Why is chocolate so often seen as women?s food? Chocolate is marketed to women as an indulgence, a break from mundane reality, an escape to a sensuous world of silk. There always seems to be some red-lipped model melting in the embrace of the latest chocolate bar. Women are portrayed as craving chocolate constantly, so much so that an ad for Axe Body Spray portrays a man made of chocolate running down the street chased by ravenous hordes of women to indicate how irresistible it?s supposed to make men who wear it. But how did chocolate get so wrapped up in gender identity? It turns out chocolate has a long and mixed relationship with gender which has less to do with chemicals and biology than with the changing cultures and politics in the world chocolate has inhabited over the centuries
The word ?chocolate? probably originated with the ancient Mayans, who used chocolate in their wedding ceremonies. The Chol Mayan bride and groom exchanged five grains of cacao and said, ?These I give thee as a sign that I accept thee as my husband? (or wife, as the case may be). Another wedding tradition of the Maya and Mixtec peoples was to ?chokola?j,? or to drink chocolate together, which may be where the Spanish colonists got their word for the stuff. (Coe 61) The chocolate they drank, however, was far different from the hot cocoa of modern times: it was a savory corn gruel flavored with vanilla, chili, and other spices. (59) One of the reasons it was kept for special occasions was its rarity, so rare that cacao beans were used as currency by the Mayans and the Aztecs. (58, 99)
The Aztecs had a love-hate relationship with chocolate, though. They viewed the Mayans as a decadent people, and since they were the ones exporting cacao, chocolate gained the connotations of exoticism and extravagance. The Aztecs, who considered themselves austere and hard-core, worried that their love of chocolate made them weak. In one myth, an Aztec convoy is sent to bring gifts to a goddess at the top of a mountain, but the young men struggle behind the old native guide. He tells them, ?You have become old, you have become tired because of the chocolate you drink and because of the foods you eat. They have harmed and weakened you.? (78) The nobility still indulged in chocolate, as a cold, foamy, water-based beverage, without sugar but with much guilt. Yet the only other class of people allowed by law to consume chocolate was the military, who were in fact issued pressed wafers of ground cacao as rations because of their high energy content. (99) The calorie density that makes chocolate such a boon to the active may have been why it was viewed as a guilty pleasure for the sedentary rich.
The Spanish colonialists were not initially impressed with chocolate. Spanish men noted its ability to give energy to the natives, but didn?t acquire a taste for the bitter beverage themselves. It wasn?t until the men brought their wives and settled into houses attended by Aztec servants that Europeans started to pick up the habit. They started adding sugar to make it more palatable, and Spanish women got addicted to the stuff. (114) Thomas Gage wrote in 1648 that some upper-class white ladies in Chiapa Real could not get through Mass without some chocolate to fortify their weak stomachs. When the bishop threatened to excommunicate them for interrupting the service, they simply boycotted the cathedral. The bishop soon died? of poisoned chocolate. (183)
The Spanish colonists adopted the pressed wafer form to ship chocolate back to Spain, where it quickly caught on in Europe. But soon chocolate found itself with a rather lascivious reputation. It was supposed to excite the sexual appetite, and women were said to use chocolate to poison their enemies and bewitch men into submission. (Grivetti & Shapiro 117) Spain was seen by the rest of Europe as a sensual and decadent country, not unlike the Aztec?s view of the Mayan civilization. The French despised everything Spanish on principle. When Louis XIV married the Spanish Infanta, she had to indulge her chocolate habit in secret. By the following decade it was popular with the aristocratic women of France, however, in spite or because of recurring rumors about chocolate?s unhealthfulness and depravity. In 1671, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal complained that ?everyone who spoke well of it now tells me bad things about it.? (Coe 156) Not that such rumors kept people away from the stuff, as we hear from Marie de Villars, a French woman who visited Spain in 1680: ?Remember that I am in Spain, and taking it is almost my only pleasure.? (136)
Chocolate, with its rarity and richness marking it as an extravagant treat, was eschewed by those who wanted to appear strong and willful. Mostly that meant image-conscious men in the upper classes of both Aztec and Spanish societies. But women, who were not expected to maintain Spartan-like discipline, could love chocolate with relative impunity. Another trajectory of chocolate was its use as medicine. Cacao was used generally to treat headaches, fevers, and digestive issues, and it was often specifically said to promote vitality and, in women, increase milk and menstrual flow. (Grivetti & Shapiro 71) Since women were considered to have weak constitutions, it became all the more acceptable for women to be heavy chocolate users.
