Advertisements before Valentine’s Day urged consumers to put “man” back in “romance,” by promoting products such as a heart filled with meat instead of chocolate. The way to charm a man, these ads said, were give him meat on Valentine’s Day. This is Jerky Heart:
What’s depressing is that “Today” saw this worth talking about. Popular culture continually reifies the association of masculinity and meat eating.
Or over at “Manly Man” one could order beef jerky bouquets. Many of these were sold out for Valentine’s Day.
Here’s what they look like:
And so the sexual politics of meat is expressed in new commodities whose purpose is to reassert that manly men eat meat. The world is changing, becoming more gender fluid, but not here. Ironic isn’t it that manliness is so temporary and unstable that it has to be reasserted through its association with meat even on a day symbolic of love and relationship.