Science has now provided a preliminary answer to the most pressing question of our time, at least for men: “Does this reusable shopping bag cause you to question my sexuality?”
The answer,at least in a rough statistical sense, is yes — at least according to a new study by researchers at Penn State.
As a press release announcing the study explains:
In a series of studies, the researchers evaluated specific pro-environmental behaviors that previous research suggested were seen as either “feminine” or “masculine” and examined whether they affected how people were perceived.
They found that men and women were more likely to question a man’s sexual orientation if he engaged in “feminine” pro-environmental behaviors, such as using reusable shopping bags.
It works the other way, too:
They were also more likely to question a woman’s sexual orientation if she engaged in “masculine” pro-environmental behaviors, such as caulking windows.
Now, I’m no scientist, but if a woman likes caulk, wouldn’t that make her seem more straight? Evidently not to the men taking part in the survey, who were more likely to avoid women they saw engaging in more “manly” environmentalist activities.
Now, the study wasn’t able to determine whether or not men or women refrained from engaging in certain environmentalist behaviors because they thought it might make them look gay.
But we live in a world in which some guys refuse to wash or wipe their own asses because they think that it might make them gay, so I’m going to take a wild guess and say that, yes, there are more than a few dudes out there who refuse to use reusable shopping bags because they think it makes them look like a sissy.
–DF
H/T — Pacific Standard
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@TheKND
Evidently, the alpha male lives in his own reality where alpha and beta males are a thing, not something we misunderstood about wolves then randomly applied to humans. It’s not true of wolves, and even if it was humans and wolves are very different.
What I don’t get about evo-psych fans is how they can somehow mentally justify their (generally incorrect) views about random animals being applicable to humans. If you think humans behave like lobsters, I have a news flash in that very few humans I’ve ever met breathe water, have claws, fight to the death when mating, or eat brine shrimp.
Alan. Did you read the article you posted?
The key word here is lean. Chuck is super cheap. It also takes a lot of education to properly nourish yourself with a plant-based diet without using expensive meat replacements, which the majority of Americans, with their extra long weeks and often multiple jobs, just don’t have the time, let alone money for.
@Lainy
Cigarettes are different though, that’s an addiction rather than a lifestyle choice like line-drying clothes. My best friend has fought that addiction forever. Once she quit for 10 years (then her grandma died and she had just one at the funeral and… yeah… ). Most smokers are aware it’s bad and would like to quit.
It’s a super difficult thing to break. She did have the 10 year sober period which was brought about by some books actually. She basically self-helped herself into it. I really think if her grandma had not died while she was having some mental health problems she would have been sober all her life. I will try and obtain the titles in case they could be helpful for your fiance.
Another friend has gone the Juul route. Where I’m at, there’s a huge push against e-cigarettes as untested and full of possibly harmful chemicals that might do Bad Things to your lungs, Oh No!™ While they are certainly worse than not using e-cigarettes, at the same time regular cigarettes are full of definitely harmful chemicals that guaranteed do Lethal Things to your lungs. Also all the lobbying against Juul is funded by the cigarette companies so one has to be suspicious of the motives for the concern. He says, the e-cigarette provides the same hand-mouth kind of motion that cigarettes do, which patches and gums don’t, and is much easier to stick to while still getting rid of second-hand smoke.
I will butt out (hah! smoker joke!) though if you would rather. I know it can be a sensitive issue.
@kupo
Er, what? I’m gonna go read this article so I know what argument I’m jumping in to, and to know what point I’m supporting, but… no, this isn’t true, not specifically more so than nourishing yourself with any diet.
I am from a vegetarian tradition and have many friends from another vegetarian tradition from another continent and we all nourish ourselves properly with no more education than having grown up in our respective traditions. We do not use expensive meat replacements as a normal part of our diets. This is education. It is not specific education more than growing up in a meat-eating tradition.
There’s apparently a strain of folk belief which holds that mirrors attract lightning. I haven’t been able to find an origin dor the belief, though, other than possibly coming from Portugal and/or Brazil.
@Snowberry:
Well, incels are indeed bad men, but they’re a very specific type of bad men. And if it’s a “vague slur”, then these guys are vaguely slurring themselves, because they self-identify as such. And they are also the ones doing the virgin-shaming, since they choose to BE ashamed of their virginal/sexless status. And they choose to shame one another. No place is more toxic to a lonely, girlfriendless, unsexed cishet guy than an incel forum.
