April 28, 2014 • 48 mins
Do women really go crazy for chocolate? Cristen and Caroline unpack the old stereotype of women's chocolate obsessions, one of advertising's greatest confections.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you. From House top
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Caroline and I'm Kristen, and uh today we're talking about
a favorite topic of mine and I was preparing for
the topic of chocolate last night, Kristen by shoving chocolate
(00:27):
Easter eggs one after another into my face because every
year my mother, I'm thirty, my mother makes Easter baskets.
She may one for Kristen as well, don't worry, but
I I feel like I was doing some really good,
hard hitting chocolate research. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's important
to get a little meadow with things and fuel your
(00:49):
chocolate research with chocolate. I myself have also been enjoying
the chocolate Easter eggs your mother so generously gave to
me in my own Easter basket. I don't know the
last time my mom gave me an Easter basket. So
if I tell her that another person's mom gave me
an Easter basket, it might cause a little friction, Yeah,
a little mom friction. So I don't know if I'll
(01:10):
if I'll film my mom in on that. But I'm
a little surprised that it's taken us this long to
get around to women in chocolate, because is there a
more stereotypically women woman good than chocolate? Yeah, other than shoes,
I don't think so. Yeah. I mean it's like shoes,
Kathy comics, chocolate. There we go, and the last two
(01:33):
are basically one and the same exactly. So we got
to talk about women in chocolate because the question I
wanted to know was what's up with the stereotype that
women are just these chocolate craving monsters who, according to commercials,
also really want to have sex with chocolate. Interesting? Yeah,
(01:56):
that I don't think that's been quite proven yet that
we do want to have sex with chocolate, or that
we would rather have chocolate van sex. Interesting. Yeah. I
would like to kick this off though, with a quote
from Kathleen Banks Nutter, who wrote an essay on sort
of the history of women in chocolate in the book
(02:18):
Edible Ideologies Representing Food and Meaning. She wrote, what food
is more easily gendered and eroticized than chocolate. So, ladies
and gentlemen, you're in for quite a treat with this podcast. Yeah,
I um, you know, the based on the amount of
chocolate that I crave. You know, if you were. If
(02:39):
you were to tell me in this podcast, Kristen, that's
something in women's body is whether it's their brain or
their uterus, is programming them to eat more chocolate. I'd
be kind of prone to believe you, because I feel
like I don't know too many dudes who are like
super into chocolate who have to have chocolate on hand. Um.
But I don't think that's we're going to tell you
(03:01):
know because also Caroline, I'm going to go ahead and
put it out there. I'm more of a salty tooth
than a sweet tooth. If you were to offer me
a bag of potato chips and a bag of chocolate chips,
I would take the potato the potato product. See, I
have a weird, a weird thing that I would love
to get rid of, which is that after every meal
(03:24):
that you know, typically include something savory, I have to
have something chocolate to finish it off. Either that I've
got to like shove a bunch of gum into my
face so that I don't go after whatever's chocolate around me.
I've been known to like go through the office just
like lifting up people's bags, like do you have any
I need? So well, this podcast, this is kind of
especially for you, Caroline. It's yeah, it's sounding that way.
(03:47):
So let's go over just a few chocolate statistics to
get an idea of what we're dealing with, because the
thing is, when it comes to women in chocolate and
our desires for it, it seems like a lot of
it is perhaps cultural, because it's a lot more popular,
for instance, in Europe than it is in Asia. So
(04:07):
if we look just in the UK, of women say
that they eat it regularly. But at the same time,
seven percent of British men say that they fancy chocolate. Yeah,
so they're over there shoving cadberry stuff into their face.
But it's not it's not a massive gender gap. Now
maybe maybe women. Could it be that women are just
(04:29):
made out to be crazy for chocolate more so than men,
we'll find out, Caroline. Um. But over in Germany they're
the ones eating the most chocolate, And can I blame
them when they have things like kinder eggs? Kind Sally,
you know, speaking of my mother. Sally is a flight attendant.
She flies to Germany. She smuggles back kinder eggs for
(04:50):
me and has ever since I was little kids, So
I have all those little toys that you put together
that are a severe choking hazard. Basically, your mom gives
you the best candies, Caroline, my mom is the Easter Bunny. Yeah.
But moving away from Eastern looking, just at Valentine's Day,
Americans purchased more than sixty million pounds of chocolate for
(05:11):
February fourteenth alone, and more than sevent of that chocolate
will be given by men to women. So with that,
you're starting to see what we'll talk about a lot
more in terms of this gendered economy of chocolate buying
and bestowing. And as far as cravings go, like the
cravings I have on like a ten minute by ten
(05:34):
minute basis throughout the day, women tend to report craving
chocolate more than men do. But again this is mainly
focused on Western women. All those studies like the one
that Kristen sided earlier about showing that there was such
a small gender gap between men and women in the
UK eating chocolate, most surveys do show that there is
a negligible gender difference, but there is a difference in
(05:58):
the guilt we feel. Women report more post chocolate guilt
after eating it compared to men, which I also kind
of would own up to like, after I shove a
bunch of well, okay, maybe way after I shove a
bunch of chocolate, Once the glow has faded, after I've
shoved a whole bunch of sugary chocolate in my face,
then I'm like, maybe I shouldn't have done that. Maybe
it's just you coming down from a sugar high. Yeah,
(06:19):
and I start like twitching and itching. Oh no. But
speaking of those chocolate cravings, just one more aside on that.
Looking at the Western women's chocolate cravings, you'll see a
lot of reports that chocolate is the most widely craved food.
But again, if you that's probably focused on Westerners, because
(06:43):
if you look at a place like Egypt, for instance,
there was a study finding that women and men both
preferred savory and had more savory cravings because it was
more related to their local cuisine, right, And and kind
of along those same lines, I mean, I would argue
you know that that, I mean that makes sense that, uh,
based on what you typically eat, you're going to crave
(07:03):
certain things. And you know, I've noticed the more I
eat chocolate, the more I crave it, and the less
I eat chocolate, the less I crave it. Yeah, and
the more I eat potatoes, the more potato chips just raw, Chris,
It's so weird. She has this whole drawer full of
potatoes and she's rip one out like an apple and
bite into it. My podcasting secret car bloating, constant car bloating. Um.
(07:25):
But before we get into where this women and chocolate
connection really comes from, let's go back in time and
see where chocolate comes from. Because within the history of chocolate,
we start to see how it becomes more gendered as
it moves from its origin in Mesoamerica to Europe. Right. Yeah,
(07:46):
they actually found they I mean, you know, the people
who look for these things, chocolate pirates. Chocolate pirates actually
found cacao residue in pottery in Honduras that dates back
as far as fourteen hundred BC. And just side note, um,
in case you're wondering throughout this podcast, anytime we say kacao,
I'm just going to think of the Portlandia sketch where
(08:08):
cacao is the safe word. But anyway, so, yeah, it
dates back a long time in Mesoamerica and the Mayans
were drinking it by three a d. And when the Aztecs,
you know, like they did conquered the Mayans, they started
taking up the drinking of chocolate as well, and not
only did they drink it, as tech, supposedly ate it
(08:31):
off each other's bodies during sex. They considered The word
for chocolate in their language is something along the lines
of like choco lattle. It's there's a lot of consonants
next to each other, but that basically translates to a
holy fetish. That's how much they liked it. That's so
cosmo of them. Yeah, I can just I'm picturing like
(08:52):
an ancient as tech cosmopolitan. Hey, as tech ladies, you
wanna you wanna get your man going, get some chocol
you want to avoid getting sacrificed this month, it's so
chocolate during sex. So then in fifteen nineteen we have
Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez being exposed to this magical sexy
(09:13):
chocolate for the first time in the court of Montezuma
the second and then by five we have chocolate being
shipped to Europe along with these ideas of its connections
to sex, and very quickly from that it's connection to women.
By the sixteenth century, you have chocolate in Europe being
(09:33):
conceptualized as an aphrodisiac. Right, and one Spanish physician, Antonio
Culminero de Laedisma, I'm sure I said that wrong, wrote
in the seventeenth century that chocolate vehemently incites to venus
and causes conception in women, hastens and facilitates their delivery.
(09:54):
And I just have to that I I say, oh,
is that how babies are? Right? Yeah, if chocolate cause
of conception in women, thank god, I'm on birth control. Um.
But yeah, in Europe, it's it's interesting to see that, Um,
they took this, this this treat or this beverage or
this sexy time making item and they ended up sweetening
(10:15):
it to make it taste better. Because back when there
were all these Spanish explorers in Mesoamerica hanging out with
the Aztecs, one of them described it as a bitter
drink for pigs. But then when it's transported over to
Europe and it's sweetened, that's when it starts to become
kind of a luxury item. Yeah, it's important to remember
that chocolate way way back in the day is not
like the chocolate Easter eggs that you might be eating.
(10:38):
It's super sweet and smooth. It was a pretty intense
food that was often Yeah, I was often drunk. And
Casanova also side notes, supposedly ate it to aid his virility.
It was like yield viagra. Or maybe he just kept
it on hand for all this chocolate loving ladies that
stopped by. Yeah, he just had like a witness sampler
(10:59):
that he could slide. Maybe that was his secret. And
so when it comes though to the gendering of chocolate,
this happens pretty soon after it's imported to Europe. According
to more Rosen Bloom, for instance, who wrote a book
all about the history of chocolate. He says that once
chocolate arrived in Spain pretty quickly you have men drinking
(11:20):
coffee and stronger stuff and women drinking the chocolate. And
this was something too that reminded me of our research
for our episode on gender and coffee. Was how with
the old coffee houses in England it was mostly men
and the women were at home drinking chocolate, right or
how even now if you walk into a Starbucks, you know,
(11:42):
hearing from all of our listeners who work at coffee
shops saying that, oh, the men walk in and they
order espresso or black coffee and the women are ordering mochas.
