There’s a pattern that becomes impossible to ignore once you step back: meat isn’t just sold as food. It’s sold as masculinity, as nationalism, as cultural conformity. And when challenged, defenders of the status quo double down, not only to keep animals as commodities but to keep people locked inside a rigid social order.
Meat as a Marker of Power
For decades, researchers have documented the way meat-eating is coded male. Salad is for women, steak is for men. Vegetarianism is dismissed as “feminine.” Veganism, as one study put it, is the ultimate antagonist to meat, and therefore to masculinity itself.
That isn’t accidental. From advertising campaigns to political slogans, meat is portrayed as hearty, strong, and essential. Men who eat less of it are ridiculed as weak, emasculated, or, in today’s rightwing vocabulary, “soy boys.” Carol J. Adams called this dynamic the sexual politics of meat: eating animals as an act that reinforces the gender binary and patriarchal dominance.
When Politics Weaponises Meat
This symbolism has been supercharged in US politics. During the 2024 elections, Republican candidates funded by cattle groups ran grotesque ads comparing transgender people to castrated cattle. The language wasn’t medical, it was metaphorical, a crude attempt to use meat imagery to dehumanise people and defend the gender binary.
Behind these ads were the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association PAC, the Livestock Marketing Association, and donors tied to the USDA Beef Checkoff program. In other words, the meat industry itself bankrolled anti-trans disinformation.
By invoking cattle castration, these politicians both legitimised their own authority (as ranchers, as “real men”) and normalised violence against animals. Their “authenticity” was proven not by facts, but by mastery over animal bodies.
Fragility Disguised as Strength
What these ads reveal isn’t strength but insecurity. As Adams points out, if masculinity were stable, it wouldn’t need to be constantly reinforced with bloody metaphors and animal domination. The fact that political campaigns must spend millions to remind men they’re men by pointing at meat shows just how fragile the binary is.
This fragility extends into culture. Influencers like Joe Rogan fetishise the “carnivore diet” while sneering at soy. Eating the wrong plant, in these circles, risks your identity. That’s not confidence, that’s fear.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Beyond the rhetoric, the material impact of these gendered norms is staggering. A 2025 study from the Grantham Research Institute found that French men emit 26% more carbon than women in food and transport combined. After accounting for calorie needs and commute distances, the biggest drivers were two things: eating red meat and driving cars. Both heavily gendered behaviours.
Women, who are more likely to adopt plant-based diets, already emit significantly less. The Vegan Society has pointed out that men face unique barriers: stigma, peer pressure, and nutritional myths. These aren’t personal quirks. They are socially engineered obstacles designed to keep men tethered to industries that profit from exploitation.
What This Really Protects
When we connect the dots, meat isn’t just about diet. It’s about reinforcing hierarchies: man over woman, human over animal, white settler over Indigenous land, straight over queer, cis over trans. Cattle ranching itself was built on colonial expansion, the violent displacement of Native people, and the construction of a white American identity.
That’s why politicians and pundits cling to meat as a symbol. It reassures them that the world is still ordered the way they want: men in charge, animals as property, difference as deviance.
Pulling the Thread
But the symbolism is cracking. Each time someone points out the hypocrisy, that the same politicians denouncing “mutilation” in gender-affirming care openly celebrate mutilation of calves, the thread is pulled a little further. Each time a man chooses beans over beef, or a family shifts to plant-based meals, the fabric unravels.
The truth is simple: masculinity doesn’t come from eating corpses. Strength doesn’t come from domination. And freedom doesn’t come from propping up fragile hierarchies with the bodies of animals.
The gender binary, like the meat industry itself, survives only through constant reinforcement, propaganda, and violence. And both collapse the moment we stop buying in.