to their own body pressures, but research consistently shows that women bear the disproportionate brunt of the discriminatory practices associated with fat phobia. So for example, women report experiencing weight discrimination at much lower BMIs or weights than men do. So in other words, men can afford to be much larger than women

Starting point is 00:39:54 before society kind of turns on them. Women are also twice as likely to describe experiencing weight discrimination in healthcare and 16 times more likely to experience weight discrimination in the workplace. At the end of the day, gendered expectations around food choices purposefully prevent women from achieving equality in all aspects of our lives. It also prevents women from achieving true food freedom and not just like the performative cool girl version that we've just described. Resisting these restrictive gender norms is essential to getting in touch with our own true needs. So I want to share some tips here on how to help shift the culture for long-term positive change. And these may specifically come in handy during the holidays when we tend to be

Starting point is 00:40:41 gathering even more than normal around food. So number one, challenge others when they use moralizing language to describe food. As Emily and I discussed, gendered eating norms get consistently reinforced by language that's used to describe feminine and masculine foods. While food marketed towards men tend to carry more positive connotations like powerful, fuel, and energy, we're generally stuck with morally charged terms like guilty pleasure, sinful, guilt-free, light, and cheating, all of which add judgment to our food choices and by extension to us. Try flipping the switch when you're describing food choices by using words like satisfying, energizing, nourishing, and fulfilling.

Starting point is 00:41:32 And if you hear a friend or family member call their meal like a sinful cheat, maybe say something like, uh, it's literally just food. Like it's pretty silly to compare a cupcake to infidelity or a legitimate crime. Number two, when in public, eat in a way that honors your hunger and cravings with confidence and pride. Diet culture and the patriarchy that informs it teaches women that our hunger is to be controlled and suppressed rather than naturally responded to like our male counterparts. As a result, women hold a lot of shame and embarrassment about their appetite and often feel uncomfortable eating anything more than rabbit food in public. It also breeds comparison, often resulting in an unspoken competition about who will eat less. based on your natural appetite and preferences and not some kind of like gendered expectation for them sets boundaries around diet culture and creates an environment where women feel empowered

Starting point is 00:42:31 to honor their true needs. Number three, avoid commenting on other people's plates, especially if it challenges typical gender norms. It takes a lot of bravery to reject diet culture and gender norms, never mind both at the same time. And one of the reasons for that is out of fear of public criticism or judgment. Even if you think a comment is like well-meaning or a compliment, just consider for a moment the possibility that it could do real harm. So if a male friend is ordering a salad, don't tease him for eating like a bird or being on a diet. And if your female friend opts for a burger and fries, don't ask her if it's like a cheat day or comment that she's quote-unquote splurging. Also, a quick reminder that if you are on the

Starting point is 00:43:17 receiving end of these comments, it says a lot more about the commentator's relationship with food than any food choice you could ever make. Finally, resist matching your food choices to others. Research has consistently shown that what and how much we eat is hugely influenced by those around us. So when our girlfriends are ordering salad, we tend to eat salad. And when they announce that it's a cheap day and they dive into the nachos, we follow suit. Not surprisingly, women are much more susceptible to this influence than men. So if you find yourself craving a burger, but changing your mind at the last minute, when you hear all your friends ordering a few light apps, make the point to be the first to order. Another great tactic that I use when we're going out that I find particularly helpful when dining with men and women is to order a wide range of foods for the

Starting point is 00:44:11 table to enjoy communal style so that you can basically build your plate dynamically without being judged for any particular choice. So this would allow women to feel confident eating the steak and fries and also empower our men to enjoy the greens that they may crave. When we really dig down to analyze the intersection between fat phobia and sexism, we can see how societal norms reinforce control, value judgments, and expectations around femininity, masculinity, and everything in between. Breaking down these biases and recognizing our unique nutrition needs helps in challenging fat phobia for all and ultimately helps us foster a healthier relationship with our own body and food choices. And that's all that I have for you guys today.

Starting point is 00:44:58 I hope this episode was as interesting for you as it was for me. Like I totally geeked out here and I just loved, loved every bit of the research. But a big thank you again to Emily Contois for helping me fight back against diet culture. Also, don't forget to please follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It really, really, really does help me out as a new pod. Signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abbey Sharp. Thanks for listening.

Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - “Ladies Eat Salad, Men Eat Steak and Burgers” - Exploring Gendered Eating Tropes in Media & Marketing with Dr. Emily Contois

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