Everyone, it seems, loves to rag on the Pumpkin Spice Latte — except, perhaps for those who shell out something like $100 million a year on the seasonal offering at Starbucks. But even those who are fans of the drink sometimes feel a little uneasy about making the purchase. Some women worry they might be labeled “basic,” while some men worry that someone might see them drinking a supposed “girl drink.”
Indeed, when Vice sent out a reporter to examine the gender politics of the drink, she spoke with a barista who told her that guys ordering the drink “speak more quietly and their eyes get shifty.” But despite the nervousness, he said, men bought roughly half of all the Pumpkin Spice lattes he prepared. Not such a girl drink after all.
Just don’t tell that to the incels, who disdain both the drink and its buyers, and consider it so much of a girl drink that they see its very existence as a sign that we live in some sort of secret gynocracy where (white) women are catered to over men.
“Pumpkin spice is a prime example of white female privledge,” wrote someone called SlayerSlayer on the Incels.co forums recently.
It’s fall again, and I can’t help but notice that they have PUMPKIN SPICE EVERYTHING. You go to Trader Joes- PUMPKIN SPICE. You go to Starbucks- PUMPKIN SPICE. You wanna buy fucking soap from Target- PUMPKIN SPICE
WHY???????
Cuz of the huwhite womenz. This is fucking ridiculous. Yeah, pumpkin spice is not the worst flavor but I hate being reminded of dogfucking and basic bitchery every time I buy a vanilla latte, or just anything in general.
Dude, I hate to tell you but you are the only one “being reminded of dogfucking” whenever you step into a Starbucks. It’s only incels who are utterly obsessed with the delusional belief that most white women fuck dogs
Another incel suggested the problem extended much further than pumpkin spice.
Starbucks + Jamba Juice + Trader Joes + Whole foods = white foid central.
Rage fuel places to go. I always avoid these places. I make my own coffee or get it from a gas station.
Well, that’s good news for everyone who works at or shops at Starbucks, Jamba Juice, and the rest of his list. I just feel bad for the employees and customers of that gas station.
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“Female privilege” because…men are embarrassed to buy things seen as girly? Isn’t that something that feminism specifically addresses, too??
If it weren’t for that take, I could agree with them somewhat: Starbucks is overpriced for the stuff it has. And yes, trends can be annoying.
Coincidentally, I just got a pumpkin spice latte at that place out of nostalgia for the time 10+ years ago when they were the cool new thing. Let me have my “basic bitchery” in peace! 🙂
@Battering Lamb
Same here. Can we at least wait until after Halloween for the Christmas stuff to go up?
Something tells me the OP took the exact opposite message from “Angel of Death.”
Well clearly you’re just going to the wrong coffee shops then.
Pumpkin spice is basic, but vanilla isn’t?
In high school chemistry class, after we did lab work with esters, I was put off of artificially flavored anything for a long time. You take a foul smelling acid (like, say, butyric acid), add an alcohol, and voila! instant pear/pineapple/wintergreen.
If only it were so easy to convert incels into emitting something pleasant.
Protips for manly men:
If you want to go to Starbucks but also display your contempt for all things feminine, the exact words you want to say at the counter are: “Large coffee, black, no sugar.” The barista will probably say, “Do you mean a Venti?”, to which you should reply, “Yes, a large coffee.” If they insist that you say “Venti”, then turn on your heel, walk out, and go to a 24-hour diner instead. Diners have manlier coffee, anyway.
The best part is that large coffees-black-no-sugar are *always* in season, so you don’t need to wait until October to buy one.
My biggest beef with pumpkin spice is that I loathe all things pumpkin and (at least in my neck of the woods) no commercial outlets distinguish which items have pumpkin (or pumpkin flavor) and which don’t.
Trader Joe’s, I’m lookin’ at you.
I used to spend a lot of time reading ingredient labels and got tired of it a couple of years ago. So nowadays, I avoid it all.
