Eric S. Raymond noticed something:

I’ve been experiencing intense cravings for red meat recently as a result of shooting semaglutide for weight loss. It seems my body is demanding that I spend more of my limited intake of calories on protein.

As a result I’ve been thinking a lot about meat hunger. Some facts I’ve known for a long time, and others I’ve only recently learned, are falling together into new patterns.

I’ve previously told on X the story of how my wife noticed that taking me out for a steak periodically is a good way to keep me from becoming grumpy and depressive, and promptly instituted a household custom of bi-weekly steak nights.

It’s not just me. Dieticians are well aware that men crave meat more than women do. This is generally, and quite reasonably, thought to be because men have larger volumes of bulk muscle to maintain – this feeds directly into a demand for more protein and amino acids.

In cultures across the world, hunting and cooking and eating meat are male-coded behaviors. This association goes clear back to Paleolithic times when early humans worked out how to hunt big game with spears and arrows.

When you hear stories about one spouse trying to cut the household’s meat consumption in favor of allegedly healthier vegetables, and the other spouse sneaking burgers and barbecue of the sly, you never have to ask which one is the wife and which one is the husband.

The languages of hunter-gatherer tribes often have a special word meaning “hunger for animal flesh” that is different from the more general word for calorie hunger. My sources don’t say, but I think it’s a safe bet that these words are mostly used by men.

In every society with an aristocracy, hunting game tends to become a prerogative of kings and nobles. Conversely, limiting the lower orders to a low-protein, low-meat diet is a time-honored elite strategy for keeping them tractable, dull, and even physically inferior to the meat-fed scions of the nobility.

The recent intensification of my cravings for meat has started me thinking about what it means when we are told that we must eat less meat to save the planet. And the facts I have assembled here point in an ugly direction.

The eco-crusaders exhorting us to stop raising cows so they won’t fart methane are demanding that both men and women voluntarily adopt a diet that will make the tractable and dull. And more specifically a diet that will be particularly difficult for, and injurious to, men.

I notice that in every culture we can observe there is a three-cornered relationship among masculinity, meat consumption, and having the status and autonomy of one who hunts meat.

“Eat less meat to save the planet” cashes out to a demand that men become feminized, starved, and tractable. Is this by accident, or by design?

Consider that the other political positions usually associated with this demand are not random. “You will own nothing and be happy”, the same people tell us. No campaign for vegetarianism has ever been linked to a campaign for lower taxes and less intrusive government. The pattern is clear.

I think it’s time for this to be said clearly: agitation against meat consumption has become one front in a war against masculinity and liberty.

Repression is not an accidental side effect of attempting to stigmatize meat-eating, it’s the goal. Perhaps it always has been.

A reply further noted:

smokingwreckage: Also, with a group’s men gone or suppressed, its women are vulnerable. This is just another tribal warfare instinct from people stupid enough to believe they have out- evolved their own humanity

Low protein means less building material(s) not only for muscles, but also for nerves. Protein starvation, if it can be inflicted, is a common trait in brainwashing. Break the body down far enough and then ‘reprogram’ the victim.

Are there individuals who choose to reduce or even cut out meat consumption or have the choice thrust upon them by economics? Yes. This is not about such. It is about the “top down” bit of THOU SHALT (from a non-divine source). The “betters” as they see themselves. You know, parasites.