The popularity of chocolate, and its ambiguity in terms of food status, led the Catholic Church to allow chocolate-drinking during fasts. (Grivetti & Shapiro 71) It also promised an alternative to alcohol, both to the Aztecs for whom drunkenness was punishable by death (Coe 76), and to the Quakers who saw it as more virtuous. In the 17th century, slave labor enabled the cheap cultivation of cacao (though of poor quality and often adulterated), allowing it to reach beyond the aristocracy for the first time (187).* In England it was a mainstay of coffee-houses, institutions of ?social and political importance? where chocolate was prepared unspiced, suitable for ?men of business,? according to Philippe Dufour. (169) But by the 18th century, chocolate?s image was tied too closely to the French elites and the Catholic clergy, so the British turned to tea and the French turned to coffee as drinks of civilization, liberty, and the Common Man. (203)
Sweetened chocolate maintained its holier-than-thou aristocratic pretensions, as well as quite a few health concerns. In 1698, Martine Lister asked why Parisian women were so fat, and essentially blamed chocolate?s empty calories. Henry Stubbes, however, thought that additives like sugar, and not cacao itself, was to blame for the obesity, diabetes, and gout observed in excess consumption. (172) Unsweetened chocolate never lost its life-promoting medicinal sheen, especially during a time when undernourishment was a more common problem. In the 19th century, women were the guardians of household health, and cookbooks often contained medicinal recipes involving cocoa. Chocolate was something for women to administer, not to make for themselves, and the cookbooks suggested that adding sugar to make it enjoyable turned it into something ?decadent, sinful, and feminine.? (Grivetti & Shapiro 119) Cocoa powder was marketed to women as mothers and care-givers, using pictures of children and happy families and text suggesting its healthfulness. (187)
The Industrial Revolution allowed for processing beyond the pressed cacao wafers of the Aztecs, making chocolate cheaper and more accessible. In 1815, Van Houten invented the process of separating cocoa powder from the fat of the bean (cocoa butter) making a substance much easier to dissolve in water. Eating chocolate was first invented in 1849 by a Quaker family named Fry who re-combined these component parts with the addition sugar and poured it into molds. (Coe 241) Another Quaker family, the Cadburys, opened a tea and coffee shop in 1824 and quickly moved into the cocoa business. They invented the first heart-shaped box of Valentine?s chocolates. (243) The Swiss pushed chocolate technology even farther, with Henry Nestle and Daniel Peter inventing milk chocolate in 1879, and Rudolphe Lindt inventing the conching process in the same year, turning chocolate into the perfectly smooth confection we know today. (248) Finally, it was the American entrepreneur Milton Hershey who automated milk chocolate manufacturing, becoming the ?Henry Ford of Chocolate Makers? in 1893. (251)
So for the Victorians, at the cusp of the age of advertising and mass-produced goods, sweet chocolate confections became popular. They were sold with romantic, even sexualized packaging, which targeted not the supposedly demure Victorian ladies, but the men who wished to court them. (Grivetti & Shapiro 119) Chocolate advertising promised as surely as modern beer ads do to fill women with lusty thoughts. It was appropriate for men to buy chocolate for women, but for women to buy chocolate for themselves was considered ?promiscuous.? (120) If chocolate was a stand-in for sex, then buying yourself a box of bon-bons was akin to masturbation. Like Eve, Victorian women were considered to be innately weak and immoral, easily swayed by the temptations of self-indulgence; the good woman held fast to temperance and chastity. Walter Baker, of Baker?s Chocolate, appealed to this domestic side of women with his company?s logo, the Chocolate Girl. This mythical waitress won the heart of a nobleman by serving him chocolate, transforming chocolate from an aristocratic luxury into an everyday food item through adherence to traditional gender roles. (354)
For men, chocolate was marketed as a source of power. It could buy the love of women, and it could provide energy for manly endeavors like war. Used to treat sick soldiers who fell sick from malnutrition during the Civil War, Northern physician E. Donnelly promoted the inclusion of chocolate in soldier?s rations to prevent such ailments in the first place. (353) By the middle of the 18th century, soldiers of all ranks purchased chocolate almost as much as they did alcohol. (403) It was so essential during the Seven Year?s War that a raid on a British supply train was called the ?Chocolate Massacre,? and as the blood mingled with the chocolate, you can imagine it was a most macabre scene. (399) In the military context, chocolate was a symbol of strength and vitality, and this carried over to civilian advertising directed at men. In one ad for cocoa, firemen drinking hot mugs of it stand under the copy: ?Makes Strong Men Stronger.? (Coe) Perhaps Victorian society was afraid that women lacked the will to control the power it gave men, so they had to censure their own enjoyment in order to dispense it to their husbands and children.
In modern times, chocolate is still a guilty pleasure for women, something they are supposed to crave but equally not supposed to give into without compensatory gym time. The cravings themselves are almost certainly psychological rather than physiological: Willa Michener and Paul Rozin compared eating chocolate to eating merely capsules of cocoa powder, and found only the full experience and ritual of eating the bar satisfied cravings. (Michener) Psychologist Debra Zellner argues that the very fact that chocolate is a nutritional taboo makes it alluring, harkening back to the French noblewomen of the 17th century. What?s more, treating yourself to anything when you feel bad, such as during pre-menstrual mood swings, is bound to make you feel better regardless of what the treat?s chemical composition is. (Rauch) Throughout history, the benefits and detriments of chocolate seem most tied to its high calorie and fat content, able to sustain warriors, soldiers, and the malnourished, while exacerbating health problems in the over-consuming wealthy elite. It has been tied to women through the marginilization of both, and the association has evolved into contradictory ideals for both women and chocolate consumption during an age of advertisements. When we hear that ?women?s bodies scream for chocolate,? we should recall that chocolate has played an essential role for men as well, and that marketing ? and culture in general ? can construct and mold our desires beyond their objects? mere utility or pleasure.
* Before the Civil War, Walter Baker promoted Free Labor chocolate to a New England population increasingly sympathetic with the abolitionist viewpoint, while at the same time selling poor-quality, adulterated cocoa to the slaves themselves. (Grivetti & Shapiro 352) Today slaves are still used in cacao production, especially in Africa, but the marketing of Fair Trade chocolate has increased the awareness of the true cost of cheap chocolate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_cocoa_production
Coe, Sophie and Michael Coe. The True History of Chocolate. Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Grivetti, Louis and Howard-Yana Shapiro. Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage. Wiley, 2009.
Michener, Willa and Paul Rozin. ?Pharmacological versus sensory factors in the satiation of chocolate craving.? Physiology & Behavior, Vol 56, Sep 1994. pp 419-422.
Rauch, Catherine Ann. ?Chocolate: A heart-healthy confection?? CNN.com, 2 Feb 2000. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/diet.fitness/02/02/chocolate.wmd/
Source: http://www.zenzoa.com/articles/2012/02/14/chocolate-and-gender/
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