THE WHOPPER VIRGINS, PT 1: BATTLE FOR THE CROWN IN THE VIRAL ONLINE SPHERE
THE BURGER WARS
The Whopper: Burger King’s signature flame grilled beef patty, topped with tomatoes, lettuce, mayo, pickles, a swirl of ketchup and sliced onions on a sesame seed bun.
In the face of its competitor, McDonalds’ Big Mac, the Whopper has largely been regarded as the underdog of the decades long rivalry between the two fast food chains. Think of it like David and Goliath, if only David and Goliath were corporate behemoths. Goliath boasts higher profits and populates more of the land … but David strikes with advertising.
The decades long Burger War addresses the age old question: Whopper or Big Mac? In 2008, Burger King’s advertising campaign, The Whopper Virgins, set out to answer this question once and for all. It claimed to conduct “the world’s purest taste test” by finding people who had never been exposed to either McDonald’s or Burger King, or even a hamburger for that matter, and document their taste-test reactions.
Filmed in Thailand, Greenland and Romania, the footage presents native people in traditional clothing, far removed from technology or the modern age, living an agrarian lifestyle. They are flown or transported from remote villages to locations nearer the respective fast-food joints, where they are shown sat at a table in a monotonous boardroom. They could be in a recording studio at the edge of a parking lot for all we know. The two burgers are presented to them on white plastic trays. Many appear perplexed by the task at hand and struggle to dismantle the meat stack before them, trialling various means by which to transfer food from plate to mouth without losing the contents of the burger.
Burger King’s so-called “whopper virgins” (screen grabs from Burger King’s Whopper Virgin campaign, via YouTube)
Controversy aside (for now): the ads worked. Following their broadcast, Burger King experienced one of their largest stock increases in the company’s history, were praised by National Geographic, subsequently parodied by Saturday Night Live and won several awards, including marketer of the year. Curiosity or controversy? Fame or dismay? The Whopper Burger was back in the limelight.
THE EFFEMINATE RICE EATER
Inevitably, the campaign was criticised for a multitude of reasons, but the majority was directed to its use of the word, and subsequent portrayal, of the ‘Virgin’ as a non-western subject. In a single term, ‘Whopper Virgins’ masterfully interweaves ideas of sexual inexperience, associated with virginity and purity, starkly contrasted against meat eating, decadence and brashness. It suggests that through the act of consumption, a Whopper can transform you from a pure, adolescent virgin, into a fully fledged, processed man. It will consume you, chew you apart and churn you out larger, more boisterous, brash, louder and remarkably unsubtle. The advert even goes so far as to mute the voices of interviewees until after they have consumed the hamburgers: a not so subtle dig at their supposed condescension. He is now man, hear him roar. The peoples of Romania, Thailand and Greenland are simplified by the Americans and portrayed as somewhat lacking or immature for the absence of Western style, processed red meat in their diets.
The concept that one is not as ‘developed’ on the basis of one’s diet is largely rooted in the ‘effeminate rice eater’ trope. The term originated in the 19th century as a colonial stereotype, it qualified that through the consumption of meat, colonisers became more masculine, and therefore more dominant and powerful, in contrast to the ‘effeminate’ rice eaters of which the colonised peoples were constituted. Early 19th century writers, such as Sarah Hale, were not afraid to remind their readers that ‘forty thousand of the beef-fed British govern and control ninety million of the rice-eating natives of India’, these rice-eaters were subsequently described as an ‘impotent, and effeminate race.’
Just as white supremacy was used to justify colonialism under the guise of ‘science’, so too was the effeminate rice eater. In 1884, the American neurologist, James Leonard Corning, published a medical research paper in which he argued colonial populations lacked the “intellectual vigour” of the West, not because of their race, but because of their diet … they simply did not eat enough Western-style meat. Corning established a correlation between nutritional deficiency and deflated meat consumption, one that would prevail for decades.
Colonial-era tropes of the effeminate rice eater present non-western men as weak, equating their qualities to stereotypical feminine attributes. The trope is particularly evident in The Whopper Virgins’ use of Inuit and Thai interviewees, as the ‘rice eaters’ are traditionally people of colour, particularly those of Asian heritage. In a similar critique of the campaign, Vasile Stanescu argues the Romanian interviewees were used as ‘white cover’ to hide behind. The campaign attempts to immunise itself against charges of ‘racism’ or ‘colonialism’ by including traditionally white peoples of Eastern Europe. But they are still presented as non industrialised, having no access to technology, impoverished, ignorant and thus comedic: “They didn’t even quite know how to pick it up”, remarks one of the film crew. The very effectiveness of The Whopper Virgins lies within the implication that even white people run the risk of becoming effeminate if they are unable to consume enough Western style meat. The trope of the effeminate rice eater offers the possibility of a ‘solution’: salvation via provision of western-style meat. Or in other words, salvation via Whopper.
