The New Gender Apocalypse: Baked Goods

The future of gender stability in America resides, dear readers, with sugar, eggs, flour, butter, and food coloring. But we’ll come back to that.

Before today, the most ridiculous thing I’ve written about had to be those very strange “Man Mom” commercials for the Combos snacks.

But this is but a mere shadow of the absurd when compared to what my friend Jimmy sent me today. Behold, the new front lines of gender stability and differentiation: CUPCAKES.

I’d like to begin by presenting the evidence for why this menace requires immediate action in the war against feminization.

There is obviously a potential nightmare brewing in America — a nightmare of undifferentiated gender, of the loss of “men” and “women” as categories, of genuine masculinity forever being erased as men are slowly emasculated.

The epicenter of this new national crisis? The cupcake, obviously. Just look at it.

Something clearly has to be done. The cupcake (and its frightening financial partner, the cupcake store) is a menace that represents everything that isn’t masculine: it’s often pink (or similar soft-hued color), that most terrifying color to masculinity, and it’s a sweet rather than a savory food item, which automatically classifies it as a feminine food. It’s often consumed by children or as dessert, neither of which are associated with genuine manly behavior.

And yet… and yet… cupcakes are delicious.

This presents a problem for the manly man, who wants that delicious cupcake but doesn’t want to run the risk of rupturing the ever-so-fragile mythology that maybe, just maybe, masculinity is all a socially constructed fantasy that has nothing to do with colors or flavors or behaviors… even as it has everything to do with them. It’s all so confusing and scary and… and… the cupcake is to blame!

Well, thank god for David Arrick. He gets it. He understands the threat cupcakes pose to gender boundaries! That’s why he started Butch Bakery in New York, where, he says, the “objective is simple. We’re men. Men who like cupcakes. Not the frilly pink-frosted sprinkles-and-unicorns kind of cupcakes. We make manly cupcakes. For manly men.” Plans are to expand beyond New York, too, to places where even more real men live.

FINALLY!

Let’s all take a break and have a huge collective sigh of relief.

At last men have a safe place to buy the delicious combination of sugar, flour, butter, and eggs without the horrifying NIGHTMARE of pink frosting, sprinkles, or (ye gods!), unicorns. (Brief aside: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a unicorn cupcake in my life.)

Instead we can rest easy knowing that the B-52 is here!

Whew. Men finally have a cupcake that makes sense. It’s named after an aircraft designed to carry nuclear weapons! It has military-style camouflage! It has a disk on top instead of sprinkles! The rest of the list is so reassuring, too:

Rum & Coke
Sidecar
Old-Fashioned
Mojito
Beer Run
Driller
Home Run
Campout
Jackhammer
Big Papi
Tailgate

Testosterone for the win! This list of choices is perfect. Not a unicorn in sight, and not even a hint of pink anywhere. The website is great, too — it has this fancy engineering schematic of a cupcake. This is how a man eats a baked good: named after hard liquor, off a blueprint, and covered in engine grease.

Okay, so there’s no engine grease, but it sure wouldn’t surprise me if they added that kind of language to the marketing. Here’s what the website says:

“When a magazine article mentioned that cupcakes were a combination of everything ‘pink, sweet, cute, and magical’, he felt it was time to take action, and butch it up.”

It was time to take action! Hell yes it was! The onslaught of feminization through baked sweets demands it. Men everywhere can now feel totally secure eating a cupcake, safely knowing that the borders and boundaries of gender have been restored. The most reassuring part, too, the biggest relief is knowing that women, men who aren’t interested in amplified, stereotypical masculinities, and people who don’t want to be boxed into either category have no interest in liquor, sports, camping, David Ortiz, or eating delicious food outside before football games.

I’m glad the long national nightmare is over. Cupcakes have been gender-differentiated.

Move over, Man Mom. There’s a new winner of the Most Ridiculous Manvertising Ever award.

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