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Food

Advertisers Still Don’t Get That Not All Women Love Chocolate

Stereotypes around women and chocolate melt together stickily. I, for one, am obsessed with the stuff. I eat giant bars of Dairy Milk standing outside my flat, too impatient to get inside. But are women really hard-wired to crave Toblerones?
Photo via Flickr user Korona Lacasse

Women: there is a now a brand of chocolate (designed by men, natch) that will make you younger and more beautiful. All those lady things rolled into one. Indulge your hormone-fuelled feeding frenzy while keeping a panicky watch on your diminishing hotness. Thank you, clever scientists!

The product in question is Esthechoc. "In clinical trials we saw that inflammation in the skin starting to go down and the tissues began to benefit," said its creator Dr Ivan Petyaev. "We used people in their 50s and 60s and in terms of skin biomarkers we found it had brought skin back to the levels of a 20 or 30 year old."

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READ MORE: Anti-Aging Chocolate Wants to Smooth Your Skin from the Inside Out

Esthechoc has a slick, scientifical-looking website, boasting of "enhanced bioavailability" and "biochemical parameters." At no point does Esthechoc explicitly say it will make you look younger, but that is the implication and media outlets across the world have reported it as such (although in MUNCHIES' case, with a good dose of cynicism).

Experts are wary. "Dark chocolate is a good antioxidant," says Liam Grover, professor in biomaterials science at the University of Birmingham. "I'd have no reason to dispute what they say about reducing inflammatory markers. But there's a big difference between reducing inflammatory markers and making people look younger."

Esthechoc is eye-wateringly expensive and I should probably forget it exists. And yet, since I first saw the press release, it's been niggling me with its perfect blend of food and body-related sexism. Chocolate to stop you getting old and ugly. It feels like a double attack.

Stereotypes around women and chocolate melt together stickily. I, for one, am obsessed with the stuff. I eat giant bars of Dairy Milk standing in the shared hallway of my flat, too impatient to get inside. If there's chocolate in the house, I can't rest until it's in my mouth. I know I'm not alone here. But why is this? Are women really hard-wired to crave Toblerones?

Look at the images that appear when you Google "women chocolate": sexualised pleasure, glut, rapture. God knows how we decide whether to eat our two-fingered Twix bars or fuck them.

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Received wisdom says we are. There's dude food (hamburgers, flesh) and chick fodder (green stuff, chocolate). Will Beckett, owner of Hawksmoor steak restaurants, recently told The Daily Telegraph: "Meat is to men what chocolate is to women. It feels like it's in our DNA."

Chocolatiers will concur. "Most women have a very special relationship with chocolate," Lavinia Davolio, founder of boutique chocolate shop, Lavolio, tells me. "While men enjoy eating fine chocolate, women really connect with our treats on a deeper level."

That chocolate is associated with womanhood is ingrained in our culture. Look at the images that appear when you Google "women chocolate": sexualised pleasure, glut, rapture. God knows how we decide whether to eat our two-fingered Twix bars or fuck them.

David Katz of Yale University believes women's chocolate lust is down to evolution, suggesting that differences in physiology explain food preference. Mammoth-hunting men needed meat to build muscle, while women gathered berries and developed a sweet tooth. Others cite the meme-inspiring idea that women crave chocolate around their period.

"It may be in part cultural, a reflection of the way it's advertised, but there may be also biological aspect," says David Benton, professor of psychology at Swansea University. "In the second half of the menstrual cycle, the basic metabolic rate and appetite is greater and there is a particular preference for palatable foods."

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Advertisers waste no time pondering this. Chocolate is marketed mainly at women and children. In women's case, this is likely to be sexual—think ads by Galaxy or Godiva. When men get a look-in, chocolate isn't sold on the basis of their obsession but as a convenient hunger fix.

Women, including myself, readily go along with this. Chocolate is the cure for broken hearts, period pains, and random mid-afternoon cravings. The most annoying health-conscious celebs love to tell us that they "indulge in the occasional square of organic chocolate."

The thing is, there doesn't seem to be much solid science to back up theories that any of this is founded in biology. Studies looking into reported food cravings have not always yielded significant gender differences when it comes to chocolate. The hormonal link seems tenuous as studies have shown that women continue craving chocolate after menopause.

Also, the idea of chocolate as femme food is not universal. In Spain, men and women were found to crave chocolate equally while in Egypt, all genders preferred salty foods over sweet. A study at UCL suggested it was school-age boys who were the most into sugary, fatty foods.

Peter Rogers, professor of biological psychology at the University of Bristol doesn't think there's an innate gender difference in preference for Mars bars. Women's relationship with chocolate, he believes, is more likely to be an effect of its status as a "naughty" food.

READ MORE: Scientists Have Found More Reasons to Justify Your Chocolate Habit

"We all like chocolate, in part because it's a sweet tasting, rich food, but also because it has a lot of cultural kudos," he explains. "If there is a difference, it may be because women are, in general, under more pressure to keep thin. We have a strong ambivalence around chocolate. Possibly greater than any other food we can think of."

Food isn't gendered by some grand design of the universe which places cupcakes in the metaphysical women's aisle and bacon in the men's. Taste preference can be learned. I don't plan on un-learning my chocolate fixation but I don't need it sold to me with an added dollop of bullshit beauty-guilt. Woo-peddlers of the patriarchy: I like my chocolate without pseudo-science.