Food This article is more than 5 years old

Eating bananas whole is ... gay? Fragile masculinity's bizarre new 'hetiquette'

This article is more than 5 years oldArwa Mahdawi

Rapper Wiz Khalifa’s insistence that ‘you gotta break it in pieces, bro’ is but one example of gender expectations affecting food

Rapper Wiz Khalifa thinks heterosexual men shouldn’t eat bananas straight out of the peel. Khalifa shared his fruity thoughts on the Breakfast Club radio show earlier this week, telling host Charlamagne Tha God that men should break their bananas into little bits. It’s simple “hetiquette”.

“If you bite into a banana, you sus,” Khalifa said. “Sus” is slang for suspect, and in this instance, seems to be implying that eating a banana whole is a gay thing to do.

When Charlamagne protested “it’s just fruit”, Khalifa doubled down on his assertions. “You gotta break it in pieces bro … gotta break the banana in half. I’m just trying to help you out, bro. If you’re in public, just break it into pieces.”

Khalifa’s comments haven’t gone down well on the internet, with a lot of people pointing out that being afraid that eating a banana makes you look “gay” is the very essence of toxic masculinity.

Khalifa isn’t the only celebrity to have demonstrated, via food, just how fragile their masculinity is. In 2016, Richard Hammond, a very manly, very heterosexual man who drives fast cars on the Amazon motoring show The Grand Tour, said he didn’t eat ice-cream: “It’s something to do with being straight.”

🤗 hello & here's the full richard hammond 'ice creams are gay' piece and yeah, it's awful pic.twitter.com/JhDisRsc1Q

— ollie cole (@ProducerOllie) December 26, 2016

Hammond served these bizarre thoughts up to a live studio audience who applauded him. He then continued: “Ice-cream is a bit – you know. There’s nothing wrong with it, but a grown man eating an ice-cream – it’s that way, rather than that way …”

After facing a backlash for his comments, Hammond said he didn’t know what the big deal was. “When I hear of people in the media coming out, I think, why do they even feel the need to mention it? It is so old-fashioned to make a big deal of it. That isn’t even an interesting thing to say at a dinner party any more.” Facts disagree with Hammond’s feelings: LGBT students are two to three times more likely to be physically assaulted or threatened at schools than their straight peers. Despite great strides in LGBT acceptance, a 2017 report found that rates of homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools are at an “unprecedented high”.

Do real men eat quiche?

Khalifa and Hammond may be more outspoken about their views on how gender connects with food than the average person, but research has shown that men edit their food and drink choices every day to conform to gender expectations.

A 2010 study, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, found that when men have to make a snap decision about what they consume, they choose whatever their intrinsic preference is, even if it’s coded “feminine”. They’ll opt for that tasty pink drink at the bar instead of a more manly-seeming whiskey, for example.

When men have more time to consider a decision, however, they start thinking about the social implications of transgressing gender norms, and choose something that conforms more to a masculine gender identity. They’ll order the whiskey even if that isn’t really what they want.

James Wilkie, assistant professor of marketing at University of Notre Dame, who co-authored the study, explains that women aren’t as sensitive about making appropriate choices because they’re not penalized in the same way that men are. “If anything,” says Wilkie, “a woman might get compliments if she orders a more manly drink at the bar.” We live in a culture which rewards acting in stereotypically ‘male’ ways and punishes ‘female’ behaviour. Sad as it may be, this extends to the manner in which you eat a banana.

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