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In the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there was a specific type of manliness culture. But, as Cracked points out, that culture is gradually dying out. Here is one of five examples of how manliness culture is disappearing:

Red Meat

When a bunch of manly type dudes (or dudes who like to portray themselves as such) came up with the masculine alternative to Valentine’s Day, what did they call it? Steak and ******* Day. And when Carl’s Jr. advertises its huge hamburgers, it knows who to target with their ads.

And once again, despite the fact that I assume women eat meat just as often as males do, in our culture beef is man’s food. Probably because it combines several popular masculine pursuits in one: fire, murder, and dying early.

Hell, in the West, our symbol of masculinity for the last 200 years has been the cowboy, the guy in charge of riding around on horses and guarding our beef.

But Soon …

It’s simple math.

It takes about 50 times more resources to grow grain, feed it to a cow, and then eat the cow than it does to just feed the grain to a human (for example, it takes about 100,000 liters of water to get 1 kilogram of beef, versus about 2,000 liters to get 1 kilogram of soybeans or rice). You lose 90 percent of the calories that grow from the ground if you pass them through a cow first. And don’t shoot the messenger here — I’m no vegetarian. I’ve eaten so much meat that my body is practically made of the stuff. But if you saw somebody routinely take one bite of their food and then toss the rest in the trash, you’d think they were an asshole (“Dude, there’s starving people in the world!”). Well, that’s what you’re doing when you insist on converting your food into steak just to make it taste better. You’re throwing 90 percent of it away, in the form of cow s**t.

But then we have global warming — this is almost never brought up as one of the causes, but the reality is that somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of carbon emissions come from meat production, and beef is by far the worst offender. As the above-linked article mentions, beef produces “twice the emissions of pork, four times as much as chicken, and 13 times that of vegetable protein such as beans, lentils, and tofu.” Oh, look, there’s the “T” word. Quick, go to a steak place, find a masculine-looking dude, and suggest that he eat tofu instead. I will bet you a thousand dollars he’ll reply something to the effect of “What, you think I’m gay?” See, because society has told him that Beef = Bro.

So while worldwide this trend is still going in the other direction as developing nations are getting their first taste of beef (consumption in China is skyrocketing), in the U.S. you can already see the curve going the other way — we’ve been eating less meat for a decade now.

Some of that is for health reasons, and that’s another element of it — where you see lots of red meat, you also see lots of heart disease, and along with that comes hundreds of billions in health care costs. And just as with the car accident statistics I mentioned above, that’s where it really starts to matter — these things tend to stick around in the culture right up until there’s more money in opposing them than supporting them. At that point, they’ll go to work making it socially unacceptable, like how you can watch old movies now and think it’s weird to see everyone smoking indoors.

Full story at Cracked.

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