Exactly interesting. Well, not only was it a gender drink,
but it was also sort of an elitist thing too.
When it made its way to Europe from the New World,
it was pretty much solely reserved for the nobility of Spain, Italy,
(12:03):
and France. It basically became a luxury where dainty ladies
enjoyed it, and they transformed the enjoyment of chocolate into
a highly refined social event. And this is coming from
Jamal Fahim's thesis Beyond Craving, and he points out that
this is sort of the beginning of chocolate as a
fetish that communicates social status and upper class femininity, and
(12:25):
that upper class femininity is going to continue to broaden
its reach within the growing chocolate industry. As you see
in the eighteen hundreds, how chocolate is transformed from this
grittier drink into the type of chocolate that we think
of today. That's a smooth bar that's really sweet. It's
a very tantalizing for our senses. And this happens through
(12:49):
a number of innovations, starting in eighty eight with a
Dutch entrepreneur named Conrad Johannes van Houghton who figures out
how to press those cocao safe word cacao beans to
separate the dry cocoa from cocoa butter that makes chocolate
(13:09):
less bitter and smooth. And by eighteen fifty we have
englishmen Joseph Fry mixing sugar with cocoa butter and making
the first solid chocolate bar. So he's like Joseph Frys,
like the patron saint of of all that is good
and happy in this world. For me, I guess I
should wear like a necklace with his picture on it.
(13:31):
Um More developments come in eighteen seventy nine when Rodolf
Lint of you know Lint Chocolate, invented conking, a process
that also smoothed chocolate, and he actually used a machine
that looks like a conk shell, hence Cleverland. Uh So,
because of all these innovations, by the early nineteen hundreds
(13:52):
you have guys like Henry Nestley or would that be
Onree Nestle, Milton Hershey and others who are in the
chocolate game. And so all of a sudden you have
at the beginning of the twentieth century this growing chocolate business.
And what's interesting too, as we were talking about the
gender of it, if you look at the manufacturing of chocolate,
(14:13):
all those chocolate bars that were eating a lot of times,
especially in the earlier twentieth century, it becomes gradually feminized
as well. You have more and more women working in
these factories. So not only are women becoming the target
consumers of chocolate, they're also often the ones on the
factory floors making the chocolates. So every day it was
(14:33):
like Lucy and Ethel, you're working the chocolate. Okay, great,
I'll just keep that image in my head as well
as the Portland a sketch, so my brain is is
at capacity. There is a darker side, of course, um
to chocolate making, and this is something that still goes
on today in some parts of the world where they
grow cow trees and make chocolate, and that is the
(14:55):
fact that there are child labor issues that that we
rugle with as well as environmental issues like rainforest being stripped,
the soil being stripped of nutrients by planting these trees
over and over again. So that has actually driven some
companies to you know, get into the fair trade thing,
make sure that they're having positive sources for their beings basically. Yeah,
(15:20):
and and those those sourcing issues are as relevant to
chocolate as they are to our conversation on coffee. But
we're not going to focus so much on the manufacturing
side of it, but rather the advertising of chocolate, because
you can actually trace women's history in the twentieth century
(15:41):
in the United States through chocolate ads. Essentially, just by
the way that chocolate is framed really shows women's level
of social mobility and their relationship to men. It's fascinating. Yeah,
it's fascinating because this is coming. You know, this starts
after the Industrial Revolution, when you've got guys like Milton
(16:02):
Hershey making a cheaper, more available chocolate bar. I guess
he's like the Henry Ford of candy, uh, making it
more available to people. And so once it is more
readily available, you have to sell it. You have to
make people aware that it is not something for just
uppercrust elite ladies, that it's for everyone. Yeah, and we
already have these longstanding connotations of chocolate with sex and
(16:27):
romance and luxury, and so what better thing to sell
to dainty ladies. But in the Victorian era, depictions of
women gorging on chocolate in the same way that we
think of today of like, you know, just chocolate crazed
women that would not have been kosher. That would have
totally violated the female norms of the time, because this
(16:51):
was at the time too when women would not have
been you would not want to be seen, like eating
a lot of food like all you can eat buffets
not okay for the Torrian women to indulge in. So
they were supposed to eat more like ladies. So a
lot of times if you see Victorian ads for chocolate,
the women aren't necessarily eating the chocolate in the ads,
but maybe holding it close to their mouths just sort
(17:14):
of tantalizing. If you want to find a good way
to get me to gorge on chocolate, it's to make
me hold it away from my face for too long
before I eat it, and then it's just like cookie monster,
it's just over. But yeah, you couldn't with these, with
these proper Victorian ladies, you couldn't show them over indulging.
You couldn't have them exhibiting any type of desire because again,
(17:36):
chocolate being kind of an aphrodisiac, considered to be an
aphrodisiac tied in with wooing people and whatnot. If a
woman is shown to not only gorge on it, but
really want it and desire it, then it's getting hot
up in those Victorian homes. Yeah. But when you move
into the progressive air, out of the Victorian era, into
the progressive air, you have the rise of the new woman.
(17:59):
You have the suffrage movement taking place. You have women
having a little bit more social mobility. They might be
driving cars every now and then. Yeah, and and the
whole rituals of dating outside the home are starting to
take shape. And so chocolate advertisers are thinking, Okay, how
are we going to advertise to this new woman. How
(18:22):
are we going to frame chocolate as something that she
needs in her life? Oh, dating, gentleman callers, what better
gift for this new woman than a box o chockole lots? Right.
It's kind of like when we talked about diamonds. How
diamond advertising put it in men's heads that you're not
a good husband, fiance, boyfriend, et cetera. If you don't
(18:42):
present a diamond, and then that leads the woman to
expect it and think, oh, well, you're not a good
fiance if you didn't give me a diamond. It's kind
of the same thing in in this you know, smaller scale,
less expensive, but it's kind of the same thing with chocolate.
It's like, oh, well, he must not really like me. Yeah, exactly.
And it's because they're hurting female consumers but ultimately courting
(19:04):
men to buy the chocolate, saying it what better gift
for gal than a box of Chocolate's Johnny, Yeah, and
there is um yes. And they were addressing Johnny in
a whitman's ad that gave me pause when I read
the copy for it, because it sounds so opposite of
(19:24):
the whole idea of of keeping chocolate in the Victorian
area era away from sounding to um sensual. So in
this ad they said, a visit to Pleasure Island is
best when made by a man and a maid, and
together they enjoy the plunder from this wonderful chest of chocolates.
Now tell me that's not one big euphemism, right, Oh yeah,
(19:46):
chocolate as are all euphemism. I mean, even in the
Victorian era. As you get creep closer and closer to
the twentieth century, you see how chocolate is still it's
still sort of symbolizing the physical concer omption that may
ensue after you know, proper marriage and whatnot. Right, Yeah,
I can't believe they were giving chocolate to women when
(20:07):
they were just dating. Well, in the nineteen twenties, you
even have companies like Romance Chocolates just going ahead and
putting it friends center, Like, hey, Romance Chocolates, what else
are you going to get for a for a date
than these? Right? But so in the nineteen twenties, as
you know, women are wearing shorter clothes, tighter clothes. They've
(20:30):
they've shed the bustle and the corset. Lucky Strike begins
advising women to reach for a cigarette instead of chocolate
to keep that figure slim to fit into all of
your new garments. Yeah. This is around the time too
when you start seeing alongside the suffrage movement you also
see the first big wave of a dieting push for women.
(20:54):
And to me this was really significant because I feel
like today, even with all this over chocolate advertising, there's
always still that underpinning of guilt, and we're never like advertisers,
never let us forget that we have female figures that
you know, we're supposed to keep in shape, and so
(21:15):
in the late when this lucky strike ad comes out,
you have women having the right to vote, more freedom
theoretically than ever before. But also too, this is a
time when you're also seeing the first kind of dieting
push for women as well. There's always this balance between like, ladies,
go ahead and indulge but not too much, feel bad
(21:37):
about yourselves, but enjoy yourself, but then feel bad about yourself. Yeah,
it's a terrible yo yo effect. And I mean it
is interesting to think about how like every time women
are on the verge of getting more power in society
and they're outside of the home, all of a sudden
people are like, yeah, but you should probably be thinner
and and remember not to eat too much. Well, that's
(21:59):
the thing I think. Naomi Wolf points this out in
The Beauty Myth, which now is such an old text
but still Uh. The point I think is uh sort
of time immemorial, because she talked about how any time,
like you said, women are experiencing the most liberation, you
have the most sort of reactionary um messages regarding our
(22:23):
bodies of like of dieting, of exercise. So moving from
the twenties Zoe into World War Two, chocolate becomes advertised
as almost a sexual surrogate for absent soldiers, which I
found so fascinating. There was a Whitman ad, for instance,
depicting a woman wistfully staring at a soldier's photo while
(22:47):
holding a chocolate. So it's basically like, ladies, you know,
old Johnny, Old Johnny's off fighting the Nazis, So while
you're home, stay faithful and eat some chocolate to tie
you over. Yeah. Yeah, the joy you get from chocolate
is almost like having sex with a loved one, which
is still the same kind of advertising we see today
(23:08):
of like lone woman, always with a background of billowing silk,
like I don't need anything but this chocolate. Yeah, my
hair would just be all over the place. But moving
into the nineteen sixties and seventies, you know, Chris and
I were just talking about um, that whole control, that
body control of like okay, well, more women are in
(23:30):
positions of power, they're they're taking power for themselves. We
have the second wave feminist movement, but we also, alongside
that at the same time have this whole concern about
health and fitness and how do we advertise sweet treats
to health conscious feminists of this era. Yeah, so this
(23:51):
is when you start to see the entrance of and
I hope this is not offensive to anyone's ear, but
let's face it, their master a tory chocolate ads. Basically, instead,
you could replace a chocolate bond bond with a vibrator
in a woman's hands and a lot of these ads
and it would be the exact same thing. You wouldn't
even have to changed the copy. And you also see
(24:14):
the reentry to of chocolate being seen as this aphrodisiac.
