I'm a guy, and whenever I go out to eat with a woman, and I order a Diet Coke, and she orders anything else, the server gives her the Diet Coke 99% of the time. I think of that when folks say sexism is over.

Where I went to University, the quality of the cafeteria food was one of the prime motivators to move out of the dorms and into a place with your own kitchen. We didn't want more, we wanted none. At that time of my life I still ate meat, and I swear the chunks of "meat" served in the mystery stews were composed solely from the fat trimmed off of steaks.

(I did catch the original point of your post, but the "We want more" was just too reminiscent of Dickens not to note it).

It's not rice cakes and Diet Coke. It's so much better:

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/category/chick_food/

we don't give liver transplants to drug addicts and alcoholics who refuse to stop. Maybe the solution is that no one should be be provided with any form of socially subsidized medical care to deal with the consequences of their overeating.

so even apart from the calories EVERYONE should drink diet coke or no Coke at all. Everyone that I know, male and female, who drinks cola of any kind drinks diet, except for a few fat people with rotten teeth who are obsessed with "real" sweetness.

once in a while. Real discrimination is something else entirely.

Interesting info, dick dworkin. Thanks.

Wow, that's a depressing story. Not the student rebellion part, the fact that they were restricting women's food as a matter of course.

I think college me would have reacted to that by looking over at the guy next to me's tray and going "hey, where's the rest of mine?". Where/when was this, out of curiosity? I've never encountered discrimination over food quite that blatant.

I'm loving the wierd assumptions in the comments that women refusing to subsist on rice cakes and salad alone means that they must be fat, or that they'll get fat. And that women being fat is a public health matter, whereas men being fat is just sort of invisible and doesn't need to be focused on.

I'm not really much for poetry, but Rebecca has a point. The idea of woman food and man food is ridiculous. Other than a few specific nutritional needs (eg. women need more calcium and folic acid) there's no reason food should be gendered. And the idea that women just need a lot less food overall is nonsense - how much food a person needs is influenced by overall size, metabolism, age, activity level, etc. I'm kind of a small woman (5ft2, sz 6-8) and I'd be gnawing my own arm off with hunger if I tried to live on the tiny portions a lot of people seem to consider ideal for women. And I know big men who eat less than me and yet are quite noticeably fat. There's a lot of individual variation.

Also ew rice cakes. Salad can be a wonderful thing, but rice cakes are like pouffy cardboard.

Yes there is a lot of individual variation but this doesn't change the fact that the AVERAGE women will be a fat pig if she eats as much as the AVERAGE thin/athletic man. The preferred solution so far is to redefine any women who isn't yet bedridden by obesity as BBW and justify it by screaming about objectification, pleasing men, etc. Judging by the number of angry and obese women with a sense of entitlement that there are (more of less)walking around the strategy is apparently wildly successful. How much good it will do everybody, or anybody, in the long term is another question.

You know, I have to suspect you're applying vastly different ideas of "average" to men and women here. Unless we're talking big differences in height and muscularity caloric requirement aren't all that different for men and women. Men generally need a few hundred calories a day more than women the same height and weight, but it's not like men's needs are double women's or anything like that.

Personally I see a lot more fat men walking around than fat women (though in San Francisco you don't see many people who're very fat in any demographic). In my time here I've encountered a total of 5 truly obese people, and 3 of them were men. In terms of both the chubby/slightly overweight and the genuinely fat groups, I see more men than women. So unless you're working with a concept in which any woman over a size 2 is fat, but men aren't fat until they have a BMI of 35 or above, what you're saying makes no sense.

Double standards, you seem to have a lot of them.

Men on average have more muscle and higher metabolisms than women which makes my statement necessarily true.

I suspect it on the basis that I do not see mostly thin/athletic men and mostly hugely fat women walking around. If you claim to be seeing that, there's something odd going on with your perceptions. What you (constantly - what's up with that?) describe does not reflect the reality in America, which is that most people of either gender are slightly overweight to a little fat, a smaller but significant number are of medically average weight, a much smaller number are thin, and an even smaller number are extremely fat. The idea that most American women are so large they can barely walk is just not true. It's also odd that you consistenly ignore the fact that American men, like American women, are on average a little chunky.

I just calculated out my daily requirement for calories, assuming I'm lightly active (which means not bedridden), and it said approx. 1900. I'm 5'7", so only a little on the tall side of average. I calculated out the daily requirement for a lightly active, average-sized man. It was around 2100. Oh shit, I can eat one less cookie for dessert than your average man, I better watch it or I'll become morbidly obese!!

Also, your perceptions of what being more muscular does to your metabolism are totally inaccurate. Fat burns about 2 calories per pound per day. Muscle burns 6. By contrast, your kidneys burn 200 calories per pound. Hardly a big enough difference to justify men being expected to eat twice as much food as women.