Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home. The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”
If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese. Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.
Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)
Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.
From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.
the portions in family restaurants (as opposed to haute cuisine types) are designed so that no one goes away hungry.
volume IS very much a part of the american hospitality tradition, and Nobody Leaves Hungry is important. but you have to recognize that it’s not how we cook for ourselves, it’s how we welcome guests and strengthen community ties.
so in order to give you a celebratory experience and make you feel welcomed, family restaurants make the portions big enough that even if you’re a teenage boy celebrating a hard win on the basketball court, you’re still going to be comfortably full when you leave.
of course, that means that for your average person with a sit-down job, who ate a decent lunch that day, it’s twice as much as they want or more. that’s ok. as mentioned above, taking home leftovers is absolutely encouraged. that, too, is part of american hospitality tradition; it’s meant to invoke fond memories of grandma loading you down with covered dishes so you can have hearty celebration food all week. pot luck church basement get-togethers where the whole town makes sure everybody has enough. that sort of thing. it’s about sharing. it’s about celebrating Plenty.
it’s not about pigging out until you get huge. treating it that way is pretty disrespectful of our culture. and you know, contrary to what the world thinks, we do have one.
If you put a single crab into a bucket, it will climb out and escape from becoming someone’s dinner.
If you put a whole bunch of crabs in a bucket, however, the crabs in the bottom of the bucket will pull the crabs at the top of the bucket back down if they try to escape. Instead of allowing some or all of the crabs to survive, the group of crabs will ensure that every single one of them ends up on a plate.
This same phenomenon is seen in human communities, where it has become known – appropriately – as crab bucket mentality. From the outside, these crab bucket communities might look like support groups, or places to get feedback and advice. But in reality, they are black holes – these are communities where people go to tear each other down, and to actively be torn down in return. Instead of lifting each other up, these communities burrow further and further into their buckets, until everyone is too bitter and broken to ever climb out.
And you might be part of a crab bucket community without even knowing it.
Some online communities are obvious crab-buckets. The so-called “incel” community might be the most obvious example; these are angry young men who tell each other over and over again that they are worthless, unattractive, and that they will never be loved. Lonely teenagers enter the incel community to talk about how frustrated and insecure they are after dealing with romantic rejection, and they quickly find themselves pushed toward hopelessness, violent misogyny and suicidal fantasies. Likewise, the “pro-anorexia” and “thinspo” communities are crab buckets, where members encourage each other to adapt more and more extreme disordered eating, and often invite other members to make cruel comments about their bodies and food journals. Insecure young women (and some men) go to these communities because they want to like their bodies more, and end up weighed down with self-hatred.
But not every crab bucket is obvious.
Although there are lots of wonderful and supportive spaces online for LGBTQ+ people, the internet is also littered with LGBTQ+ crab buckets – especially for trans people. Some trans communities are almost entirely dedicated to discouraging and criticizing other trans people for not “passing”; these communities will pore over each others’ pictures, pointing out lingering masculine or feminine features, comparing each other to “a man in a dress”, or outright convincing each other that there is no point in transitioning, as they have no hope of ever “passing”. Anxious trans or questioning people join these groups to navigate a very difficult time in their lives, only to have their own insecurities magnified and distorted.
Communities and feedback circles for writers and artists can also be crab buckets. Again, while there are wonderful and supportive spaces available, there are also toxic black holes out there, masquerading as genuine communities. I’ve belonged to writers’ groups where every single piece of writing was viciously torn to shreds, no matter how promising it might have seemed, and there were constant discussions about how ‘pointless’ it was to try to get published. Members were so insecure about not “making it” that they frantically tried to crush the hopes and dreams of anyone who might be competition. Instead of producing better writing, these kinds of groups eventually produce no writing at all.
Activist communities are often crab buckets. On the surface, people join activism communities to lift each other up and feel less alone in their cause; in reality, however, many activist communities have underlying cultures of suspicion, gossip, and hostility. Members gleefully comb through each other’s posts and content carefully, constantly looking for any small mistake or out-of-context comment that will allow them to declare that someone is “trash” or “cancelled”. People join these causes to fight back against their own feelings of powerlessness, and often report developing anxiety, depression and panic attacks as a result.