For instance, this I gotta kick out of this. In
nineteen seventy five, High Times, the weed culture magazine that
we mentioned in our Women in Weed episode, I had
a cover story on chocolate as an aphrodisiac because you
have the flow chart of smoking pot plus munchies equals chocolate,
(24:37):
which then may or may not lead to groovy sex, intimacy,
true intimacy. And so here's the return of chocolate being
considered an aphrodisiac. But in the nineteen eighties you also
have the return of it being considered a status symbols
going all the way back to sixteenth century Spain, when
it was considered only for the elite. So in the
(24:58):
era of Gordon Gecko and Greta's Good, you don't just
want to get your special girl a drug store brand.
You don't just want to go and get Whitman's. You
have to get some like crazy boxed chocolate that's a
million dollars to show that you can afford it and
that she's worth it. Yeah, in the nineteen eighties you
see a sixty percent rise in dark chocolate sales. This
(25:19):
is when you start, you know, hearing more about like, oh,
dark chocolate, that's the good stuff. And this is too,
a trend that seems to have continued today as you
see more and more not only specialty brands of chocolate,
but just the hyper specialization of dark chocolate. Two, as
we're being told like, okay, yeah, no, it's actually good
for you. So it's a little more okay to eat
dark chocolate. But then you go to Whole Foods and
(25:43):
you find these organic chocolate bars and it's like chocolate
and bacon, or chocolate and Serrano chilis or something, all
these kinds of exotic flavor combos, and they are crazy expensive. Yeah.
I I almost hate to admit this because it makes
me sound like a really big idiot. But when I
(26:03):
was Christmas shopping back in December. Uh, I was going
through this store and I was getting my niece and
nephew mostly candy for their stocking. It was neat candy.
I mean, it was like kind of fancy, because you know,
they don't like anything that I get them, so I'm
just like, I'll just get them candy. Ha ha. My
brother will have to deal with it. Well. So anyway,
I grabbed this like three pack of chocolate bars because
(26:26):
I'm like, how I didn't even I literally didn't even
have the thought of how expensive could chocolate be? Because
why would I? Chocolate is not that expensive? Right? Thirty dollars?
Thirty dollars. I know, I'm the biggest idiot. Why did
I not check that ahead of time? But I didn't
even think too. It's because it was from like this.
It was all dark chocolate, different types of it, and
it was from like this teeny tiny, like artisan chocolate
(26:49):
place in San Francisco. And I just the regret. I
don't think I've ever felt deeper regret for anything in
my life. And then did you sad eat the chocolate?
I couldn't. I gave it to my boyfriend. I was like,
I can't even like look at this. You just take it,
consider it part of your Christmas present. Talk about chocolate
guilt seriously, but no, I mean I think that the
(27:10):
dark chocolate thing does kind of point to or highlight
interesting aspects of the whole chocolate guilt conversation, because like,
we're supposed to feel guilty, or we do feel guilty
after we eat too many sweets, but then dark chocolate,
like celebrities and magazines are preaching to us that like,
if you eat dark chocolate, it has antioxidants and so
(27:31):
you will never get cancer. But you're only allowed to
have a square a day, maybe a square every other day. Well,
and then how many celebrity interviews with you know, beautiful,
very thin, fit women who say, oh, my weakness is chocolate.
I mean, it's always all these conflicting messages. There's one
thing that Katherine Nutter points out about chocolate ads today
(27:55):
is that the models in these ads clearly don't indulge in,
you know, chocolate fests. On the regular chocolate fest, my
mouth just started watering. I think I need to start
that or maybe never never alburn it down. So from
the nineteen eighties, where we see all of that fancy
chocolate rising to the two thousands, we see this whole
(28:20):
self empowerment message come about, one of which came from
Godiva in two thousand four with their tagline every woman
is one part Diva, much to the dismay of every man.
And I have no idea side note what that means.
I don't get that the whole just also side note
(28:41):
to anyone in marketing listening. If you call me a diva,
I'm not gonna want your product. Yeah, I don't get that.
Who like who? Who thinks that women want to be
want to be diva's? I don't know. I'm sure there
are probably some women listening thinking that that's fun, but
I don't know. I just think it's so hokey. I
think it is hokey. And I think when you have
people like I'm just trying to think of an example,
(29:04):
somebody like Mariah Carrier, you know, somebody who's like a
stereotypically high demand, high maintenance celebrity calling themselves a diva.
That makes me want to call myself that even less so.
But then you're telling me that I am one if
I eat your chocolate and Godiva, which really is like
the gray Goose vodka of candy, like Chocolate Burn, old
(29:28):
chocolate Burn, because you know, you take something that's really
kind of basic and just mark up the price. Just
putting a fancy ribbon or some you know, geese on
it doesn't actually make it worth the price. Yeah, there
was an article, I forget which one it was, that
we read talking about how some chocolate experts, like Small
Gaze of Chocolate essentially tried Godiva and they did not
(29:50):
give it very high mark. Now what did they say,
like a box of sugar had been poured into candlewax
or some something like that, or that it was very chalky.
Just weren't big fans. But I do think it's it's
interesting how there's now that self empowerment aspect. It's like
the men have sort of been removed from these chocolate ads.
(30:10):
So instead of the old dynamic of wooing men into
buying chocolate to give to women, it's now Dove, for instance,
telling us, oh, ladies, treat yourself, you go buy chocolate
for yourself. Stay at home. It's just stay at home
and read the inspirational messages that on the inside of
(30:32):
dove rappers, right, and and give yourself a gentle, you know, hug,
and then go eat some yogurt. But can we talk
a bit more about this guilt issue with chocolate, because
this isn't something that came up in any of the papers,
but what it sounded an awful lot like the more
we read about how chocolate is, you know, basically is
(30:54):
sold to women as sex. It's the one acceptable sexy
vice that women can have, according to society, and yet
there's that guilt undergirding it of like if you eat
too much of it, then boys aren't gonna like you
because you'll have a chocolate belly. It's so weirdly slut shamy.
(31:16):
It's like it's like a candy analog to slut shaming,
where it's like, well, ladies, if you do too much
of that, then boys aren't gonna like you. Am I
am I making too big of a leap? No, I
think it's absolutely parallel. I think there are some very
weird and they always have been apparently, some very weird
(31:39):
things going on with the way we look at chocolate
and think about chocolate. And you know, we have the
Aztecs in the Spanish to think, but um, we'll actually
get into some more ickiness behind chocolate advertising when we
come back from a quick break. When we left off,
(32:00):
we had gone through the history of women in chocolate
and advertising. But one thing that we didn't mention as
we were going through that twentieth century timeline was that
really the main target of chocolate ads, especially in the
first half of the twentieth century, were exclusively white women.
And there are some issues of race and racism and
(32:25):
chocolate that we would be remiss to not address as well,
because you see, for instance, racial anxieties surrounding chocolate going
all the way back to when it was first brought
from the New World to Europe. Right there was this
uh story that mort rosen Bloom, who we saided earlier,
(32:46):
the author of Chocolate A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light, Uh,
talks about in his book about a woman by the
name of Madame de Saveny writing to her daughter warning
her against drinking too much chocolate because she knew of
an another woman who drank it and her child came
out black as the devil. Yikes, yikes, indeed, okay, well,
(33:07):
and and there are all these chocolate anxieties to probably
linked to this early idea of it as an aphrodisiac
and being linked to sex, where oh, if you eat
too much of it, you might become, you know, some
kind of sex monster. But then too if you look
at advertising in the nineteenth century, these chocolate dads typically
(33:28):
portrayed women of color representing chocolate in its raw, unrefined form,
whereas the white women were used to evoke a sense
of luxury and romance, which is very problematic, right, Yeah,
women of color being seen as the workers, white women
being seen as the consumers, going from raw to refine.
(33:51):
There's all sorts of really icky racial things there, which
makes sense because it ties so much into those issues
of class and the evolution of chocolate and how it
kind of became a mass marketed good. And I was
hoping to find more scholarship on the race aspects of
chocolate advertising, but unfortunately didn't, because I feel like today
(34:13):
it's still and maybe it's just just advertising in general,
but I still feel like you mostly almost exclusively see
white women in chocolate ads. Well, yeah, I mean, we're
we're definitely not in any sort of post racial utopia
by any means, especially when it comes to discussing chocolate.
(34:34):
The whole racist thing of calling women of color chocolate
is referring to well, any person of color as being chocolate. Yeah,
then you get into issues of exoticizing and eroticizing people
of color by referring to them as chocolate. Again, didn't
find any you know, deep research on it, just a
few blog posts here and there, mostly from black women
(34:56):
asking like, please stop calling me chocolate because it's all
so notable that it's not like we refer to white
women as vanilla except to indicate how boring we are
when we have sex. Uh. Yeah, Well, there was that
one Cadbury ad that was addressing Naomi Campbell by saying,
move over, Naomi, there's a new diva in town talking
(35:18):
about a chocolate bar. And so that's that's combining. We
already had the diva conversation. That's combining like the worst
of all chocolate ads. Yeah, and she did not appreciate it.
I wouldn't an entire campaign to get them to take
it down, because I mean some people are saying, oh,
it's not you know, it's not racist, it's not, but yeah,
it's it's a it's a little bit racist. And then
(35:41):
there is just the awkwardness of More recently, Ferrero launched
an ad campaign in Germany for their white chocolate and
they're like, big commercial tagline was Germany votes White, so
which Germans were like, Hey, yeah, no, you remember, remember
Nazis and that whole thing. You please don't do this. Ah,
(36:06):
there's some people in some marketing departments somewhere who were
laid off after that. I'm assuming, well, what did you think?
