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In Japan, ‘carnivorous women’ and ‘herbivorous men’ are less to do with what’s on people’s plates, and more about what the different genders can bring to the table. Is this a reclamation of women’s right to consume in a free market, or is it yet another iteration of patriarchal capitalism?
You may have already heard about the online Women’s Carnivore Tribe. Maybe you’re partial to a steak or 2 yourself, maybe you’re passionate about protein, or perhaps you too don’t want to waste any more time on regular bowel movements.
If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, it’s an online community for meat-eating women to share recipes, advice, and anecdotes.
While the idea may seem a little intense for some people, the theoretical basis is simple enough: women ought to have the same access to alimentary resources, and a space to talk about it, as men. On paper, a woman’s consumption habits and her love life don’t seem to have too much in common.
That is, until you find yourself on the East Asian side of the internet. In Japan, to be a ‘carnivorous woman’ has wholly different connotations, and has nothing to do with what women have on their plate.
The East Asian response to the western world’s ‘Girl Boss’ stereotype, carnivorous women in Japan give ‘bringing home the bacon’ a wholly different connotation. These women supposedly prioritise work and money over motherhood and relationships.
They are labelled ‘carnivorous’ due to a perception that these women ‘devour men’ (figuratively). Not in the ‘She Ate’ house down boots kind of way, but more in a ‘she eats men up and spits them out’ kind of thing.
Straight off the bat, this has obvious and alarming connotations for the perception of binary gender roles within heterosexual relationships. The idea that one must be the consumer whilst the other is consumed fosters a rhetoric of domination and subjugation within modern-day relationships.
Whilst historically this has often placed the man above the woman, the idea of consumable men, known as ‘herbivorous men’ in Japanese culture, flips the script. What this new narrative doesn’t consider, however, is the possibility that both participants could be both and neither, and that this distinction may be more arbitrary than mutually exclusive.
According to Maki Fukasawa, a ‘herbivorous man’ is one who is ‘gentle, quiet, and soft’. He typically does not have traditional ‘manly’ characteristics such as aggressiveness and sexual dominance. Instead, he treats women not as sex objects but as friends. He does not care whether he has a girlfriend or not, and he likes the same things women like, such as cooking and eating cake. If you can imagine such horror!
One of the most popular iterations of this figure is Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, a member of the popular group SMAP, before they disbanded in 2016. Kusanagi became a feminine icon at the same time that British bands like the Rolling Stones were positioning themselves as firm iterations of masculinity through rock music, a male-dominated genre of music.
As a result, Japan’s carnivorous women are cast, of course, as the predatory antithesis to Japan’s response to the ‘soy boy’.
According to an article in Japan Today, which essentially gamifies Japanese men based on their proximity to women, Carnivorous Men (Nikushoku Danshi) are those who actively seduce women thanks to their strength and reliability. By contrast, herbivorous men tend to be ‘shy about relationships’.
Rather than pursuing a prospective girlfriend, they do genuinely believe men and women can be friends without an ulterior motive. Of the 400 single men around 30 years old who were surveyed in Japan, 3 quarters are believed to be ‘Soshoku Danshi’.
There are even Pescatarians (Gyoshoku Danshi), which can be further subdivided into categories such as the ‘teriyaki’, ‘boiled fish’, and even the ‘Meuniere’ type depending on how patient, outgoing, or narcissistic they are.
These men tend to wait for women to fall in love with them before pursuing any attraction. Rolled Cabbage Men (Rolled Cabbage Danshi) are more low-key but can turn into Nikushoku Danshi when on a date with a woman, whilst Creamy Fanshi have a soft sweet exterior with an apparently uber masculine priority. And the list goes on.
While masculinity, especially within the manosphere, seems intent on defining men’s ‘masculinity’ in relation to their ability to dominate or subjugate women, the carnivorous women stereotype sees women entering the worst kind of male spaces.
While they’ve graduated from girlhood to womanhood through their internet personality categorisation, this has only led to their further subjugation, in the same way that men are categorised in relation to other men.