The list of crab bucket communities goes on. Any kind of group can become a crab bucket group under the right conditions; just because a community is created by and for a marginalized identity, it doesn’t mean that that community is actually safe for that identity. As humans, we like to band together in groups to accomplish large goals and feel less alone… but sometimes, we turn those groups into echo chambers for our own toxic ideas, and try to drag as many people as we can down into our buckets of despair with us.
If you’re in a group that you suspect might be getting a little crabby, it’s probably time to leave. Turning a whole group around by yourself is an enormous and thankless task, and it’s not one that I’d wish on anybody. Once a group of people have formed a collective identity around proving why they’re all worthless or fat or problematic, it’s hard to turn that ship around, and any attempts to do it might be met with hostility. It’s okay to give up on toxic communities, and look for healthy ones that build you up instead of tearing you down.
I still don’t understand what that was supposed to mean. Sexually attracted to cities? What?
I think it was supposed to be a play on “metropolitan” fashion, as rendered by people who didn’t understand the concept of a sexual orientation and thought that being gay consisted of looking like Earring Magic Ken.
I had assumed that they were using the “sexual” ending from “transsexual”, implying that it was more of a gender and presentation thing.
Maybe, but I seem to recall all the thinkpieces using gayness as a reference point (and I think specifically Queer Eye for the Straight Guy had something to do with it) The term was coined in 1994, gained currency in 1999 and peaked in 2004; it was popular in a time when “homosexual” was considered a neutral term and trans people didn’t get a lot of discussion in news media at all, except as a “news of the weird” footnote.
From what i always understood it was kinda like that song “gay or European” in legally blonde where metrosexual meant somebody presenting in a way that outside people read more as gay but had little or no bearing on their actual sexuality
Yeah, that’s about an accurate summation, I think!
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used in a way without heavy vibes of “pretentious yuppie with who probably has strange liberal ideas about sex” whether it was for a straight person or a gay person, like it’s always kinda used in media as like a dismissive thing
I always felt it meant “insensible-to-derision,” like, there’s this vast bullying energy always ready to be unleashed on outliers, so Normal People tread carefully and concern themselves with Being Normal. Meanwhile, a metrosexual LOOKS gay, and invites bullying, and yet isn’t gay, therefore by the rules shouldn’t be harmed. This tension has to be resolved rationally, which is work, and nobody likes being made to do work.
I think it’s definitely a class tension, too; the metrosexual is well-dressed and dripping with (alien, city) status, and the bully who wishes to erase that status on a technicality (gay) finds, unpleasantly, that they are not allowed to. Continued evolution of just HOW the metrosexual is sexually deviant and therefore a justified target is imo a resentful response to this situation.
Yeah: it was less men calling themselves “metrosexual” for practicing basic hygiene, and more Conservatives cranking up a culture-panic, to goad society into labeling men who practiced basic hygiene “metrosexual”, to then bully them into displaying the boorish, slovenly laziness that Cons have –out of their persistently escalating fears of feminization going back to <thinkthinkthink> Hell the Beatniks in the 50s(!!!)– have increasingly decided to define masculinity with.
Which reveals the whole game on Gender, really. Not that long ago being able and willing to dress well outside of work situations was an expected, virtuous male quality. The coining of the term, and especially the evolution of its politicocultural use, was Less about noticing a new trend and More about cementing this cultural shift away from defining masculinity by “high class” standards(think Cary Grant or, better yet, George Clooney, as he became a sort of leftist bete-noir culture trope for the Right during this period, specifically because of his insistence on older standards of male appearance) and towards defining it by what the wealthy think of “low” working class people(i.e., dirty, smelly, cheap clothes, ugly, unhealthy). Class warfare can be subtle, and political conservativism being weaponized by the rich, through culture war content in entertainment media, to convince their non-rich fellow-partisans to cosplay rich folks’ negative stereotypes of them, is an excellent example of that subtlety.
“that’s just the way the world works” it literally doesn’t have to be but okay
if anyone ever tells you “humans are just selfish / life is cruel / that’s just how the world is, get over it” be critical of them bc there’s a 75% chance they’re just using that as an excuse for their own shitty behavior so that they don’t have to put an effort into being better, kinder people
i'll apple your turnover 