Did you see the Axe Dark Temptation ad? Where I didn't? Okay,
so what happens? I mean, it's an axe body spray ad.
So basically the premise of every single ax body spray
ad is that the guy puts it on and then
he just becomes irresistible chick magnet use the worst phrase
(36:29):
on the planet. Um. So with the Dark Temptation ad,
he puts on the body spray and it turns him
into a chocolate man. And what women love more than
chocolate caroline, And so women start coming up to him
and you know, eating away at his chocolate body, and
then finally it's revealed that oh he's just like, he's
just a white guy under there. But the fact that
(36:51):
it's called dark temptation and it's it's fine because there's
a white guy under there still, you know, just some
just some issues, just some issues kind of all piling
up there together. Yeah, that is that is a pile
of issues. Yeah. Lots of lots of women eating away
at your very core. Yeah, lots of just symbolism loaded
(37:12):
into one terrible commercial. Um. But what though, okay, so speaking,
women eating men made out of chocolate. Yikes, what about
the science of this? Because we've talked all about advertising.
We have clearly been sold this idea that chocolate is
a food for women, that we love it more than
(37:34):
anything else, including shoes. But what does science have to
say about this? You would think, right that science would
have been, like, ladies, every time you bite into a
chocolate bar and you you get obsessed with the idea
of eating more chocolate and you feel addicted to it,
it's because it's releasing all of these amazing things, and
(37:54):
you're it's not really that. It's they've found that there's
not a huge like cause and effect chocolate. Sarah tonin
lank It's probably more that it chocolate is fatty and
sugary and it tastes real good. Yeah, there have been
a lot of studies actually looking at the psychopharmacological effects
(38:15):
of chocolate, essentially how groups of chemicals such as cannabinoids
and chocolate react in our brain and make us chocoholics,
I guess, And the suity results have kind of been mixed.
They really haven't been able to pin down one specific
chocolate craze chemical in there. So it's like, well, some
(38:37):
people really like it and I guess it's I guess
it's good. But there was the study called Chocolate and
Cheese their effects on mood, sort of looking at okay, well,
we know that it probably has something to do with
the fat and chocolate. So if we take a sweeteness
savory like cheese and compare it, what happens and their
best conclusion was that it's proba probably the oro sensory
(39:02):
effect of eating chocolate. Essentially, we like how it smells,
how it feels in our mouth, just all of the
sensory sensations of eating chocolate. The look on your face
right now, Caroline, I feel like you've been whisked away.
I need to go find that Easter basket. You need
to go to Pleasure Island from the I absolutely do um.
(39:26):
Speaking of health stuff, one thing that does get brought
up in women's magazines a lot is if you like chocolate, ladies,
not only are you gonna get fat, but you're gonna
break out. Yeah, what about what about that connection? Yeah? Um,
that's something that I've always been worried about because I
had so many pimples when I was a young girl,
(39:48):
and even now my horm I'm thirty, right, like, I
shouldn't break out anymore, but I still do. Adult actnate
totally exists hormones anyway, So they looked at whether researchers
looked at whether, um, chocolate actually does produce acne, and
again the results were kind of mixed, but they did
find that among the people who broke out, who did
(40:09):
break out and experience acne, here's here's a little bit
of what happened. So after people ate chocolate and then
we're exposed to the bacteria that caused acne, they found
that the blood was shown to have more markers of
inflammation than the people who had not eaten chocolate. But
they're just not sure what component of chocolate actually caused
(40:31):
that inflammation, whether it is the fat or whether it
is the sugar. I mean, we know that sugar causes
inflammation in the body, but they're not quite sure about
the acne link. It seems like that's the story with
everything regarding women in chocolate. We're just not quite sure.
But here have some chocolate in the meantime while we
try to figure this out, let's also talk about the
stereotype of periods making women crave chocolate even more. Yeah,
(40:56):
I I am. I was. I'm gonna tell the truth here.
I was a little dismayed to find out that there
is no scientific link really supporting the hypothesis that you
crave chocolate more around your period, because I swear I
don't know what it is in my brain and the
brain of Caroline Urban Podcast or Extraordinaire. I don't know
(41:19):
what's going on that like leading up to my period,
I'm just like gorging on chocolate, and like as I'm
stuffing the fifteen candy bar in my face, I'm like, oh, Okay,
I see what's happening. But I wonder if it's just
not so much the chocolate as maybe a connection between
menstrual cycles and comfort food. And some scientists say that,
(41:41):
you know, chocolate contains minerals like magnesium and iron, which
we may be deficient in around our period things like that.
All I know is just I just wanted. And one
of the reasons so why this period chocolate hypothesis has
been debunked is because chocolate cravings don't diminish with menopause.
If it was a period thing, then we would see
(42:02):
a massive drop off in women over fifty wanting chocolate.
But that all happens. Well, maybe it's a mood thing,
because I know, like when I'm sick or hungover or
just generally not feeling good, I want comfort food. I
want like fried chicken and mashed potatoes and soup and
like you know, salty, mushy, amazing things that have really
strong flavors um And so maybe chocolate just fits into that,
(42:26):
like making you feel good. Well, speaking of making you
feel good, the one thing that we do know about chocolate,
specifically dark chocolate, is yes, the rumors are true. Dark
chocolate does appear to have some health benefits. There was
a study published linking it to lower rates of stroke,
coronary heart disease, blood pressure, and other cardiovascular conditions, but
(42:50):
in an interview with The New York Times about this study,
finding one of the lead authors said, police, don't get
us wrong. This doesn't mean that you can eat all
of the chocolate that you want. We're just saying it's
a correlation. It's not a causation, right, Yes, antioccidents, Yes,
Gorging on chocolate until you throw up pretty much destroys
(43:11):
any of the positive effects of chocolate. Although I was
thinking about studies exactly like this one when Sally also
gave me a solid dark chocolate Easter Bunny. But no,
don't try to come from me. I don't care. I don't. Yeah,
I don't. I don't feel guilt. I mean I do,
but I don't. But see, that's good, that's great that
you don't feel guilt. You shouldn't feel any guilt. If
(43:32):
you want chocolate, eat the chocolate. I don't know, I
just I'm so yeah, I'm at the point of I'm
just tired of hearing about it. I'm tired of seeing
those weird ads. I don't get it, you know, yeah,
I don't. Uh, it's the same things. Like I'm surprised
there's not more terrible chocolate stock photography. I mean, I
know there is, but you know, the way we see
women laughing over salads, the same way we see women
(43:52):
eating yogurt, like chocolate is in that same ballpark, as
far as like women are so stupid, look at what
you're eating and how you're eating it, and like you're
pinning all of your hopes and dreams on it, whereas
men are just told that they really want a grill meet. Yeah,
you want a hamburger? Have a hamburger? Sloppy? Joe's sloppy.
(44:15):
Joe's not sloppy jays Nope. Well, Caroline, I think we've
now pretty much exhausted all of our chocolate knowledge and
now it's time to hear from listeners. I want to
know if there are guys out there who are also
a self identified chocoholics. I want to know who the
ladies are like me who could care less about a
bag of Eminem's, Give me some dol Rito's please, or
like any kind of chip you get me. I'm saying
(44:37):
savory rather than sweet. And anyone who don't, I don't
know what are your thoughts on chocolate? Let us know.
Mom's Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
email us. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff
podcast or send us a Facebook message, and we have
a couple of messages to share with you right now.
(45:00):
So I've got a couple of messages here about our
new male grooming episode. This one is from Jess, who writes,
in My Dating career, I despise male body hair. I
thought it was just plain unattractive and probably wouldn't have
looked twice at a hairy dude. However, a few years
ago I met a guy and film madly in love
(45:20):
with an extremely hairy dude. I mean his back has
started to connect with his chest. Hair level of Harry anyway,
his hair a nous drives me crazy too, but in
a good way. I think a huge part of what
we find attractive is just what we see on TV.
The unknown is always scary. It's really frustrating because he,
as you mentioned many men are, is very self conscious
(45:43):
about his man for he has even asked me to
tweeze hairs from areas that bother him. Once you associate
body hair with a manly dude who treats you like gold,
it's very sexy. Here's hoping for more hair representation in
the media. Ah and for love and I hope, I
hope that letter makes that gentleman feel better. Who wrote
(46:04):
us very concerned about whether he'd find a date. Ye,
don't worry about your hairy bags. Don't worry about it.
I have a letter here from Gretchen who wrote in
about beards as well, and she said, well, I can
definitely see a trend in the popularity of beards on
men on TV. I wonder if this is just a
trend in certain social circles. Maybe it's because I live
(46:25):
in Alaska that I have never thought of a beard
is something trendy, just something some men had and others didn't.
When I was growing up, my father sported a beard,
and my husband grows when every fall and shaves it
off in the spring. He does this as he works
outside and below zero weather, and it often helps keep
him warm and when spring comes it's too warm. I
know other men up here who also follow this practice.
I like my husband's appearance both ways, so whatever he
(46:47):
wants is fine with me. On a recent trip this
winter to London, England, we did take an interesting notice
of the lack of beards there. In fact, my husband's
caught the attention of one small boy who marveled at
his appearance, exclaiming and pointing. Adam out of pure amazement.
I also think if a man isn't well endowed in
the facial hair department, what is wrong with being clean shaven?
If that suits in better? And then Gretchen has uh
(47:10):
some more comforting words for our harryman out there. She
says on the topic of other body hairmanance, personally, I
like a guy with some chest hair and find the
idea of waxing it or shaving it off because that
is what women like. Silly, so fear not men, some
women dig it. So thanks Gretchen. I'm sure a lot
(47:31):
of listeners out there appreciate your viewpoint, and thanks to
everybody who's written into us. Mom. Stuff at Discovery dot
com is our email address, and if you want to
find links to all of our social media, all of
our podcast, blogs and videos, you should head on over
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for more
(47:51):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com S
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you. From House top
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Caroline and I'm Kristen, and uh today we're talking about
a favorite topic of mine and I was preparing for
the topic of chocolate last night, Kristen by shoving chocolate
(00:27):
Easter eggs one after another into my face because every
year my mother, I'm thirty, my mother makes Easter baskets.
