Carnivore Women of TikTok: Healing from Modernity

Petite, sleek-haired, smooth skinned Isabella Ma is seated before a massive steak. The plate dwarfs her, wider than her waist. The steak is on the bone, the foregrounded rib appearing nearly the size of Ma’s arm. She matter-of-factly shakes out her white napkin, places it on her lap, picks up the steak by the bone, and digs in. Her breathy voice narrates: “My fiancé took me out for date night. And instead of ordering salad and eating with a fork, I ordered a dry-aged tomahawk and ate with my hands. Because what’s more feminine than that?”

This paper will draw from close readings of Isabella Ma’s TikTok persona, Steakandbuttergal, to draw connections between American metaphysical religion and the gender dynamics of meat-based wellness influencers. Ma is a self proclaimed “high fat carnivore” who claims that with a diet of only animal-based products, primarily meat and butter, she cured her cystic acne, lost 30 pounds, cured her “brain fog,” and has reversed health issues that plagued her previously as a vegan. Like other genres of wellness influencers, carnivores like Ma argue that meat has been her salvation by making her stronger, more desirable, and more in touch with her true nature. But uniquely, carnivores like Ma contrast their feminine beauty with the masculine-coded, often phallic sticks of butter and hunks of meat that they consume on camera. Her most popular video at the time of writing, with 12.5 million views, shows Ma in jeans and a top exposing her slender midriff, holding a plate with two burger patties, seven fried eggs, a stick of butter, and a jiggling, viscous, overflowing bowl of gelatinized bone broth, eliciting comments expressing visceral disgust, concern, and shock. 

Contesting and reconstituting far right notions of femininity, and calling for a return to true human nature, Ma exemplifies the digital manifestation of what Catherine Albanese calls the “enlightened body-self,” the tendency in metaphysical religion for practitioners to value “the physical as a route to the transcendent,” and pursue salvation through the healing of the body. Isabella Ma’s content comfortably speaks the far-right carnivore lingua franca of a sick modernity and the salvation of a romanticized, ancestral, traditionally gendered way of being. But the same time, Ma reveals conflicting notions of femininity on the far right. She selectively engages in primal gender rhetoric, rejects a modernity construed as feminine, and enforces patriarchal rhetoric while crossing the boundaries of femininity. And, by modeling the enlightened body-self, she transcends these contradictions while simultaneously shaping and participating in them.

Ma is part of a larger trend of carnivore influencers often associated with the far right, exemplified by public figures like Jordan Peterson or social media accounts like the Raw Egg Nationalist. Scholars of right wing social media culture have identified common themes among this network of meat-based wellness influencers, most common among them the theme of masculinity endangered by the modern world, redeemable by eating meat and reclaiming a mythologized ancestral manhood. In their article “Long live the Liver King,” S. Marek Muller, David Rooney, and Cecilia Cerja argue that carnivore influencers like the Liver King and Raw Egg Nationalist have contributed to a discourse of “primal rhetoric,” that links meat consumption to cisheterosexist and white nationalist values, using noble savage tropes to invoke “ancestral carnivorism." In her paper “Granola Nazis and the Great Reset,” Catherine Tebaldi goes further to argue that for her characterological figure of the Granola Nazi, who idealizes the beauty of the healthy body and the natural world, “images of food, landscapes and normatively attractive white faces produce the figure of the white nationalist as a wholesome, desirable woman or a strong, masculine man.” Like the authors of “Long Live the Liver King,” Tebaldi identifies appeals to a romanticized masculine past, but more explicitly places this within “pan-Aryan white mythology,” eco-fascism, and Nazism. 

By bringing scholarly analysis of the far-right carnivore diet into conversation with religious studies scholarship on metaphysical religion and capitalist spirituality, this paper shows the way Ma and other women carnivores solve contradictory expectations of far right femininity through the transcendent salvation of the enlightened body-self. Ma is offering not only beauty, wellness, and weight loss advice, but also a cure for modernity, a return to true human nature, and spiritual healing. She promises freedom: not freedom from gender traditionalism, but the freedom to sit at the table with carnivore men, together at the top of the food chain. She both embodies and distances herself from an idealized traditional femininity, seeking freedom from feminine weakness, and from the feminized, corporate, conspiracy-ridden modern world with its seed oils and processed foods and neoliberal precarity. 

Ma both contributes to and complicates the dynamics identified by Tebaldi and the authors of “Long Live the Liver King.” She makes the same appeals to the sickness of modernity, and the same appeals a mythologized ancestral human nature. Yet unlike Tebaldi’s granola nazi women, posed beside beautiful landscapes and homesteads, Ma’s feminine beauty is always juxtaposed by the large, crass, masculine-coded meals she consumes. Her success on TikTok’s algorithm comes from these contradictory images, and the visceral feelings of disgust or shock she elicits from her viewers. Isabella Ma’s content utilizes many of the feminine tropes of granola Nazism, but she is “not like other girls.” Her content perpetuates the same tropes that uphold white nationalism, but selectively participates in racial, gendered rhetoric. Having healed the “enlightened body-self,” Ma transcends these binaries and hierarchies, while simultaneously upholding and participating in them.