Men, Are They Dining?
Welcome back to #EmerilHive, a weeklyish newsletter by Becca Thimmesch.
In a very rare turn of events, I recently found myself wondering what’s going on with men.
I was scrolling my favorite social media platform, venmo, taking my weekly peek into the financial transactions of people I sort of know. I was struck, once again, by the perennially haunting question, do men go out to dinner with each other?
And it felt like a valid question. Obviously, on an individual level, I was sure that men did in fact go out to dinner with other men. But on a structural level? I wasn’t sure. Sometimes new types of wage gaps, like the fact that none of the men I know buy Christmas and Birthday presents for their friends beyond alcohol, drop into my lap and so I asked myself, are men saving a pretty penny on dinner and drinks?
So I did a little research. I’ve asked men in the past and they always very immediately are like uh, of course I go out to dinner with my friends and then upon further questioning it’s revealed that they attend three or four celebratory meals per fiscal year. I took it to Instagram, a place where I seem to know or at least follow several hundred men, if you can believe that.
I asked a series of questions and went on like a three day data bender that included multiple fascinating conversations with men I haven’t spoken to in years. The results were confounding.
I’m thrilled to report, as a top-line, that men are in fact going out to dinner with each other.
But it’s not exactly cut and dry. The complex inner-workings of male relationships play out here as they would anywhere else.
Before we keep going, a brief note on gender. It would have been impossible for me, given who I am and who my friends are, to collect a heterosexual or even baseline cisgender dataset. Nor would I have wanted that! I heard from a few trans men who felt their dining habits mostly reflected the fact that they were also gay, and thus involved group dining with other gay men--cis and trans alike. But, to my unending shame, I found myself primarily interested in what cisgender men were up to, for no reason other than curiosity and perhaps novelty.
Maybe it’s just me, but I never see groups of straight, cis men at restaurants. Nor do the men I know have standing happy hours or restaurant nights out or even takeout schedules correlated to television. But I wouldn’t have 11/12ths of a sociology minor if I didn’t ask myself, am I not seeing something because it isn’t there, or because I’m not looking in the right place?
The answer, of course, was that it’s a land of contrasts.
Let us begin with frequency, wherein we immediately begin to see a pattern of reading incomprehension emerge. Almost all the men in my sample answered that they dined out with other men as a habit, but when asked for a specific frequency, most said that they only did this every so often or on special occasions only.
An incredibly vocal minority came out of the woodwork, consisting largely of men that I honestly wouldn’t have pegged for it, to let me know that they dined with a group of friends or roommates at least once a week. Most of them described a group agreement to try new restaurants or explore their city’s dining scenes (all of these respondents lived in major urban areas) as part of a weekly ritual. The only correlation I could reasonably draw from this group was a history of team sports participation (comfort around other men) or a history of frankly, being extremely ran-through (comfort in oneself). Only two men, both with restaurant backgrounds, described regularly cooking for other men.
Among the broader (yet still small) group of men dining with other men most weeks, one very strong correlation emerged. Money! Unsurprisingly, the men I know who make the most money generally answered the same, despite very few of them knowing each other or living in the same cities. It echoed some intel I got from friends in food service who told me they served tons of all-male groups, mostly at high-end restaurants, mostly in or around financial districts or neighborhoods where finance guys live. Which like, obviously. Men who make a ton of money and live in places where food has cultural cachet like New York or London are absolutely dining out in droves. It would be hard to envision how cities like these could have such bro-y food scenes if they weren’t catering to at least some men. My sources described massive bills, heavy drinking, and the sort of intra-group posturing you might expect about ordering expensive wines and covering whole bills. Finance!
Which does lead us to money. Men frequently told me that cost was a major factor in their not dining out with other men. And of course, I’m not the arbiter of how you spend your money, but it did beg a certain question of what people prioritize. It wasn’t too long ago that I was a recent graduate making 43 grand in DC, considering myself lucky because plenty of my friends were making in the 30s and even one poor soul in the high 20s. Yet many of these (mostly) women were skimping on other expenses or even taking on second jobs to fund a social dining calendar. But, for my respondents who identified as struggling financially or even just more nebulously “trying to save money,” dining with friends seemed like the most obvious thing to give up.
Very few who responded said that dining with men usually revolved around a sporting event, but most respondents did say that the meal wasn’t usually their primary endeavour. Many said that they would share a meal as a secondary activity, whether they were going out, going to a movie, or trying to get drunk. Most described an ad hoc approach to dining with friends consisting of spur of the moment plans and sudden pangs of hunger while watching TV or whatever else men do.
I felt like sports were becoming a little too central to my questioning and that was maybe problematic of me, so I conducted some follow-up in the DMs to ask about other forms of screen-based entertainment. I generally mark the passage of time by Monday night Instagram stories of spreads for watching The Bachelor, and I wondered if men had anything similar going on. The answer was a resounding “not since Game of Thrones ended.”
But a discussion of TV leads us right into the most interesting part of this entire thing, which is how the men surveyed seemed to perceive various dining experiences as coded or not coded for them. Many of the men I talked to told me they really only did certain things with other men. Watching The Bachelor was largely not one of them.
A set of themes emerged. Lunch with other men held a different connotation than dinner. Dinner without alcohol felt weird. Always takeout, never dine-in.
Perhaps the most interesting was what almost every man I talked to told me about dining one-on-one. Backing up a step, we get to another point of reading comprehension. When asked if they had ever perceived or felt any stigma about men dining with other men, almost everyone surveyed answered no. On follow-up however, everyone described what is actually, 100%, definitively, feeling or perceiving stigma. They just didn’t agree or didn’t care. That’s why we ask different types of questions, my lil’ researchers!
A small number of men told me that stigma kept them from dining with other men, especially one-on-one. Most respondents, however, said almost the exact thing. They described leaning into the stigma against 2-top male dining by going on “man dates” or “bro dates” or some other variation on the term, not caring or even revelling in the idea that others might conclude a romantic attraction.
This hit me like a Mack truck. Why was everyone using the word date? Is a 2-person dinner so romantically coded?
It’s not something on my radar when I’m dining out with one other person, irrespective of gender. Anecdotal evidence from friends suggests I’m not alone.
Some of the gay men I spoke to told me that they felt this acutely, citing the sort of blurriness that can come with dating men in their social circles. Bisexuals of all genders told me that a one-on-one dining excursion with no clear understanding of intention was a nightmare. But I was struck at how many men, secure in their heterosexuality and with often close friends who they also knew to be straight, were reifying the apparently ironclad relationship between sharing a meal and having sex.
As a former sex educator, I was enthralled.
Something nice was that a lot of men told me they were trying very hard to unlearn weird ways of thinking about food and hanging out with other dudes. Many cited the absolute lack of anything else to do for the past two years other than eat as the kick in the ass they needed to spend more time simply engaging with the men in their lives, sharing meals, and taking care of each other. They told me that they were working on getting over weird societal hang-ups, being more intentional, and deepening their friendships.
But unfortunately, the data did absolutely tell me that all the guys I know are spending like, 20 bucks a week on eating with friends and so a new type of wage gap has unfortunately just dropped. Add it to the list!
Emeril Update
Delmonico, a marquee Emeril property, has closed for good. RIP, and I hope Emeril is out on a consolation Bro Date.