She may one for Kristen as well, don't worry, but
I I feel like I was doing some really good,
hard hitting chocolate research. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's important
to get a little meadow with things and fuel your
(00:49):
chocolate research with chocolate. I myself have also been enjoying
the chocolate Easter eggs your mother so generously gave to
me in my own Easter basket. I don't know the
last time my mom gave me an Easter basket. So
if I tell her that another person's mom gave me
an Easter basket, it might cause a little friction, Yeah,
a little mom friction. So I don't know if I'll
(01:10):
if I'll film my mom in on that. But I'm
a little surprised that it's taken us this long to
get around to women in chocolate, because is there a
more stereotypically women woman good than chocolate? Yeah, other than shoes,
I don't think so. Yeah. I mean it's like shoes,
Kathy comics, chocolate. There we go, and the last two
(01:33):
are basically one and the same exactly. So we got
to talk about women in chocolate because the question I
wanted to know was what's up with the stereotype that
women are just these chocolate craving monsters who, according to commercials,
also really want to have sex with chocolate. Interesting? Yeah,
(01:56):
that I don't think that's been quite proven yet that
we do want to have sex with chocolate, or that
we would rather have chocolate van sex. Interesting. Yeah. I
would like to kick this off though, with a quote
from Kathleen Banks Nutter, who wrote an essay on sort
of the history of women in chocolate in the book
(02:18):
Edible Ideologies Representing Food and Meaning. She wrote, what food
is more easily gendered and eroticized than chocolate. So, ladies
and gentlemen, you're in for quite a treat with this podcast. Yeah,
I um, you know, the based on the amount of
chocolate that I crave. You know, if you were. If
(02:39):
you were to tell me in this podcast, Kristen, that's
something in women's body is whether it's their brain or
their uterus, is programming them to eat more chocolate. I'd
be kind of prone to believe you, because I feel
like I don't know too many dudes who are like
super into chocolate who have to have chocolate on hand. Um.
But I don't think that's we're going to tell you
(03:01):
know because also Caroline, I'm going to go ahead and
put it out there. I'm more of a salty tooth
than a sweet tooth. If you were to offer me
a bag of potato chips and a bag of chocolate chips,
I would take the potato the potato product. See, I
have a weird, a weird thing that I would love
to get rid of, which is that after every meal
(03:24):
that you know, typically include something savory, I have to
have something chocolate to finish it off. Either that I've
got to like shove a bunch of gum into my
face so that I don't go after whatever's chocolate around me.
I've been known to like go through the office just
like lifting up people's bags, like do you have any
I need? So well, this podcast, this is kind of
especially for you, Caroline. It's yeah, it's sounding that way.
(03:47):
So let's go over just a few chocolate statistics to
get an idea of what we're dealing with, because the
thing is, when it comes to women in chocolate and
our desires for it, it seems like a lot of
it is perhaps cultural, because it's a lot more popular,
for instance, in Europe than it is in Asia. So
(04:07):
if we look just in the UK, of women say
that they eat it regularly. But at the same time,
seven percent of British men say that they fancy chocolate. Yeah,
so they're over there shoving cadberry stuff into their face.
But it's not it's not a massive gender gap. Now
maybe maybe women. Could it be that women are just
(04:29):
made out to be crazy for chocolate more so than men,
we'll find out, Caroline. Um. But over in Germany they're
the ones eating the most chocolate, And can I blame
them when they have things like kinder eggs? Kind Sally,
you know, speaking of my mother. Sally is a flight attendant.
She flies to Germany. She smuggles back kinder eggs for
(04:50):
me and has ever since I was little kids, So
I have all those little toys that you put together
that are a severe choking hazard. Basically, your mom gives
you the best candies, Caroline, my mom is the Easter Bunny. Yeah.
But moving away from Eastern looking, just at Valentine's Day,
Americans purchased more than sixty million pounds of chocolate for
(05:11):
February fourteenth alone, and more than sevent of that chocolate
will be given by men to women. So with that,
you're starting to see what we'll talk about a lot
more in terms of this gendered economy of chocolate buying
and bestowing. And as far as cravings go, like the
cravings I have on like a ten minute by ten
(05:34):
minute basis throughout the day, women tend to report craving
chocolate more than men do. But again this is mainly
focused on Western women. All those studies like the one
that Kristen sided earlier about showing that there was such
a small gender gap between men and women in the
UK eating chocolate, most surveys do show that there is
a negligible gender difference, but there is a difference in
(05:58):
the guilt we feel. Women report more post chocolate guilt
after eating it compared to men, which I also kind
of would own up to like, after I shove a
bunch of well, okay, maybe way after I shove a
bunch of chocolate, Once the glow has faded, after I've
shoved a whole bunch of sugary chocolate in my face,
then I'm like, maybe I shouldn't have done that. Maybe
it's just you coming down from a sugar high. Yeah,
(06:19):
and I start like twitching and itching. Oh no. But
speaking of those chocolate cravings, just one more aside on that.
Looking at the Western women's chocolate cravings, you'll see a
lot of reports that chocolate is the most widely craved food.
But again, if you that's probably focused on Westerners, because
(06:43):
if you look at a place like Egypt, for instance,
there was a study finding that women and men both
preferred savory and had more savory cravings because it was
more related to their local cuisine, right, And and kind
of along those same lines, I mean, I would argue
you know that that, I mean that makes sense that, uh,
based on what you typically eat, you're going to crave
(07:03):
certain things. And you know, I've noticed the more I
eat chocolate, the more I crave it, and the less
I eat chocolate, the less I crave it. Yeah, and
the more I eat potatoes, the more potato chips just raw, Chris,
It's so weird. She has this whole drawer full of
potatoes and she's rip one out like an apple and
bite into it. My podcasting secret car bloating, constant car bloating. Um.
(07:25):
But before we get into where this women and chocolate
connection really comes from, let's go back in time and
see where chocolate comes from. Because within the history of chocolate,
we start to see how it becomes more gendered as
it moves from its origin in Mesoamerica to Europe. Right. Yeah,
(07:46):
they actually found they I mean, you know, the people
who look for these things, chocolate pirates. Chocolate pirates actually
found cacao residue in pottery in Honduras that dates back
as far as fourteen hundred BC. And just side note, um,
in case you're wondering throughout this podcast, anytime we say kacao,
I'm just going to think of the Portlandia sketch where
(08:08):
cacao is the safe word. But anyway, so, yeah, it
dates back a long time in Mesoamerica and the Mayans
were drinking it by three a d. And when the Aztecs,
you know, like they did conquered the Mayans, they started
taking up the drinking of chocolate as well, and not
only did they drink it, as tech, supposedly ate it
(08:31):
off each other's bodies during sex. They considered The word
for chocolate in their language is something along the lines
of like choco lattle. It's there's a lot of consonants
next to each other, but that basically translates to a
holy fetish. That's how much they liked it. That's so
cosmo of them. Yeah, I can just I'm picturing like
(08:52):
an ancient as tech cosmopolitan. Hey, as tech ladies, you
wanna you wanna get your man going, get some chocol
you want to avoid getting sacrificed this month, it's so
chocolate during sex. So then in fifteen nineteen we have
Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez being exposed to this magical sexy
(09:13):
chocolate for the first time in the court of Montezuma
the second and then by five we have chocolate being
shipped to Europe along with these ideas of its connections
to sex, and very quickly from that it's connection to women.
By the sixteenth century, you have chocolate in Europe being
(09:33):
conceptualized as an aphrodisiac. Right, and one Spanish physician, Antonio
Culminero de Laedisma, I'm sure I said that wrong, wrote
in the seventeenth century that chocolate vehemently incites to venus
and causes conception in women, hastens and facilitates their delivery.
(09:54):
And I just have to that I I say, oh,
is that how babies are? Right? Yeah, if chocolate cause
of conception in women, thank god, I'm on birth control. Um.
But yeah, in Europe, it's it's interesting to see that, Um,
they took this, this this treat or this beverage or
this sexy time making item and they ended up sweetening
(10:15):
it to make it taste better. Because back when there
were all these Spanish explorers in Mesoamerica hanging out with
the Aztecs, one of them described it as a bitter
drink for pigs. But then when it's transported over to
Europe and it's sweetened, that's when it starts to become
kind of a luxury item. Yeah, it's important to remember
that chocolate way way back in the day is not
like the chocolate Easter eggs that you might be eating.
(10:38):
It's super sweet and smooth. It was a pretty intense
food that was often Yeah, I was often drunk. And
Casanova also side notes, supposedly ate it to aid his virility.
It was like yield viagra. Or maybe he just kept
it on hand for all this chocolate loving ladies that
stopped by. Yeah, he just had like a witness sampler
(10:59):
that he could slide. Maybe that was his secret. And
so when it comes though to the gendering of chocolate,
this happens pretty soon after it's imported to Europe. According
to more Rosen Bloom, for instance, who wrote a book
all about the history of chocolate. He says that once
chocolate arrived in Spain pretty quickly you have men drinking
(11:20):
coffee and stronger stuff and women drinking the chocolate. And
this was something too that reminded me of our research
for our episode on gender and coffee. Was how with
the old coffee houses in England it was mostly men
and the women were at home drinking chocolate, right or
how even now if you walk into a Starbucks, you know,
(11:42):
hearing from all of our listeners who work at coffee
shops saying that, oh, the men walk in and they
order espresso or black coffee and the women are ordering mochas.
