Dude Food

One of the things that defines dude food is this carefree, limitless way of eating that doesn't take into account moderation, common dietary nutritional advice; that it often maps onto stereotypical assumptions about foods that are masculine, masculine appetites, flavors and ways of eating and thinking about food that map onto these limitless, voracious, seeking satisfaction ways of eating. So, when you look at ˜dude' as a concept, as a linguistic term, it can definitely map onto men and to women, to masculinity and femininity. But dude food in particular gives us often very regressive, sort of stagnant definitions of how to be a real man.

One of the cookbooks I'm looking at, literally titled Dude Food, is the only cookbook I've ever seen where there are pictures of men just being dudes (...) and the only picture in the book of a woman is a woman without her top lying on her belly in bed with a lover. So the only way that women are configured into the recipes for dude food are as ways to be able to get women in bed and to be able to satisfy all of their appetites. It definitely maps onto these ideas about gender that have significant effects for how we think about gender equality and justice in the United States. Emily Contois

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image of the great Michel Piccoli via

"Il me faisait peur, ce monsieur." Michel Piccoli's Political Conscience

Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli was born in Paris in 1925. Experiencing the war when he was very young shaped him. Perhaps the moment he heard Hitler when he was listening to the radio in the late 1930s was the beginning of him developing a political conscience: "Il me faisait peur, ce monsieur."
Piccoli has always been outspoken. Whether his political activism might have harmed his career as an actor is a question he does not think about. "It may have closed some doors but I have never thought about it." (via)



In 1999, when the Freedom Party of Austria scored its biggest political victory and formed a coalition government - "the first time a party with Nazi origins had become part of a European government since the end of World War II" - an "unprecedented response" from the European Union followed since there was a serious breach of the principles of "liberty, democracy, respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law" (via). In Austria, people protested. One large-scale demonstration took place in Vienna on 19 February 2000 and one of the participants was Michel Piccoli who had gone to Vienna to demonstrate with the Austrians against the far-right coalition (via).

In an interview, Simone Signoret recalled that she, together with Michel Piccoli and Serge Reggiani, once mistakenly arrived two days early for a political demonstration and commented that had they been great scholars they probably would not have attracted "embarrrassing attention and received sympathetic hearing". Her conclusion was: "Moralité, faites donc du cinéma!" (Moores, 1991). Thank you, Monsieur Piccoli, for lending your name to the cause.

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- Moores, P. M. (1991). Celebrities in Politics: Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. In J. Gaffney & E. Kolinsky (eds.) Political Culture in France and Germany (130-154). London & New York: Routledge
- photograph by Jean Ber (1988) via

"So we played with dolls." Michel Piccoli

"Yes, that's right (I played with dolls). At the time, playing with dolls seemed to be a strange thing to do for a boy. People thought I could become homosexual. The reason, however, was simple. I had a cousin whose family was very wealthy. I liked the girl very much. She had lots of dolls and I had practically no toys. So we played with dolls."
Michel Piccoli

"As surprising as it may sound, although the thing to do is to buy dolls for girls and cars for boys, the science suggests boys actually prefer dolls." Paola Escudero

There is no innate preference among boys for "macho" toys. According to a study carried out at the University of Western Sydney, 6-month-old boys in fact even prefer social toys such as dolls to nonsocial ones such as trucks (time of fixation on the different images was the indicator for preference) (via and via).



"Unfortunately, boys have been discouraged from playing with “girl” items for decades, treated with contempt and told dolls are for 'sissies'."
Rebecca Hains, 2015

"'A boy with a doll?' The gentleman chuckled and dramatically raised one eyebrow before delivering his half-serious, half-stirring warning about my bub’s bleak future as a ‘sissy’."
Jamila Rizvi, 2016

Nice to watch:
::: Dad approves of son's new doll: WATCH

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photographs of the great, the marvellous Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli via and via