Can’t argue with the emotionally-unstable part, but then again, the vast majority of emotionally unstable people are neither incels nor murderers, so that argument falls apart. There’s something a lot bigger and uglier than just emotional instability at work there, and its initials are T and M (which also happens to be the point of this topic, so you’re not really OT at all.) Lots of emotionally insecure guys glom onto this ideology, to be sure. But most of them don’t turn out to be murderers or anything close to it, partly because they outgrow it, partly because someone or something else intervened…and mainly because they can’t get high-firepower weapons.
So this troll is talking out his ass, as usual, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And all the head-nodders who agreed with him are just clueless.
@Big Titty Demon
Key difference: you grew up with that diet. Also, you’re vegetarian, not plant-based. Getting proper nutrition from plants alone is actually very difficult to do if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I know people who have become very sick from malnourishment, as confirmed by their doctor, specifically from switching to a vegan diet without learning how to ensure they get the right nutrients. If you grew up with it, then you were educated in how. I’m not saying it has to be a formal education. But there needs to be learning.
@ Lainy
I went into the safety issues of nasal snuff (dried and powdered tobacco) because I self – medicate with it to take the edge off limb tremor.
It’s not to be considered absolutely safe, but it’s probably a great deal safer than cigarettes, possibly than vaping too.
In the UK at least, it’s also a lot cheaper than smoking, patches or vaping. I can’t answer for that in the USA though.
I know it’s a bit old – fashioned and potentially messy, but it is another harm reduction strategy if vaping doesn’t appeal.
Maybe the idea was that the mirror is metal (or at least the backing is) and might somehow attract lightning into the house?
I never realized reusable bags were considered “feminine”. Where did this even originate from? Personally, I use a few ancient reusable cloth bags from around thirty years ago, since they’re pretty solid, fold and store easily, and can even be machine washed if I ever need to clean them really thoroughly. Modern ones often seem a bit plasticky and kinda flimsy at times. Their only real benefit seems to come from being free-standing while empty, which makes packing groceries a bit easier, especially at self-checkouts.
As to vegan/vegetarian/meat… I get not eating meat. I like meat quite a bit (and probably won’t ever go full-on vegetarian as a result), but I also like vegetarian dishes and cook them fairly often (as I find meat, especially raw/uncured, harder to work with). Vegan, on the other hand, I don’t understand. Cheese is too good, and you all-but-need eggs or butter to produce the best baked goods. Not to mention honey being amazing.
I just couldn’t do it — there are so few purely-vegan meals that I enjoy and don’t think would be significantly improved by cheese, eggs, butter, or honey.
This leads me to think that “vegan” is going to necessarily be fuzzily-defined. If honey doesn’t count, because bees are needed to produce it and bees are animals, then what about everything (and it’s a lot) that requires bees to pollinate it? There go an awful lot of our food crops. It gets worse, of course: ultimately everything we eat depends on an ecosystem that includes animals, and very little or none of it isn’t directly dependent on at least one species of animal, to say nothing of indirectly.
At the end of the day, there might be nothing that is 100%-animal-involvement-free except the purely synthetic.
If the dividing line is drawn at “humans corral, constrain, kill, maim, move, shave, pluck, control, enslave, or otherwise manipulate and use animals” then that lets plant crops reliant on e.g. soil nematodes in the gate, but still excludes anything requiring artificial honeybee hives moved about to get it all pollinated, leaving only wild-pollinated crops, which I think might not be very much.
If the dividing line is drawn at “kills or seriously harms the animals” then it’s just vegetarian, with a few extra restrictions (egg chickens and milk cows must be free range rather than factory-farmed, mainly).
It’s not that bees are required to make honey, it’s that honey is an animal byproduct. It goes in the same category as milk and eggs for that reason.
Though there is debate about whether figs can be considered vegan.
@Snowberry
I’m reminded of the 2008 presidential campaign, when people were ringing alarm bells about Sarah Palin’s church being dominionist, and the right-wing got right to work claiming that dominionism was just a liberal conspiracy theory.