“Meanwhile, I’m just baffled that they keep calling it “pumpkin spice” when it’s not even made with pumpkins. That’s false advertising!”
or what the world has called “mixed spice” or “poudre douce” for the last couple of centuries. I hate marketing departments.
@ tashkat
You call this mixed spice? I can see two flakes of oregano touching!!!*
I’m now tempted to approach customer services at Waitrose with a jar of “All spice” and list I’ve printed from the internet.
*(c) Kif from Futurama
I just don’t like pumpkin spice because I don’t like cinnamon, mint and eggnog type flavors are my favorite when the holiday seasons start coming along. More of a fruit smoothie kind of person myself. But seriously dude, it’s a popular flavor that makes money because like most of the population likes cinnamon flavors.
Naglfar:
I find it darkly amusing to read some independent medical experts on Twitter and see them assess Trump’s breathing from these cues, like mechanics making a sad assessment of a beatdown car.
@Battering Lamb
That one’s not the candy’s fault; time was bananas mostly did taste like that, because the Gros Michel strain was the biggest commercial source of bananas. Then there was a fungal infection and they mostly all died, so now people mostly eat Cavendish bananas. Which in fact taste better by most accounts, but less like banana candy.
One of the things that baffled me while I read Harry Potter as a kid was all the stuff with pumpkins, because I had no idea how pumpkin tasted. They had this big feast with pumpkin-everything, it was apparently supposed to sound delicious and I was just wondering why I need to know that they’re drinking some sort of a vegetable juice now. So when I first heard about pumpkin spice lattes I was well equipped to file them in the “incomprehensible” pile. Hadn’t realised they were such a problem for some.
I guess all the stuff that’s catering towards men is just Stuff As It Should Be. The girl stuff really should be in an isle of its own, just so that regular folks don’t need to see it.
@Lumipuna
Of course, the White House is insisting he’s fine, so if he dies the fans will cry assassination.
Gawd forbid anyone enjoy things. The universe is only fair if everyone is as miserable as incels complaining about *checks notes* drinks they aren’t forced to drink at all.
I think I’m the only one who like banana flavored candy. Y’all can pass your banana Runts, Laffy Taffy, and popsicles on to me if you don’t want them.
I dislike nutmeg, so I’m not a pumpkin-spice fan. I have a six-pack of pumpkin beer, tho. Am I female-privilaging?
(Unlike P-S Lattes, my beer contains actual pumpkin.)
@weirdwoodtreehugger, I love banana flavored candy too. Which is weird because I’m not crazy about the actual fruit. We can split said candy, right? 😀
Any guy part of the right-wing adjacent incel so called “movement” drinking lattes is doing it wrong.
@Dalillama, Battering Lamb, Naglfar, Bookworm in Hijab:
The bit Dalillama mentions is true for multiple artificial flavours. A lot of ‘grape candy’ is much more similar to the Concord grape than to the Thomson Seedless you’re likely to find on supermarket shelves. I’ve tasted cherries in the Okanagan Valley in B.C. that tasted a lot like your typical cherry candy (albeit not as sweet) but that’s one particular variety that has too short a lifespan to be shipped around and sold in grocery stores much.
In several cases the ‘artificial flavours don’t taste like the actual fruit’ is because the fruit has changed due to the demands of modern shipping, handling, and grocery stores. The focus is more on produce that ‘will survive shipping’ and ‘can be sold year-round’ rather than on the actual flavour. Which is its own set of complaints aside from the ‘artificial’ flavours issue.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
I remember doing esters in high school chemistry as well. (Or maybe middle school? I don’t remember exactly when it was now.) A lot of those esters, of course, are actually the same chemicals that ends up giving the produce (part of) its flavour anyway.