Exactly interesting. Well, not only was it a gender drink,
but it was also sort of an elitist thing too.
When it made its way to Europe from the New World,
it was pretty much solely reserved for the nobility of Spain, Italy,
(12:03):
and France. It basically became a luxury where dainty ladies
enjoyed it, and they transformed the enjoyment of chocolate into
a highly refined social event. And this is coming from
Jamal Fahim's thesis Beyond Craving, and he points out that
this is sort of the beginning of chocolate as a
fetish that communicates social status and upper class femininity, and
(12:25):
that upper class femininity is going to continue to broaden
its reach within the growing chocolate industry. As you see
in the eighteen hundreds, how chocolate is transformed from this
grittier drink into the type of chocolate that we think
of today. That's a smooth bar that's really sweet. It's
a very tantalizing for our senses. And this happens through
(12:49):
a number of innovations, starting in eighty eight with a
Dutch entrepreneur named Conrad Johannes van Houghton who figures out
how to press those cocao safe word cacao beans to
separate the dry cocoa from cocoa butter that makes chocolate
(13:09):
less bitter and smooth. And by eighteen fifty we have
englishmen Joseph Fry mixing sugar with cocoa butter and making
the first solid chocolate bar. So he's like Joseph Frys,
like the patron saint of of all that is good
and happy in this world. For me, I guess I
should wear like a necklace with his picture on it.
(13:31):
Um More developments come in eighteen seventy nine when Rodolf
Lint of you know Lint Chocolate, invented conking, a process
that also smoothed chocolate, and he actually used a machine
that looks like a conk shell, hence Cleverland. Uh So,
because of all these innovations, by the early nineteen hundreds
(13:52):
you have guys like Henry Nestley or would that be
Onree Nestle, Milton Hershey and others who are in the
chocolate game. And so all of a sudden you have
at the beginning of the twentieth century this growing chocolate business.
And what's interesting too, as we were talking about the
gender of it, if you look at the manufacturing of chocolate,
(14:13):
all those chocolate bars that were eating a lot of times,
especially in the earlier twentieth century, it becomes gradually feminized
as well. You have more and more women working in
these factories. So not only are women becoming the target
consumers of chocolate, they're also often the ones on the
factory floors making the chocolates. So every day it was
(14:33):
like Lucy and Ethel, you're working the chocolate. Okay, great,
I'll just keep that image in my head as well
as the Portland a sketch, so my brain is is
at capacity. There is a darker side, of course, um
to chocolate making, and this is something that still goes
on today in some parts of the world where they
grow cow trees and make chocolate, and that is the
(14:55):
fact that there are child labor issues that that we
rugle with as well as environmental issues like rainforest being stripped,
the soil being stripped of nutrients by planting these trees
over and over again. So that has actually driven some
companies to you know, get into the fair trade thing,
make sure that they're having positive sources for their beings basically. Yeah,
(15:20):
and and those those sourcing issues are as relevant to
chocolate as they are to our conversation on coffee. But
we're not going to focus so much on the manufacturing
side of it, but rather the advertising of chocolate, because
you can actually trace women's history in the twentieth century
(15:41):
in the United States through chocolate ads. Essentially, just by
the way that chocolate is framed really shows women's level
of social mobility and their relationship to men. It's fascinating. Yeah,
it's fascinating because this is coming. You know, this starts
after the Industrial Revolution, when you've got guys like Milton
(16:02):
Hershey making a cheaper, more available chocolate bar. I guess
he's like the Henry Ford of candy, uh, making it
more available to people. And so once it is more
readily available, you have to sell it. You have to
make people aware that it is not something for just
uppercrust elite ladies, that it's for everyone. Yeah, and we
already have these longstanding connotations of chocolate with sex and
(16:27):
romance and luxury, and so what better thing to sell
to dainty ladies. But in the Victorian era, depictions of
women gorging on chocolate in the same way that we
think of today of like, you know, just chocolate crazed
women that would not have been kosher. That would have
totally violated the female norms of the time, because this
(16:51):
was at the time too when women would not have
been you would not want to be seen, like eating
a lot of food like all you can eat buffets
not okay for the Torrian women to indulge in. So
they were supposed to eat more like ladies. So a
lot of times if you see Victorian ads for chocolate,
the women aren't necessarily eating the chocolate in the ads,
but maybe holding it close to their mouths just sort
(17:14):
of tantalizing. If you want to find a good way
to get me to gorge on chocolate, it's to make
me hold it away from my face for too long
before I eat it, and then it's just like cookie monster,
it's just over. But yeah, you couldn't with these, with
these proper Victorian ladies, you couldn't show them over indulging.
You couldn't have them exhibiting any type of desire because again,
(17:36):
chocolate being kind of an aphrodisiac, considered to be an
aphrodisiac tied in with wooing people and whatnot. If a
woman is shown to not only gorge on it, but
really want it and desire it, then it's getting hot
up in those Victorian homes. Yeah. But when you move
into the progressive air, out of the Victorian era, into
the progressive air, you have the rise of the new woman.
(17:59):
You have the suffrage movement taking place. You have women
having a little bit more social mobility. They might be
driving cars every now and then. Yeah, and and the
whole rituals of dating outside the home are starting to
take shape. And so chocolate advertisers are thinking, Okay, how
are we going to advertise to this new woman. How
(18:22):
are we going to frame chocolate as something that she
needs in her life? Oh, dating, gentleman callers, what better
gift for this new woman than a box o chockole lots? Right.
It's kind of like when we talked about diamonds. How
diamond advertising put it in men's heads that you're not
a good husband, fiance, boyfriend, et cetera. If you don't
(18:42):
present a diamond, and then that leads the woman to
expect it and think, oh, well, you're not a good
fiance if you didn't give me a diamond. It's kind
of the same thing in in this you know, smaller scale,
less expensive, but it's kind of the same thing with chocolate.
It's like, oh, well, he must not really like me. Yeah, exactly.
And it's because they're hurting female consumers but ultimately courting
(19:04):
men to buy the chocolate, saying it what better gift
for gal than a box of Chocolate's Johnny, Yeah, and
there is um yes. And they were addressing Johnny in
a whitman's ad that gave me pause when I read
the copy for it, because it sounds so opposite of
(19:24):
the whole idea of of keeping chocolate in the Victorian
area era away from sounding to um sensual. So in
this ad they said, a visit to Pleasure Island is
best when made by a man and a maid, and
together they enjoy the plunder from this wonderful chest of chocolates.
Now tell me that's not one big euphemism, right, Oh yeah,
(19:46):
chocolate as are all euphemism. I mean, even in the
Victorian era. As you get creep closer and closer to
the twentieth century, you see how chocolate is still it's
still sort of symbolizing the physical concer omption that may
ensue after you know, proper marriage and whatnot. Right, Yeah,
I can't believe they were giving chocolate to women when
(20:07):
they were just dating. Well, in the nineteen twenties, you
even have companies like Romance Chocolates just going ahead and
putting it friends center, Like, hey, Romance Chocolates, what else
are you going to get for a for a date
than these? Right? But so in the nineteen twenties, as
you know, women are wearing shorter clothes, tighter clothes. They've
(20:30):
they've shed the bustle and the corset. Lucky Strike begins
advising women to reach for a cigarette instead of chocolate
to keep that figure slim to fit into all of
your new garments. Yeah. This is around the time too
when you start seeing alongside the suffrage movement you also
see the first big wave of a dieting push for women.
(20:54):
And to me this was really significant because I feel
like today, even with all this over chocolate advertising, there's
always still that underpinning of guilt, and we're never like advertisers,
never let us forget that we have female figures that
you know, we're supposed to keep in shape, and so
(21:15):
in the late when this lucky strike ad comes out,
you have women having the right to vote, more freedom
theoretically than ever before. But also too, this is a
time when you're also seeing the first kind of dieting
push for women as well. There's always this balance between like, ladies,
go ahead and indulge but not too much, feel bad
(21:37):
about yourselves, but enjoy yourself, but then feel bad about yourself. Yeah,
it's a terrible yo yo effect. And I mean it
is interesting to think about how like every time women
are on the verge of getting more power in society
and they're outside of the home, all of a sudden
people are like, yeah, but you should probably be thinner
and and remember not to eat too much. Well, that's
(21:59):
the thing I think. Naomi Wolf points this out in
The Beauty Myth, which now is such an old text
but still Uh. The point I think is uh sort
of time immemorial, because she talked about how any time,
like you said, women are experiencing the most liberation, you
have the most sort of reactionary um messages regarding our
(22:23):
bodies of like of dieting, of exercise. So moving from
the twenties Zoe into World War Two, chocolate becomes advertised
as almost a sexual surrogate for absent soldiers, which I
found so fascinating. There was a Whitman ad, for instance,
depicting a woman wistfully staring at a soldier's photo while
(22:47):
holding a chocolate. So it's basically like, ladies, you know,
old Johnny, Old Johnny's off fighting the Nazis, So while
you're home, stay faithful and eat some chocolate to tie
you over. Yeah. Yeah, the joy you get from chocolate
is almost like having sex with a loved one, which
is still the same kind of advertising we see today
(23:08):
of like lone woman, always with a background of billowing silk,
like I don't need anything but this chocolate. Yeah, my
hair would just be all over the place. But moving
into the nineteen sixties and seventies, you know, Chris and
I were just talking about um, that whole control, that
body control of like okay, well, more women are in
(23:30):
positions of power, they're they're taking power for themselves. We
have the second wave feminist movement, but we also, alongside
that at the same time have this whole concern about
health and fitness and how do we advertise sweet treats
to health conscious feminists of this era. Yeah, so this
(23:51):
is when you start to see the entrance of and
I hope this is not offensive to anyone's ear, but
let's face it, their master a tory chocolate ads. Basically, instead,
you could replace a chocolate bond bond with a vibrator
in a woman's hands and a lot of these ads
and it would be the exact same thing. You wouldn't
even have to changed the copy. And you also see
(24:14):
the reentry to of chocolate being seen as this aphrodisiac.