My favorite was one Fox News talking head who claimed that dominionism was “something that was made up a week ago,” which was certainly news to the people who had been writing about it for decades.
And of course, now we have a dominionist Vice President and that doesn’t get talked about much because that is one of the LESS scary things about this administration.
@ surplus
The actual definition is, on the face of it, pretty straightforward
But of course the devil is in the detail and people will interpret those words in different ways.
There are many reasons people become vegan: animal rights, environmental concern, health, status, religious tradition…; and there will be as many ways of being vegan as there are individual vegans.
Generally though veganism is about harm reduction. Our mere existence has an impact. To write off veganism because it doesn’t have zero impact does seem, to me, to tend towards Nirvana fallacy.
@Big Titty Demon
That is a good point. I do forget sometimes that it is an addiction. Most of the time I say that to him because he doesn’t want to quite for starters.
I have been mostly vegan for more than 20 years. But that’s the short answer.
The long answer?
But who would listen to all of that when someone’s planning a dinner and asks, “Is anyone vegetarian?”
Sort of on topic: I was wondering whether “plant-based” meant strictly vegan, because I hadn’t been using it that way, but the first article that came up when I googled “plant-based diet definition” says it’s not. It just means eating mostly plants.
Still, word usage changes, so do you think it would be a kind of appropriation to describe my usual eating style as plant-based when it isn’t vegan?
I know this isn’t the biggest deal, but I like to think about words.
…
Oh! That reminds me. MILDLY GOOD PERSONAL NEWS TIME! I just got okayed to take courses as an independent student (at a local university)! I’ve done a BA & MA in English, but I wanted to take a couple of linguistics courses to expand the range of things I can tutor/teach. Also, I find the topic fascinating.
I’m on a waiting list for Intro to Linguistics (fingers crossed) but Sociolinguistics was open!
(And I know, I know, I won’t be so excited when it comes time to Actually Do Schoolwork, but let me savour the moment!)
@Crip Dyke – That’s well-thought-out and makes a lot of sense.
I had a thought, not sure it applies, but
did they mean Vitamin B12? It’s the only nutrient I know of that a vegan diet doesn’t give you naturally (but the doctor might have meant something more specific to you). Would that be in your price range?
(I take Vitamin D in the winter. I don’t feel any different for it, but it’s supposed to balance out the lack of sun for people in northern latitudes. Some people say it helps with them with their seasonal affective disorder. I don’t have that, or if I do, I’ve got in in reverse: I’m fine with Canadian winters but too much light and heat, esp. heat, makes it harder to focus & sleep. Case in point – it’s 1:44 AM here. I will endeavour sleepitude.)
@ epitome
Not necessarily.
Ah, then you might appreciate the semantics.
Although ‘plant-based’ is often used as a synonym for a vegan diet; the terms aren’t really interchangeable. Not all plant based diets are vegan; and (arguably) not all vegan diets are plant based. It’s all about definitions; and of course it’s axiomatic that English is ‘descriptive not prescriptive’; so people use the terms in different ways.
Vegans often use ‘plant based diet’ to highlight that veganism is a whole lifestyle/philosophy; of which the diet is just one part. Although as ‘diet’ originally meant ‘way of life’ we’ve come full circle I guess.
Some nutritionists use plant based to describe veganism and vegetarianism; but also possibly diets that include some meat, but only in limited amounts. Often though it’s only wholefood plant based that they’ll count. So a diet that’s just Oreos and Doritos wouldn’t count; even though that’s vegan/veggie.
A plant-based diet is to eat mostly plants, generally only lightly processed. Eating bread all day wouldn’t really fit what’s generally meant, but an occasional ham sandwich fits fine. Source: my dietician ex.
I’m fairly strictly vegetarian, mostly for texture/taste (I don’t like the texture and secondarily the taste of meat). Some mushrooms I dislike the same way, and I don’t like fake meat. By happy accident it’s a much cheaper way to eat, if you have a kitchen (which I usually have).
Later I started to better understand the implication of meat mass production (which is how you make meat cheap). It’s pretty awful in a lot of ways, particularly beef. Global warming impact, the need to plow vast fields to feed the animals (we could use a small fraction of those fields to feed ourselves), the farm runoff (those E.coli outbreaks in spinach? It’s from pig and cow shit), the mistreatment of animals, the mistreatment of meat factory workers, etc.
