Just Not "Manly" Enough

by Shaker BGK, who would like you to know that in addition to reading Shakesville, working as an engineer, and dreaming of David Boreanaz, he finds time to beat as many RPG villains as possible.

The world of the American trading floor is a privileged world of privileged manly men. Ryan Pacifico, a rich, heterosexual, white, able-bodied, cisgender man, fit in well in this privileged manly man's world—until the day his radical beliefs were revealed.

You see, Mr. Pacifico does not believe in eating animals, which led him to the extreme position of choosing for himself to not eat meat. As you can imagine, this drastic vegetarianism inevitably led to an utterly devastating occupational conflict: His manly boss wanted to eat at a steak house, dammit!

And because he is a manly man, his boss reacted to the untenable situation of being asked to accommodate a vegetarian employee not by suggesting going to a restaurant that would serve both steaks and a hearty portabella mushroom, nor by choosing to attend a spicy Indian Restaurant with epicurean delights to please even the most particular gourmet.

No, no, dear Shakers, his boss did the only logical thing to do in this situation. Allegedly, Robert Catalanello repeatedly referred to Mr. Pacifico as a 'homo', and trumped up charges for him to be fired.

Naturally, the strict vegetarian gave other warning signs of his flagrant homosexuality. When participating in a triathlon, Pacifico had the audacity to wear tight shorts. Everyone knows that baggy pants are the standard threads for this event. Clearly further evidence of his being a vegetarian homo!

"It's his fault for being a vegetarian homo," Catalanello is accused of saying.

The suit also charges that the boss crudely poked fun at Pacifico last March during a conversation about steakhouses.

"You don't even eat steak, dude," Catalanello is accused of saying. "At what point in time did you realize you were gay?"

Here we see demonstrated the core tenets of this boss (and steak-eating manly men everywhere): If you are not the same as us, you are not our equal; you are less than.

In this case, less means "gay". Because it is not considered manly to decline to eat red meat, ergo the decliner is less manly, and is therefore gay. To go all Programming Brain on y'all:

#include = patriarchialstandards.h
If malehuman != Manly then
male human = Big Homo
do {'Humilitate'};

This falls back to the intersection of Sexism and Homophobia. The 'power' behind the queer insult derives from insinuating that the insultee is less than a man so therefore the guy must be a women. However since the insultee does have male genitalia, the insulter uses the queer insult. As with any intersection of gender and sexuality, people who are transgender are ignored and tacitly insulted as well.

But as we all know, and as the comment section of the Daily News is quick to point out, this is all just a joke. From the comment section:

"People sue for everything now a days. Toughen up, it's the environment you are in. This guy probably is gay."

Because the lives of all the women, vegetarians, GLBTQI, and progressive heterosexual men of the world are just big jokes.