Snuffing the Rooster: Sacrificing Sensitivity to Prove Manhood on Survivor
What does killing a chicken on the reality TV show Survivor prove about being a man? An analysis of meat, masculinity, and manufactured gender roles.
“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human.” ~ Victor Frankenstein’s monster, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
Fans of the reality TV show, Survivor, know that contestants sometimes kill chickens. In season 49 (2025), a tribe of seven wins a reward competition and is awarded chickens. The hungry group agrees that a rooster should immediately be slaughtered for food. The problem is that no one has the experience or desire to gain experience doing the deed. As is often the case, hunger prevails and the decision is made that the job must get done. Who takes up the task, the feelings they have about doing it, and the meaning they ascribe to it offer valuable insight into the meaning of masculinity and the social construction of ostensibly organic gender norms.
After arriving at camp following their victory, the group discusses their desire for substantive food. The five female members insist that they are not up to the task of doing the necessary killing. Neither of the two male members have experience killing animals. Steven comments that he has “never killed anything in my entire life” while Alex says that he will do the job but is unfamiliar with the process. The two men dutifully accept the assignment and receive basic instructions from the women on the tribe. They must kill the chicken by wringing its neck and then defeather the bird in preparation for cooking. Though the men say they are “scared,” they push through their emotional resistance and proceed to do the job.
Watch the scene from episode 4 of season 49 below.
As the men initiate the barehanded slaughter, two of the female tribe members plug their ears with their fingers and walk further away to evade hearing the butchery. The women are not the only ones shaken by the chicken’s distressing cries. The men’s facial and verbal expressions show they are shaken after successfully choking the animal to death. Steven says, “It’s gone, it’s gone,” while Alex exclaims, “Oh my God!” Alex, a political communications director, adds, “That’s probably the hardest thing that I will ever have to do in my life.” As the men defeather the bird, they look over and express sympathy at the plight of the surviving chickens, believing the animals are consciously witnessing their brethren’s death and preparation for cooking.
Though some might dismiss the men’s concerns as anthropomorphism, researchers have concluded that chickens are indeed cognitively complex creatures. Despite the widespread belief that they are stupid, Lori Marino’s comprehensive review of the scientific literature reveals chickens have demonstrated “self-control and self-assessment,” engage in complex communication, logical reasoning, anticipation of future events, and are able to differentiate individuals within their group. They have “distinct personalities, just like all animals who are cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally complex individuals.”1 Hens have also been shown to engage in decision making in which they forgo an immediate though smaller food reward in order to earn a food “jackpot.”2
The tribe’s conflicting emotions verifies Carol J. Adams’ claim that human beings experience universal discomfort with the basic visceral reality of eating other living animals. The cognitive dissonance of our love of animals and our love of eating animals is partly remedied by a convenient cultural trick. The animals we eat are “made absent through language that renames dead bodies before consumers participate in eating them,” writes Adams in The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990). “Our culture further mystifies the term ‘meat’ with gastronomic language, so we do not conjure dead, butchered animals, but cuisine.”3 The men and women of the tribe on Survivor endure distress because their “meat” has suddenly been revealed to be an animal. Though we all know intellectually that “meat” is a euphemism for the body of a dead animal, popular culture and opinion conspire to hide this discomforting reality from the intuitive moral sensitivity many of us have toward conscious living creatures.
But what does any of this have to do with gender norms? Alex makes explicit what would otherwise be left up to the viewer to interpret. After the killing and cooking of the chicken, Alex reflects on the significance of his experience. “People think I’m weak,” he says to an off-camera interviewer. “They think that I’m not tough enough. They think that I’m not strong enough. They say I’m too feminine. To all those people who have made comments about how soft I am, are you guys killing chickens on Survivor? I don’t think so.” In other words, Alex interprets the suppression of his moral distress of killing a living being and the activation of his capacity to kill (for the benefit of himself and tribe) as not just a matter of existential necessity but as proof of his manhood.
Notice, further, that Alex does not question the conception of manhood as non-feminine. Instead, by thwarting his emotional objections and successfully killing the animal he not only met but even surpassed the masculine expectations of the men who had previously labeled him feminine. Alex’s interpretation of the killing as evidence of his manhood is reinforced by the fact that every one of the five women in the tribe refused to participate in the activity.
The scene is significant to the critical examination of gender for a few reasons. First, the men’s aversion to killing reveals the fact that men are not naturally competent killers. Both Alex and Steven are clearly upset by their experience of killing. The scene reveals the social construction of the idea that violence is natural to maleness. When the men say they are “scared,” they are clearly not referring to their fear of the chicken hurting them. The fear they describe is a moral fear of having to take another living being’s life. They are willing to do the job, but they are not comfortable doing it.
A second reason the scene is important is that it reminds us that men are not the only people who benefit from gendered cultural expectations, women can also be beneficiaries of these norms. Without the expectation that men ought to take care of violent and ultimately “dirty” jobs, the five women would have either had to go without “meat” or suppress their own moral aversion to killing. By relying upon men to do the killing, they are able to preserve their own gendered identities as women who are too sensitive to do such bloody work. But as we all know, women have killed and can kill chickens among other living creatures. That they were not required to do so indicates the power of patriarchal gender norms more than men’s and women’s (un)natural propensity to kill.
Viewed through a critical lens that refuses to take patriarchal ideology as biologically-determined, the scene allows us to see how men and women make choices guided by cultural expectation that manufacture precisely what we are led to believe is “naturally” occurring. Our gender roles as men and women are made rather than found in our biological sex. And these gender roles determine not just who does the killing but also the meaning of that killing in relation to our personal identities.
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Read past examinations of men’s gendered lives
Watch the scene for yourself…
Lori Marino, “Thinking Chickens: A Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior in the Domestic Chicken,” Animal Cognition 20, no. 2 (March 2017): 127.
Jonathan Balcombe, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good (New York: Macmillan, 2006), 223
Adams goes on to write, “This discomfort is seen when people do not want to be reminded of what they are eating while eating, nor to be informed of the slaughterhouse activities that make meat eating possible; it is also revealed by the personal taboo that each person has toward some form of meat: either because of its form, such as organ meats, or because of its source, such as pig or rabbit, insects or rodents. The intellectual framework of language that enshrouds meat eating protects these emotional responses from being examined. This is nothing new; language has always aided us in sidestepping stick problems of conceptualization by obfuscating the situation.”
Jeffrey, thank you so much for this essay. Carol J Adams is a legend and I appreciate you bringing her much needed perspective over here onto Substack.
Why I have always thought that hunting is a more honest way of getting meat than buying it at the store or a McNugget or whatever.