Yogurt, diet soda, salad ... low-fat anything. Judging from commercials, this is pretty much all ladies eat! (Just pay closer attention to the ads next time you watch an episode of a typically girly TV show like "The Bachelorette," and you'll know exactly what we're talking about.)
The folks over at LA Weekly decided to conduct an informal study to see just how accurate advertisers were about what women actually consume. They watched both broadcast and cable TV and wrote down the recurring female-targeted food ads they saw. They then asked women from a variety of backgrounds, ages, sexual orientations and professions to log their food-eating habits and compared those products to the ones being advertised to female consumers.
Unsurprisingly, they found that women's eating habits are nowhere near uniform -- and certainly include a whole lot of things that aren't Greek yogurt, Diet Coke, chocolate and lettuce. (Personally, we're pretty excited to drink some beers and eat some burgers over the Fourth of July.)
LA Weekly's Christine Chiao concluded:
When it comes to women and food, the Daoist attitude toward truth(s) applies: The more you insist you know, the less you really do. For every woman who lives on yogurt and salad, there's another who loves a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon with steak cooked medium rare and a side salad.
Of course there's nothing wrong with liking the foods that are targeted at women -- Chiao wrote that some women they interviewed actually apologized for having "stereotypical" preferences, and here at HuffPost Women we've written an ode to fro-yo -- but we all lose out when our tastes are assumed and dictated by marketers. (Especially when those marketers have a sadly limited view of what being a woman means.) Plus, as Jezebel's Laura Beck pointed out, there are many factors that probably determine our eating habits more than gender, such as socioeconomic status and geographical location.
Now excuse us while we go eat a hot dog with a side salad, drink a craft beer and finish it off with some frozen yogurt.
Click over to LA Weekly to see their awesome Venn diagram of "What Advertisers Think Women Eat vs. What Women Really Eat."
[H/T Jezebel]
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