What is neurotic eating behavior is to drink a cup of coffee as your meal of the day, and say you feel guilty about eating anything else, and also feel guilty about even watching someone else eat. Whatever the reasons, that to me says there are some deep-seated issues going on, and it’s probably best not to get romantically involved with such a person.

As long as your clothes are clean, you’re clean, and you have a good attitude, why does it matter that wear size 2s or size 12s? Or that you buy your clothes from Goodwill or off the racks at Macy’s? I’ve worn basically the same kinds of clothes since early high school. I not very fashionable, I will readily admit that. But I want people to know me for my mind more than what I wear, or eat. If I have to look a certain way or eat a certain way for someone to listen to me, then I will just find someone else to talk to.

I find it very odd that anyone thinks this much about what they or their date eats early on in a relationship and find it hard to believe that they actually do. Surely this article is silly season column inch filling material - no woman or man I know would give a flying hoot.

Personally I’ve never known any man to do this, let alone even heard of such a thing. leapfrog, do you have real, verifiable proof that this actually occurs or is another urban myth going around in feminist circles?

As for the whole ‘meat vs. veggie/vegan’ thing, I think what this represents is more of a ‘I’m-not-a-self-obsessed neurotic’ reaction to the stereotypes presented in women’s magazines, etc. Which by the way, are written by and for women, so trying to link it to men, ‘the patriarchy,’ etc., is nothing short of ridiculous. Unless of course you want to suggest that Oprah et al. are ‘misogynist tools of the patriarchy’ or other such nonsense.

clean up your own house and stop trying to blame this stuff on men.

Does any real people actually consider this sort of thing on a date?? I mean surely the only extra criteria one would have when choosing food for a date would be potential for embarrassment, ie maybe you’d avoid a messy spagetti sauce etc

Really - is there nothing happening in America?

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2007/08/09/red_meat/index.html

I don’t agree with everything she writes, but this assessment is, I think, spot-on. The whole article is sexist as hell because what it really boils down to is women choosing what to eat on a date as “strategy” for “catching a man.” It does us as a gender no good to trade the presumably sanctimonious salad for a lusty chunk of steak if, in the end, the bottom line is choosing to eat something based on the impression we think it will make on the man we are with. (Especially if what we eat will only be seen as a positive reflection upon us if we are able to eat it while remaining effortlessly thin, because to be un-thin is to fail at pleasing the man.)

You have every right as a vegan to be offended at the assumptions made in this article about people who eat meat vs. people who don’t, with those who don’t characterized as wimpy, weak and neurotic, and with the assumption that men are all meat-eaters who want a woman who is one, too. But as a woman, what offends me far more is that I have been handed yet another piece of “trend journalism” that adds to the drip, drip, drip of stories out there that confirm for me that women haven’t come all that far in the past few decades…that if anything we’ve had a setback…because now it’s OK for us to eat meat on a date, but why? Only because it will, supposedly, make men think we are tigers in bed who can’t wait to rip off our clothes and ravish them.

If we are thin, the thought of this will thrill them to death…but, if we’re not, it will terrify the crap out of them.

Once again, it’s all about what men want…much like the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which was supposedly about freeing both men and women to follow their sexual appetites without shame, but proved to suit men more than it did most women. How many women feel pushed into having sex with a man during that era, when when they didn’t want to, because they were afraid of appearing “uptight” and “repressed” and “frigid”?

I only hope this doesn’t start a trend of women downing meat on dates whether they want to or not, just because they’re afraid of appearing “weak” if the idea of a juicy steak doesn’t turn them on.