My initial inspiration for becoming a vegetarian was simple: eating animals is not essential to living a healthy life and I would prefer to avoid engaging in a discordant relationship with animals non-humans and nature. world. Until now, I have been an avid and indiscriminate consumer of non-human animals, often equipped with leather shoes and wrapped in my winter wool each year. Now the family anticipated and feared my capricious dietary demands and envisioned the emaciated shell of a once healthy son toiling at paltry tasks. Friends taunted me with skewers and sushi. Others closely monitored my behavior for fear that I would step on an insect or unintentionally ingest fleshly foods. While I was hardly perturbed by such petty adversity, I was perplexed by a former acquaintance's zealous affront: "Eat your vegetables, you hippie faggot!" Likewise, a colleague once jokingly remarked that my abstaining from sharing part of a chicken with him made me a sissy. The revelation that not only did others find my vegetarianism amusing, but also indicative of my sexuality and subordinate masculinity was disturbing. The feminization of mainstream culture and the concomitant derision of vegetarian men became all too clear to me while watching an episode of South Park at the request of a friend. In "Fun With Veal," Trey Parker and Matt Stone portray Ms. Choksondik's fourth grade class in a field. trip to a “concentrated animal production operation”. To the children's dismay, they discover that the calf is slaughtered, anemic, "little cows" ("Fun With Veal"). Provoked by compassion, Stan, Kyle, Butters and Cartman decide to save the calves from imminent slaughter and offer them shelter in Stan's room. The press soon catches wind of the boys' audacity......middle of the paper......interprets a number of Hardee's and Burger King advertisements advocating animal consumption as indicative of cultural anxiety broader resulting from ever-broader masculine ideals. demonstrated by the popularization of metrosexual masculinity in recent years: the use of beef consumption as an evocation of retrograde masculinity, celebrating masculine norms challenged by metrosexuality and domestic participation, testifies to the vitality of cultural beliefs existing on meat as an appropriate male food that achieves virility through the exclusion of women. (Buerkle 88).Buerkle asserts that growing gender egalitarianism threatens "men's privilege and creates anxiety among some men as their status changes." […] Allusions to retrograde masculinity [in hamburger ads] boost men's self-esteem amid masculinities fluctuating more rapidly than before” (Buerkle 89).