Dear Men, Food is Not Your Enemy

The other day, The Drama Magnet (I officially renamed her last night for pronunciation purposes) sent me an opinion piece on a topic I had planned to write about for awhile – the manorexic man. Joining forces, we decided to issue a plea on behalf of all the women who are growing increasingly tired of this new breed of male, proliferating the previously safe hetero zone with rapid speed.

Dear guys – dbags, good guys, bad guys, all guys.

Please start eating.

We realize that society is slowly trying to metrosexualize you, marketing you things like Soul Cycle and green juice. That male fashion is becoming increasingly more fun, and that the desire to fit into Acne may occasionally overpower the urge for a burger. (In fact, I blame this entire phenomenon almost entirely on fashion dbags like Hedi Slimane, as well as every man Kate Moss has ever dated.) We have been dealing with these social pressures for ages, we get it.

However, there is nothing more unattractive than watching a man starve himself silly. From what I have observed, it triggers the following two responses from women, depending on their own relationships with food.

If a woman is naturally skinny and body issue-free, it simply turns her off. The reasoning is simple: eating together is one of life’s simple pleasures, and dating somebody who only does it sporadically significantly tarnishes the experience. Additionally, a man who cannot properly care for himself immediately appears incapable of taking care of anyone else, let alone a child. (This reasoning applies to females as well.)

If a woman is not blessed with a miracle metabolism, dating a man who is scared of food will simply awaken her own issues, resulting in a very unpleasant dynamic. She will become reluctant to take off her clothes in front of him, let alone straddle him in a bedroom setting, haunted by the fear of squishing him to death. She will dread situations in which he needs to pick her up, for she does not think that it is physically possible. (Um, that awkward moment when the groom drops his new bride before making it across the threshold?) The look of his teeny Ksubi jeans on the floor will inevitably send her running for the hills, knowing that even one of her thighs wouldn’t make it in.

I once dated a hipster who not only smelled like a gym locker (bewildering, as he had never stepped foot in a gym), but he also had much skinnier arms than me, a fact that he liked to point out on a regular basis. As I lay on his scrawny upper arm, listening to drone on about the ambiguous state of our non-relationship, I would develop unhealthy urges to poke my eye out with his sharp elbow, ending the misery then and there. I prayed to God that we would never get into any sort of street fight, for I knew that our chances of getting out alive would depend exclusively on my own meager self-defense skills.

And so, on behalf of all the women of the world who cannot make it to Kate Moss size and hence pull off a dating portfolio of gaunt rock stars.

Dear guys – dbags, good guys, bad guys, all guys.

Please start eating.