Fast food advertising has long relied on this premise that masculinity is defined by meat consumption. Burger King’s 2006 advertising campaign, Manthem, parodies Helen Reddy’s 1972 hit single ‘I Am Woman’, depicting testosterone fuelled men who describe themselves as “on the prowl for a pure beef double Whopper”, they “wave tofu bye-bye!”, disregard “chick food” as an insubstantial meal, chuck a car off a bridge, which is then towed by a topless, muscular man who has chains wrapped around his body as mobs of men chant “I AM MAN!” from above.
It is a performance of masculinity. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams analyses how companies have capitalised on these associations between meat and masculinity in order to advertise and sell their products. It goes all the way back to hunter gatherers, typically associated with men because they dominated the hunting arena, as the Manthem proclaims, man is still on the “prowl” for food. Consuming meat is portrayed as a way to gain strength; through eating the muscle of strong animals such as cows, man too will become strong.
THE PRIMAL
It has been fifteen years since The Whopper Virgins lost their V-cards, but the associations between meat and masculinity persist vehemently within current online spaces. A resurgence in the raw meat community has shifted attention away from processed meat and high sugar foods, instead championing adherence to “traditional” diets that promise to enhance one’s masculinity. The Liver King, Paul Saladino, Joe Rogan, Derek AKA ‘More Plates, More Dates’, Tucker Carlson, Raw Egg Nationalist and Bronze Age Pervert are just a few examples of a wide swathe of influencers and public figures that have added this decidedly alpha-male dimension to the wellness world in recent years. Wisdom has been chasing them, but they have always been faster.
Just like The Whopper Virgins fascination with peoples who had no exposure to Western-style fast food, the origins of the raw meat diet are also founded on a colonial fascination with indigenous cultures and foods. The diet was pioneered by Weston A. Price, a Canadian dentist who undertook extensive research in the 1930s on the divergent vitamin and mineral levels between, what he called, ‘indigenous’ and ‘modern’ subjects. He argued that ‘indigenous’ subjects, such as Australian Aborigines and Native Americans, had healthier teeth and oral hygiene because of their consumption of animal fats, which contain a high concentration of vitamin A, B and D.
Therefore, in its contemporary iterations, the raw meat diet has become a means by which to break away from modernity, a rejection of the modern, processed society. Aajonus Vonderplanitz championed the lifestyle in his book, We Want to Live: The Primal Diet, which was released in 1997. He then went on to trademark the Primal Diet in 2000, which consists of raw meat, raw eggs, raw dairy, raw fats, and unheated honey. Aajonus had no professional qualifications relating to science and publicly announced “I don’t believe in medicine”, yet he did boldly, self-proclaim as a scientist. His justification followed that after appearing on panels alongside other ‘doctors’, a grand total of…ten times, he believed he deserved the title.
This rhetoric of the ‘primal’ has been adopted by figures such as the Liver King, whose website is littered with references to a “primal way of being”, channelling your inner “primal beast”, “reviving the primal patterns”, and claiming to “help primals heal”. In his viral TikToks he bellows “What’s Up Primals!”, whilst posing shirtless in front of the camera, his veins hardly able to contain themselves as they visibly pulsate near the surface of his skin. You would be hard-pressed to find a video of Liver King with his shirt on. He has come to represent a sect of masculinity that rejects modernity, and eating a raw meat diet is seen as a way to break away from its systems of controls.
The Whopper Virgins and raw meat dieters may appear to be in stark contrast to one another. Burger King’s fast food advertising rejected the notion of ‘primal’ diets, it declared the supremacy of western-style processed meat. Whereas the raw meat diets championed by figures such as Vonderplanitz and the Liver King herald a return to the ‘primal’ diets of our ancestors. But it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man … is deeply concerned about his own feminisation from lack of meat consumption. They are both united in the face of their enemies: soyboys, soy globalists, SOY!
The Whopper Virgins campaign message has not matured in quite the same way that its beef patty stakes claim to. From the trope of the effeminate rice eater through to the ‘primal’ man, we are able to trace how modern day media replicates and spreads the seeds of a culture war based on existing bigotries, othering and preconceptions within their target audiences. Using meat to feminise, humiliate and denigrate is not new. Harmful nineteenth century tropes and stereotypes have been repackaged and reformulated, persisting in the twenty-first century viral, online sphere. These spaces have increasingly become a breeding ground for the alt-right man whose longing for a primal lifestyle is but a paper thin veil over a patriarchal state. Hey Burger King, do you have some raw eggs I can slonk with that Whopper?
Text: Frankie Jenner
Creative Direction: Yannic Moeken, Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain, Junshen Wu
Photography: Junshen Wu
Sources:
Carol J. Adams: The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory, 1990
Hilda Labrada Gore: Lessons From the (Ab)original People, Weston A. Price Foundation, February 11, 2020
James Leonard Corning: Brain Exhaustion, With Some Preliminary Considerations on Cerebral Dynamics, 1884.
Emily Green, ‘Meat but No Heat’, in: Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2001
www.liverking.com
Vasile Stanescu: The Whopper Virgins: Hamburgers, Gender, and Xenophobia in Burger King’s Hamburger Advertising, in: Meat Culture, vol. 17, 2016