That said, if you don’t have access to a well-equipped kitchen, you pay a lot more for all your food, and now meat often ends up cheaper than veggies — particularly in food deserts. So there’s some privilege to being among those able to save money being vegetarian.
@Alan, numerobis – thanks for the insights!
I don’t usually eat meat when I’m cooking/buying for myself – in Quebec at least it’s cheaper not to – but haven’t been strictly vegetarian since 2010-2011. But now I’m trying to avoid meat as well as plastic…well, I don’t eat plastic…you know what I mean 😛
In case I can be mildly useful, if anyone’s still reading this thread, here are some of my favourite non-meat protein foods:
>Eggs – middling to expensive if free-range/local, obviously not vegan, but lots of different proteins/vitamins and ways to cook.
>Lentils – cheap, versatile, good for soup and stews, can cook ahead of time and keep for a few days. Goes with curry mixes, oregano, onions…
>Red (kidney) and black beans – pretty cheap, I have a good recipe for bean salad with corn, red and green peppers, & cilantro. (But red beans make a lot of people gassy if they eat a lot.)
>Quinoa – Not as cheap but not super expensive? I get this in restaurants sometimes and consistently forget to buy it. It doesn’t look to hard to cook.
>Peanuts/peanut butter – Cheap! I try not to eat this on the bus, though, in case someone’s allergic.
>Walnuts – Not as cheap! A bit bitter by themselves, but good chopped up & put in salads and fried rice and stuff.
>Pistachios (dry roasted, no salt) – Expensive! But very tasty! Can also chop up and put in other things.
>Pecans – Ridiculously expensive! Eating them by themselves makes my mouth dry! Why am I even writing about them? (Because there’s a pumpkin bread recipe that they taste really good in.)
As for tofu, I don’t hate it, but I don’t eat it much.
RE: meat, I’m not sure if I would ever be able to stop eating it. I’m a pretty picky eater and most of the foods I like are ones that contain meat. However, if you gave me some potatoes I could probably make myself a different meal for every day of the week.
I think the best way to work on our meat problem without stopping meat altogether is to focus on farming chickens and other fowl. Chickens are very space and feed efficient and the unfertilized eggs make a great substitute for full-on meat. Additionally, pretty much the only more protein-efficient type of meat than chicken is fish. I come from a pretty rural area and did some agriculture work with the local 4-H and FFA when I was in school. A flock of about 20-30 chickens can live comfortably in roughly the same amount of space that we use for two cows.
I think it’s a good idea to cut down on animal products, but not a good idea to try and pressure people into becoming strict vegans or even strict vegetarians. Most people aren’t going to be willing or able to be a dedicated vegan, but almost everyone can drop a few products or limit the number of days they eat meat, or whatever works for them. Although I’m not judging people who for whatever reason can’t alter their diet.
I’m mostly pescatarian (sp?). I eat fish twice a week. I don’t worry too much about whether a soup or a sauce contains small amounts of meat product, like chicken stock, but otherwise don’t eat red meat or poultry. I stopped buying leather products and get vegan shampoo (Garnier Fructis is vegan, so you don’t have to go fancy, you can easily find vegan shampoo in the drug store). I can’t give up cheese. I love it too much. Same goes for butter and egg to a lesser extent. And I need to eat a little bit of fish or I start to feel crappy. I’m not sure why, but eating some fish makes a big difference to me.
I consider myself an “opportunitarian”. I don’t prepare meat for myself. If for every meal I cooked my own food, I would be vegetarian. However, if I go to someone else’s house, or an event, and I am offered food that contains meat, I won’t turn it down. When visiting restaurants, it generally depends if there’s a decent vegetarian option available. I’ve been trying to cut down on the amount of dairy and eggs that I use in the food I personally prepare.
I see this ‘only gay men use shopping bags’ notion as a symptom of left wing academics with too much time on their hands.
It is popular in the dimmer regions of the press because it reenforces the narrative that heterosexual men are (nature hating) Neanderthals. This is an advertiser friendly theme because women have greater spending power than men and for this reason more advertising is directed at women.
I would advise we ignore this trollish nonsense!