In Battle of the Sexes, All-You-Can-Eat Buffet Is the Great Equalizer

It’s not easy being a man in the modern American matriarchy! Always being forced to buy all the dinners and win all the bread and dominate all the high-paying jobs and respect all the bodily autonomy. UNFAIR, RIGHT? Sometimes it feels like what happened to equality, you know!? What do men have left to live for, even? Well, fortunately for JUSTICE, one great equalizer is still holding strong: The all-you-can-eat buffet.

Everyone pays the same price at the all-you-can-eat buffet: Tiny little bird-women. Enormous and big muscle guys. Medium-sized bird-women. Very very strong and huge muscle men with grande penises. Fat people. Thin people. Hungry people. Full people. Actual birds. Bill Gates. Dickensian orphans. Jocks. Burn-outs. Maximum dweebies. LITERALLY EVERYBODY.

But apparently some feminazi restaurants want to change that. Olga Khazan wrote in the Atlantic about her experiences with buffets in Brazil, where men are sometimes charged as much as $2.25 more than women. While it’s true, Khazan writes, that men on average consume more calories than women, presuming that ALL men eat more than ALL women is a troublingly gender-essentialist point of view.

Certain other businesses, like hair salons, already charge women more than men. (There’s already been an uproar over this tendency in Scandinavia, though.) And many bars and clubs in the U.S. offer “ladies’ nights” with a lower or no cover charge for women – though this, too, is illegal in some states.

And maybe this type of thing would help make up for the fact that women pay more for things like deodorant and razors when the only difference between the male and female versions is the lilac packaging and “Summer Rain” scent.

Then again, food-related discriminatory pricing is uniquely awkward. If this became widespread, it could reinforce the stereotype that women are supposed to be birdlike and abstemious while men can indulge without restraint.

Agreed on all counts.

I can’t remember the last time I ate at an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant (sorry, trolls), but I always assumed that the whole point was that the restaurant was assuming a kind of collective risk by offering one flat rate. We already have a way for restaurants to charge customers based on the quantity of food they eat—it’s called “just ordering the amount of food you want from the regular menu.” Buffets make money because they appear to be a great deal, but almost no one actually manages to consume as much food as they think they can. We have an idiom for this and everything.

So yeah, men, as far as I’m concerned, you can keep your flat-rate buffet pricing. Maybe someday it’ll cancel out all the bitching you do about “having” to ~~coerce women into sex via fettucine alfredo~~ buy dinner. You guys can have that one. Go nuts. Eat all the shrimps. Weeeeeeeeeeeeee.