For instance, this I gotta kick out of this. In
nineteen seventy five, High Times, the weed culture magazine that
we mentioned in our Women in Weed episode, I had
a cover story on chocolate as an aphrodisiac because you
have the flow chart of smoking pot plus munchies equals chocolate,
(24:37):
which then may or may not lead to groovy sex, intimacy,
true intimacy. And so here's the return of chocolate being
considered an aphrodisiac. But in the nineteen eighties you also
have the return of it being considered a status symbols
going all the way back to sixteenth century Spain, when
it was considered only for the elite. So in the
(24:58):
era of Gordon Gecko and Greta's Good, you don't just
want to get your special girl a drug store brand.
You don't just want to go and get Whitman's. You
have to get some like crazy boxed chocolate that's a
million dollars to show that you can afford it and
that she's worth it. Yeah, in the nineteen eighties you
see a sixty percent rise in dark chocolate sales. This
(25:19):
is when you start, you know, hearing more about like, oh,
dark chocolate, that's the good stuff. And this is too,
a trend that seems to have continued today as you
see more and more not only specialty brands of chocolate,
but just the hyper specialization of dark chocolate. Two, as
we're being told like, okay, yeah, no, it's actually good
for you. So it's a little more okay to eat
dark chocolate. But then you go to Whole Foods and
(25:43):
you find these organic chocolate bars and it's like chocolate
and bacon, or chocolate and Serrano chilis or something, all
these kinds of exotic flavor combos, and they are crazy expensive. Yeah.
I I almost hate to admit this because it makes
me sound like a really big idiot. But when I
(26:03):
was Christmas shopping back in December. Uh, I was going
through this store and I was getting my niece and
nephew mostly candy for their stocking. It was neat candy.
I mean, it was like kind of fancy, because you know,
they don't like anything that I get them, so I'm
just like, I'll just get them candy. Ha ha. My
brother will have to deal with it. Well. So anyway,
I grabbed this like three pack of chocolate bars because
(26:26):
I'm like, how I didn't even I literally didn't even
have the thought of how expensive could chocolate be? Because
why would I? Chocolate is not that expensive? Right? Thirty dollars?
Thirty dollars. I know, I'm the biggest idiot. Why did
I not check that ahead of time? But I didn't
even think too. It's because it was from like this.
It was all dark chocolate, different types of it, and
it was from like this teeny tiny, like artisan chocolate
(26:49):
place in San Francisco. And I just the regret. I
don't think I've ever felt deeper regret for anything in
my life. And then did you sad eat the chocolate?
I couldn't. I gave it to my boyfriend. I was like,
I can't even like look at this. You just take it,
consider it part of your Christmas present. Talk about chocolate
guilt seriously, but no, I mean I think that the
(27:10):
dark chocolate thing does kind of point to or highlight
interesting aspects of the whole chocolate guilt conversation, because like,
we're supposed to feel guilty, or we do feel guilty
after we eat too many sweets, but then dark chocolate,
like celebrities and magazines are preaching to us that like,
if you eat dark chocolate, it has antioxidants and so
(27:31):
you will never get cancer. But you're only allowed to
have a square a day, maybe a square every other day. Well,
and then how many celebrity interviews with you know, beautiful,
very thin, fit women who say, oh, my weakness is chocolate.
I mean, it's always all these conflicting messages. There's one
thing that Katherine Nutter points out about chocolate ads today
(27:55):
is that the models in these ads clearly don't indulge in,
you know, chocolate fests. On the regular chocolate fest, my
mouth just started watering. I think I need to start
that or maybe never never alburn it down. So from
the nineteen eighties, where we see all of that fancy
chocolate rising to the two thousands, we see this whole
(28:20):
self empowerment message come about, one of which came from
Godiva in two thousand four with their tagline every woman
is one part Diva, much to the dismay of every man.
And I have no idea side note what that means.
I don't get that the whole just also side note
(28:41):
to anyone in marketing listening. If you call me a diva,
I'm not gonna want your product. Yeah, I don't get that.
Who like who? Who thinks that women want to be
want to be diva's? I don't know. I'm sure there
are probably some women listening thinking that that's fun, but
I don't know. I just think it's so hokey. I
think it is hokey. And I think when you have
people like I'm just trying to think of an example,
(29:04):
somebody like Mariah Carrier, you know, somebody who's like a
stereotypically high demand, high maintenance celebrity calling themselves a diva.
That makes me want to call myself that even less so.
But then you're telling me that I am one if
I eat your chocolate and Godiva, which really is like
the gray Goose vodka of candy, like Chocolate Burn, old
(29:28):
chocolate Burn, because you know, you take something that's really
kind of basic and just mark up the price. Just
putting a fancy ribbon or some you know, geese on
it doesn't actually make it worth the price. Yeah, there
was an article, I forget which one it was, that
we read talking about how some chocolate experts, like Small
Gaze of Chocolate essentially tried Godiva and they did not
(29:50):
give it very high mark. Now what did they say,
like a box of sugar had been poured into candlewax
or some something like that, or that it was very chalky.
Just weren't big fans. But I do think it's it's
interesting how there's now that self empowerment aspect. It's like
the men have sort of been removed from these chocolate ads.
(30:10):
So instead of the old dynamic of wooing men into
buying chocolate to give to women, it's now Dove, for instance,
telling us, oh, ladies, treat yourself, you go buy chocolate
for yourself. Stay at home. It's just stay at home
and read the inspirational messages that on the inside of
(30:32):
dove rappers, right, and and give yourself a gentle, you know, hug,
and then go eat some yogurt. But can we talk
a bit more about this guilt issue with chocolate, because
this isn't something that came up in any of the papers,
but what it sounded an awful lot like the more
we read about how chocolate is, you know, basically is
(30:54):
sold to women as sex. It's the one acceptable sexy
vice that women can have, according to society, and yet
there's that guilt undergirding it of like if you eat
too much of it, then boys aren't gonna like you
because you'll have a chocolate belly. It's so weirdly slut shamy.
(31:16):
It's like it's like a candy analog to slut shaming,
where it's like, well, ladies, if you do too much
of that, then boys aren't gonna like you. Am I
am I making too big of a leap? No, I
think it's absolutely parallel. I think there are some very
weird and they always have been apparently, some very weird
(31:39):
things going on with the way we look at chocolate
and think about chocolate. And you know, we have the
Aztecs in the Spanish to think, but um, we'll actually
get into some more ickiness behind chocolate advertising when we
come back from a quick break. When we left off,
(32:00):
we had gone through the history of women in chocolate
and advertising. But one thing that we didn't mention as
we were going through that twentieth century timeline was that
really the main target of chocolate ads, especially in the
first half of the twentieth century, were exclusively white women.
And there are some issues of race and racism and
(32:25):
chocolate that we would be remiss to not address as well,
because you see, for instance, racial anxieties surrounding chocolate going
all the way back to when it was first brought
from the New World to Europe. Right there was this
uh story that mort rosen Bloom, who we saided earlier,
(32:46):
the author of Chocolate A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light, Uh,
talks about in his book about a woman by the
name of Madame de Saveny writing to her daughter warning
her against drinking too much chocolate because she knew of
an another woman who drank it and her child came
out black as the devil. Yikes, yikes, indeed, okay, well,
(33:07):
and and there are all these chocolate anxieties to probably
linked to this early idea of it as an aphrodisiac
and being linked to sex, where oh, if you eat
too much of it, you might become, you know, some
kind of sex monster. But then too if you look
at advertising in the nineteenth century, these chocolate dads typically
(33:28):
portrayed women of color representing chocolate in its raw, unrefined form,
whereas the white women were used to evoke a sense
of luxury and romance, which is very problematic, right, Yeah,
women of color being seen as the workers, white women
being seen as the consumers, going from raw to refine.
(33:51):
There's all sorts of really icky racial things there, which
makes sense because it ties so much into those issues
of class and the evolution of chocolate and how it
kind of became a mass marketed good. And I was
hoping to find more scholarship on the race aspects of
chocolate advertising, but unfortunately didn't, because I feel like today
(34:13):
it's still and maybe it's just just advertising in general,
but I still feel like you mostly almost exclusively see
white women in chocolate ads. Well, yeah, I mean, we're
we're definitely not in any sort of post racial utopia
by any means, especially when it comes to discussing chocolate.
(34:34):
The whole racist thing of calling women of color chocolate
is referring to well, any person of color as being chocolate. Yeah,
then you get into issues of exoticizing and eroticizing people
of color by referring to them as chocolate. Again, didn't
find any you know, deep research on it, just a
few blog posts here and there, mostly from black women
(34:56):
asking like, please stop calling me chocolate because it's all
so notable that it's not like we refer to white
women as vanilla except to indicate how boring we are
when we have sex. Uh. Yeah, Well, there was that
one Cadbury ad that was addressing Naomi Campbell by saying,
move over, Naomi, there's a new diva in town talking
(35:18):
about a chocolate bar. And so that's that's combining. We
already had the diva conversation. That's combining like the worst
of all chocolate ads. Yeah, and she did not appreciate it.
I wouldn't an entire campaign to get them to take
it down, because I mean some people are saying, oh,
it's not you know, it's not racist, it's not, but yeah,
it's it's a it's a little bit racist. And then
(35:41):
there is just the awkwardness of More recently, Ferrero launched
an ad campaign in Germany for their white chocolate and
they're like, big commercial tagline was Germany votes White, so
which Germans were like, Hey, yeah, no, you remember, remember
Nazis and that whole thing. You please don't do this. Ah,
(36:06):
there's some people in some marketing departments somewhere who were
laid off after that. I'm assuming, well, what did you think?
