Manjecture #2: Everybody’s girlfriend is a vegetarian.
This isn’t literally true, obviously, but I suggest that it has a general, manjectural kind of truth to it. Hugo Schwyzer, our Puritan friend, recently wrote about a recent study, done by the Newcastle University Human Nutrition Research Center in Britain, which showed that while living with a man had a negative effect on the diets of women (call it the co-habitation 15) "females had a positive influence on the diets of the males.” Hugo writes:
That’s intriguing. Culturally, we teach women to monitor the health of their male partners. Men are generally permitted, even encouraged, to be somewhat irresponsible about their diets. Attention to food preparation and to nutrition is traditionally considered a female concern. Spend time with many couples, and you will often hear stories of what the guy “used to eat” back in his “bachelor days.” One tangible way to measure a woman’s success at “domesticating” a husband or boyfriend is to transform, or at least improve, his eating habits.
There’s a bit of the old “myth of male weakness” at work here. Both men and women buy into the myth (which is why so many folks don’t think it’s a myth at all). Call it the “men are big babies who can’t take care of themselves properly” topos; men “buy it” because it allows us to be irresponsible, women “buy it” because it offers the opportunity to measure one’s feminine power. A woman who can cause a man to change his diet is a “proper woman”. The worse he ate before they got together, the more impressive her achievement becomes. Obviously, lots of folks don’t buy into this, but the … study suggests that some people still do — and that it has real consequences for women.
In my relationship/marriage, it’s definitely the case that my diet has improved since we started living together. I haven’t become a vegetarian like Jess, but I eat far less meat, far less takeout junk food, and considerably more fruit and vegetables. When we go to the Indian restaurant now, for instance, we typically order saag paneer and malai kofta, two vegetarian dishes, whereas in my bad old sybaritic days I would have ordered chicken or lamb korma (gasp!).
I don’t think that Jess sees my reformation as a gauge of her womanhood, but she definitely sees my reformation–my quitting smoking, exercising more, eating better, watching TV less– as a noble objective of our marriage, and I have very distinct memories of thinking to myself, back before I was all coupled up, that I expected and hoped that my hypothetical marrriage would improve me in these various ways.
On the flip side, or maybe not, it’s become my responsibility, when Jess is feeling depressed, to make sure that she eats, because she tends to eat less when she’s feeling down. And now that she’s pregnant, it’s become my responsibility–both to her and to the baby–to encourage her to worry less about limiting her caloric intake in what would otherwise be a healthy, moderate fashion.