Really, I think we as a society need to do more to ‘demystify’ food and make people realize that everything is just chemicals in one form or another. Sadly, there are a lot of people profiting from ignorance. (On both sides in this one: ‘natural’ isn’t always better, and a lot of marketing for ‘organic’ is blatantly anti-science; but a lot of the artificial stuff is also only a first approximation because ‘cheap’ is more important than ‘good’ or sometimes even ‘safe’. We need better understanding and regulations that aren’t owned by the companies invested in them.)
@Tashkat:
More than that — at least one recipe for poudre douce goes back to the 14th century.
@Alan:
I wonder if we could start a movement to convince the racists that mixed spices are fundamentally anti-white because they promote de-segregation.
@ rapid rabbit
I saw a nice tweet on that “what one question would you ask white people?” thing.
“Why did you invade all those countries to steal our spices, and then not use any of them?”
“fellas, is it gay to drink spicy coffee?”
The jury’s still out on that one. What has been decided and entered into the official Man-Law canon is that it is gay to drink tea. Yeah, that’s right, even the kind Captain Picard used to drink. There are no exceptions in the cause of righteousness. Coffee is good; instant coffee’s even better because it strongly implies that you don’t know how to cook; but the best kind is the coffee you get from a bodega or a donut shop, because you don’t make that kind yourself at all: you get other people to make it for you. Strictly transactional, IOW; no sentiment, which is what we want. (Coffee from a diner is a step down because you have to sit to drink it, sometimes even at a table with other people, which implies that you’re not a busy man on the go but a beta cuck with nothing better to do than to rest on his fanny and make small talk like a schmuck.) Coffee from McDonald’s is a total win because of the connection between McDonald’s and Trump, and also because of the fact that no living human being ever voluntarily spent more than 20 minutes inside a McDonald’s unless they owned or managed the place, or it had done terrific things for their community, or they worked there. (What this means is that the McDonald’s won’t entrap you. You’re safe.) But, there are dangers even within the holy precincts of the Temple itself, and in this case the danger is that you’ll weaken and get something other than the basic roast. So, listen up and pay heed: do not, under any circumstances, buy anything which has a vowel at the end, and that means any vowel, and above all stay away from that ‘American’ stuff (in other words, ‘American’ plus a vowel) — that was only put there as a kind of ambuscade. Do not fall for it — it is not a manly drink. (What it actually is, is a weaker version of another nonmanly drink which used to be drunk by poets in black turtlenecks, some of whom were queer. So, let’s not go there.)
Hope this helps, guys; remember, you heard it here.
@Some Chick
This is how I feel about cherry flavoring. I like the cherry flavored candies and the like, but am sort of meh on actual cherries.
@Jenora Feuer
Oh, for sure. Chemophobia is rampant in alternative medicine and health food woo (for instance, Vani Hari aka Food Babe’s insistence that you should never eat any chemicals, ever). Education could do a lot to remedy this.
@Rabid Rabbit
Even easier, point out to them that coffee is typically dark in color.
@bekabot
IIRC Trump eats at McDonalds because he thinks other restaurants are conspiring to poison him. Conspiracies are big for toxic masculinity.
“<i>IIRC Trump eats at McDonalds because he thinks other restaurants are conspiring to poison him. Conspiracies are big for toxic masculinity.</i>”
Well, yeah. A big component of conspiratorial thinking is that the substance of a link (or its meaning) is of secondary importance at best — what matters most is that the link exists. What this amounts to at the basic level is that it doesn’t matter why Trump eats at McDonald’s; what counts is that he does eat there, and that therefore the aspirant to proximal greatness can gain points or mana or whatever by showing up in the same place or eating the same kind of fare. What we’re talking about is magic, not logic, and magic operates not by cause and effect but through influences which diffuse themselves amongst their surroundings and which vein the rude physical world. ‘Because’ is not a good magical word, unless it’s said in about the same sense a four-year-old says it.
@Battering Lamb:
Waiting all the way until October to start with a pumpkin-themed somethingorother is actually better than usual for them. Halloween stuff in September and even late August has been known to happen.
That being said, expect them to have reindeer and Santas all over the place on November 1.