Did you see the Axe Dark Temptation ad? Where I didn't? Okay,
so what happens? I mean, it's an axe body spray ad.
So basically the premise of every single ax body spray
ad is that the guy puts it on and then
he just becomes irresistible chick magnet use the worst phrase
(36:29):
on the planet. Um. So with the Dark Temptation ad,
he puts on the body spray and it turns him
into a chocolate man. And what women love more than
chocolate caroline, And so women start coming up to him
and you know, eating away at his chocolate body, and
then finally it's revealed that oh he's just like, he's
just a white guy under there. But the fact that
(36:51):
it's called dark temptation and it's it's fine because there's
a white guy under there still, you know, just some
just some issues, just some issues kind of all piling
up there together. Yeah, that is that is a pile
of issues. Yeah. Lots of lots of women eating away
at your very core. Yeah, lots of just symbolism loaded
(37:12):
into one terrible commercial. Um. But what though, okay, so speaking,
women eating men made out of chocolate. Yikes, what about
the science of this? Because we've talked all about advertising.
We have clearly been sold this idea that chocolate is
a food for women, that we love it more than
(37:34):
anything else, including shoes. But what does science have to
say about this? You would think, right that science would
have been, like, ladies, every time you bite into a
chocolate bar and you you get obsessed with the idea
of eating more chocolate and you feel addicted to it,
it's because it's releasing all of these amazing things, and
(37:54):
you're it's not really that. It's they've found that there's
not a huge like cause and effect chocolate. Sarah tonin
lank It's probably more that it chocolate is fatty and
sugary and it tastes real good. Yeah, there have been
a lot of studies actually looking at the psychopharmacological effects
(38:15):
of chocolate, essentially how groups of chemicals such as cannabinoids
and chocolate react in our brain and make us chocoholics,
I guess, And the suity results have kind of been mixed.
They really haven't been able to pin down one specific
chocolate craze chemical in there. So it's like, well, some
(38:37):
people really like it and I guess it's I guess
it's good. But there was the study called Chocolate and
Cheese their effects on mood, sort of looking at okay, well,
we know that it probably has something to do with
the fat and chocolate. So if we take a sweeteness
savory like cheese and compare it, what happens and their
best conclusion was that it's proba probably the oro sensory
(39:02):
effect of eating chocolate. Essentially, we like how it smells,
how it feels in our mouth, just all of the
sensory sensations of eating chocolate. The look on your face
right now, Caroline, I feel like you've been whisked away.
I need to go find that Easter basket. You need
to go to Pleasure Island from the I absolutely do um.
(39:26):
Speaking of health stuff, one thing that does get brought
up in women's magazines a lot is if you like chocolate, ladies,
not only are you gonna get fat, but you're gonna
break out. Yeah, what about what about that connection? Yeah? Um,
that's something that I've always been worried about because I
had so many pimples when I was a young girl,
(39:48):
and even now my horm I'm thirty, right, like, I
shouldn't break out anymore, but I still do. Adult actnate
totally exists hormones anyway, So they looked at whether researchers
looked at whether, um, chocolate actually does produce acne, and
again the results were kind of mixed, but they did
find that among the people who broke out, who did
(40:09):
break out and experience acne, here's here's a little bit
of what happened. So after people ate chocolate and then
we're exposed to the bacteria that caused acne, they found
that the blood was shown to have more markers of
inflammation than the people who had not eaten chocolate. But
they're just not sure what component of chocolate actually caused
(40:31):
that inflammation, whether it is the fat or whether it
is the sugar. I mean, we know that sugar causes
inflammation in the body, but they're not quite sure about
the acne link. It seems like that's the story with
everything regarding women in chocolate. We're just not quite sure.
But here have some chocolate in the meantime while we
try to figure this out, let's also talk about the
stereotype of periods making women crave chocolate even more. Yeah,
(40:56):
I I am. I was. I'm gonna tell the truth here.
I was a little dismayed to find out that there
is no scientific link really supporting the hypothesis that you
crave chocolate more around your period, because I swear I
don't know what it is in my brain and the
brain of Caroline Urban Podcast or Extraordinaire. I don't know
(41:19):
what's going on that like leading up to my period,
I'm just like gorging on chocolate, and like as I'm
stuffing the fifteen candy bar in my face, I'm like, oh, Okay,
I see what's happening. But I wonder if it's just
not so much the chocolate as maybe a connection between
menstrual cycles and comfort food. And some scientists say that,
(41:41):
you know, chocolate contains minerals like magnesium and iron, which
we may be deficient in around our period things like that.
All I know is just I just wanted. And one
of the reasons so why this period chocolate hypothesis has
been debunked is because chocolate cravings don't diminish with menopause.
If it was a period thing, then we would see
(42:02):
a massive drop off in women over fifty wanting chocolate.
But that all happens. Well, maybe it's a mood thing,
because I know, like when I'm sick or hungover or
just generally not feeling good, I want comfort food. I
want like fried chicken and mashed potatoes and soup and
like you know, salty, mushy, amazing things that have really
strong flavors um And so maybe chocolate just fits into that,
(42:26):
like making you feel good. Well, speaking of making you
feel good, the one thing that we do know about chocolate,
specifically dark chocolate, is yes, the rumors are true. Dark
chocolate does appear to have some health benefits. There was
a study published linking it to lower rates of stroke,
coronary heart disease, blood pressure, and other cardiovascular conditions, but
(42:50):
in an interview with The New York Times about this study,
finding one of the lead authors said, police, don't get
us wrong. This doesn't mean that you can eat all
of the chocolate that you want. We're just saying it's
a correlation. It's not a causation, right, Yes, antioccidents, Yes,
Gorging on chocolate until you throw up pretty much destroys
(43:11):
any of the positive effects of chocolate. Although I was
thinking about studies exactly like this one when Sally also
gave me a solid dark chocolate Easter Bunny. But no,
don't try to come from me. I don't care. I don't. Yeah,
I don't. I don't feel guilt. I mean I do,
but I don't. But see, that's good, that's great that
you don't feel guilt. You shouldn't feel any guilt. If
(43:32):
you want chocolate, eat the chocolate. I don't know, I
just I'm so yeah, I'm at the point of I'm
just tired of hearing about it. I'm tired of seeing
those weird ads. I don't get it, you know, yeah,
I don't. Uh, it's the same things. Like I'm surprised
there's not more terrible chocolate stock photography. I mean, I
know there is, but you know, the way we see
women laughing over salads, the same way we see women
(43:52):
eating yogurt, like chocolate is in that same ballpark, as
far as like women are so stupid, look at what
you're eating and how you're eating it, and like you're
pinning all of your hopes and dreams on it, whereas
men are just told that they really want a grill meet. Yeah,
you want a hamburger? Have a hamburger? Sloppy? Joe's sloppy.
(44:15):
Joe's not sloppy jays Nope. Well, Caroline, I think we've
now pretty much exhausted all of our chocolate knowledge and
now it's time to hear from listeners. I want to
know if there are guys out there who are also
a self identified chocoholics. I want to know who the
ladies are like me who could care less about a
bag of Eminem's, Give me some dol Rito's please, or
like any kind of chip you get me. I'm saying
(44:37):
savory rather than sweet. And anyone who don't, I don't
know what are your thoughts on chocolate? Let us know.
Mom's Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
email us. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff
podcast or send us a Facebook message, and we have
a couple of messages to share with you right now.
(45:00):
So I've got a couple of messages here about our
new male grooming episode. This one is from Jess, who writes,
in My Dating career, I despise male body hair. I
thought it was just plain unattractive and probably wouldn't have
looked twice at a hairy dude. However, a few years
ago I met a guy and film madly in love
(45:20):
with an extremely hairy dude. I mean his back has
started to connect with his chest. Hair level of Harry anyway,
his hair a nous drives me crazy too, but in
a good way. I think a huge part of what
we find attractive is just what we see on TV.
The unknown is always scary. It's really frustrating because he,
as you mentioned many men are, is very self conscious
(45:43):
about his man for he has even asked me to
tweeze hairs from areas that bother him. Once you associate
body hair with a manly dude who treats you like gold,
it's very sexy. Here's hoping for more hair representation in
the media. Ah and for love and I hope, I
hope that letter makes that gentleman feel better. Who wrote
(46:04):
us very concerned about whether he'd find a date. Ye,
don't worry about your hairy bags. Don't worry about it.
I have a letter here from Gretchen who wrote in
about beards as well, and she said, well, I can
definitely see a trend in the popularity of beards on
men on TV. I wonder if this is just a
trend in certain social circles. Maybe it's because I live
(46:25):
in Alaska that I have never thought of a beard
is something trendy, just something some men had and others didn't.
When I was growing up, my father sported a beard,
and my husband grows when every fall and shaves it
off in the spring. He does this as he works
outside and below zero weather, and it often helps keep
him warm and when spring comes it's too warm. I
know other men up here who also follow this practice.
I like my husband's appearance both ways, so whatever he
(46:47):
wants is fine with me. On a recent trip this
winter to London, England, we did take an interesting notice
of the lack of beards there. In fact, my husband's
caught the attention of one small boy who marveled at
his appearance, exclaiming and pointing. Adam out of pure amazement.
I also think if a man isn't well endowed in
the facial hair department, what is wrong with being clean shaven?
If that suits in better? And then Gretchen has uh
(47:10):
some more comforting words for our harryman out there. She
says on the topic of other body hairmanance, personally, I
like a guy with some chest hair and find the
idea of waxing it or shaving it off because that
is what women like. Silly, so fear not men, some
women dig it. So thanks Gretchen. I'm sure a lot
(47:31):
of listeners out there appreciate your viewpoint, and thanks to
everybody who's written into us. Mom. Stuff at Discovery dot
com is our email address, and if you want to
find links to all of our social media, all of
our podcast, blogs and videos, you should head on over
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for more
(47:51):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com S
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