🔒 The Innate Hypocrisy of the Pronatalist Movement

When it comes to issues on which people care way too much about other people’s preferences, the worst offenders have to be steak doneness, and the decision whether to have children.

 Like most people, I have strong opinions on both, when it comes to my personal preference. If you make me a steak, for example, then you just need to walk that thing through a warm room, please.

 Well that’s not true—you have to sear it, and if I’m at a nice restaurant I’ll take what the chef recommends. But if I’m at a pub or something, it’s always rare, and if I’m at home, I might even go blue with it.

 If you’re at my house, though, and we’re having steaks, and you ask for well done, then baby, you’re getting well done. I’ll go past well done, if you like, I’ll take it to congratulations, great work. I’m not going to go Gordon Ramsay on you for it, I honestly don’t care.

The key is that the reason I eat my steak rare isn’t performative. I’m not one of those guys who goes on YouTube with five pounds of steak and a cow’s liver, puts it in a blender, and chugs it. I’m not making a point about myself eating beef close to raw, and neither am I making a point about you. It’s the flavor and the texture, it’s just the way I enjoy it most. I think it goes back to my childhood when my late grandmother would cook and, bless her, I loved her more than anything in the world, but her steaks were like rubber doorstops. I didn’t like steak at all until I was a young adult out of home and, through some mechanism I don’t recall, I tasted a rare one. Knowing me, I was probably just hungry and lazy one day.

 But, sometimes, people will still look at my rare steak and be like, how dare you? It’s disgusting, it’s swimming in blood. (Don’t try to explain that butchered meat contains no blood and the liquid is actually myoglobin—it just makes them angrier). The modal opinion on steak doneness is that medium rare to medium is the accepted range and the outliers are heretics who don’t know how to cook a steak.

 The well done people cop it a lot worse than I do. I may have been radicalized by well done steaks, but you people on the other side are my kin and I have no beef, if you’ll pardon the expression, with you.

 Concern over other people’s steak preferences is performative. What else can it be? It’s certainly not educational. People know their preferences. I always hated well done steak. If you like it, I have nothing to teach you about my soupy myoglobin horror. You’ll politely spit it into a napkin just as I did with those rubber doorstops.

But it’s not just performative, it’s also reactionary. This is the part of the essay where, if you’re a new reader (welcome!), you might be perplexed that I’m making this political, but my long time readers won’t be too surprised. Judging other people for how they prefer their steak is reactionary, it’s kind of classist, there’s a bit of toxic masculinity in there as well. But it’s not too big a deal, honestly, it’s mostly all in good fun. I don’t know if too many friendships have ever broken up over it.

 You know what’s really reactionary? The pronatalist movement. That is, the people who are on a mission to have kids and are super pissed off at you if you don’t, or especially if you don’t intend to, have kids.

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