About Girls Love Meat

As the site will tell you, girlslovemeat started as a joke between three friends who loved to cook and eat together. We really truly very much do love meat, seriously, it’s delicious. The joke is the line it walks between racy and wholesome. The name sounds like something advertised on late night TV, but the content completely belies that aesthetic. It’s absurd, its fun. It’s girls eating, having fun and loving life. Eating is an act of joy, and that’s really what it all about—how much joy we take in our food and sharing it. And its funny, precisely because its good clean fun. I really enjoy the absurdity of the whole thing. It doesn’t matter if nothing ever happens with this, but I’d like to think that I can collect a small army of girls who love to eat and laugh and feel a little freer. So feel free to laugh at me as I ostentatiously much on this bloody steak, because that’s what this is here for.

I’m making this site because I’ve dared myself to. I talked about doing this so I’m just going to follow through and do it. Why not? An obvious answer would be that there is probably something much more productive I could work on, but perhaps I’m terribly jaded but this is the most beneficial thing I can currently think of to work on as a website that is not incredibly boring. I could put up a self-promotional site with my resume and design portfolio, but for one thing, I don’t want to, and for another, once I learn on this if I decide to do something like that it will be incredibly easy. I’m interested in learning from this as an experiment really, of how to build a web site, how to market it and all the things involved in that, how to take on my own project independently. Learning to work independently is very important for me right now, as is exploring the business end of things. I’m on the verge of a major career shift out of the cushy humanities world and into the business world (taking my sense of humor with me, thank you) so its time to adjust my analytical lens and play a little with the possibilities scattered about me.

It’s (distantly) possible that I could make a few spare bucks off my absurd sense of humor. Of course, that all lies in doing this right and legitimatizing the whole thing by actually doing reviews of restaurants and grocery stores and properly planning and documenting events and moderating comments (note: I’ve got to figure out how to moderate comments!) thus getting sponsors or advertisers. The other method, which is a big reason this got started in the first place, is to sell absurd merchandise. We’ve actually designed a bunch of this stuff already, and the idea of making the site was originally just as a tool for selling our funny meat merchandise, but the truth is that it’s much easier to put up a web site than to manufacture products, and I’d like to try to see if anyone gets the joke before putting any dollars into a material incarnation of it. Though a little research shows that there is a market at least for this sense of humor and meat as a theme (there’s a couple decent Threadless shirts out there along these lines, for example). Really, I’m not counting on these things, but I’d like to see how far the three of us (and anyone we recruit) are willing to take it once it becomes a digital reality.

Therefore, what I need this site to do most of all at this point is show me if anyone else finds this as funny as we do. Thus, it has to have enough well-displayed and organized content for people to take an interest in and recognize it as a phenomenon and at least enjoy it if not identify with it (in some weird way, surely). It also needs a mechanism by which to record the responses, which includes a behind the scenes device to monitor traffic and the obvious comment board, where I get to see in plain English if anyone gets it.

The purpose of the login is to hopefully reduce the amount of trash and general creepyness in the message boards this site inherently invites. This will filter out anyone who hasn’t put a certain degree of thought into what they are about to post, I hope for the best, and inspire a minimal level of community.

It also has to be able to change with time...