Males on Steepster?
I’m just curious – how many males actually use steepster? The gender ratio is tipped greatly towards the female persuasion, and I know there are some guys out there, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only one.
Not that I mind being surrounded by women, of course.
Man here….but we have a shared presence on steepster – my female partner shows up from time to time….
Pete
Editor
http://leafboxtea.com
Haha, I was thinking the same thing myself! From our past research and our tea survey we did several months ago, the gender breakdown was actually quite even. But I have to admit there do seem to be many intelligent, beautiful, compassionate, and all around amazing women on Steepster now! :)
I’ve also heard that a majority of tea drinkers (at least in the US) are female – so maybe that has something to do with it. All of your Steepster overlords (Jack, Mike, and myself) are dudes, but we welcome any and all kinds to the tea drinking fun at Steepster.
Why thank you, Jason! I love to read reviews from our male tea drinkers. Gives me hope that one day my hubby might drink more than unsweet iced tea with splenda. :)
From what I’ve noticed here, Sweet Tea is pre-sweetened before it reaches your table. Unsweet Tea is not sweetened before it reaches you. People then either add sugar or splenda or leave it plain as their personal tastes dictate. It confused me too when I first saw people sweetening their “unsweet” tea. (Actually the whole idea of calling regular tea “unsweet” seemed odd to me.)
@Carolyn. EXACTLY! That’s the beef I have w/ places like SBUX. They have iced and hot tea on the menu and then ask if I want it sweetend (Thank GOD they now ask before doing it automatically)… I give them a really stupid look (on purpose lol) and am like “Um… no… I ordered tea… not sweet tea…”. I grabbed a bottle of Tazo Organic Green Tea at an airport once, took a sip, and nearly gagged. Cane sugar was in fine print in the ingredients but it was NOT labled as “Sweet tea”. I’ve been meaning to write them an email accusing them of false advertisment. I may do that today. Thanks for reminding me.:)
“intelligent, beautiful, compassionate, and all around amazing women”
Gosh…. blush
I’ve bullied my boyfriend into making an account, although he’s not very good at remembering to use it, it seems. Still counts, right?
Jason: Flattery is always acceptable.
Re: sweet vs. “unsweet”: Tea in the South is always iced and always sweetened heavily, unless the person ordering specifies something different. Tea has to be sweetened hot, and then chilled, to produce the supersaturated solution known as “tea” here. If you don’t want your teeth to fall out, or to lapse into a diabetic coma, then you order your tea “unsweet,” and add sugar or the other sweetener of your choice. This, by the way, automatically identifies you as Someone Not From Here.
Why is it that when I order a sweetened ice tea they give me an unsweetened ice tea and a selection of sugar. o.O
@Cofftea LOL Carolyn has it right. We are in Charleston, SC so when you order iced tea you have to say sweet or unsweet tea. Totally a southern thing :) The funny thing is that when my husband goes out of town for business he has to remember to just say iced tea, because if you ask for “unsweet” the waiter looks at you like your crazy! Sweet tea is big here, as a matter of fact McDonald’s advertises in the store their “awesome” sweet tea, lol
Then why do some places even in the midwest serve sweetened iced tea as a default? When I go out to eat the ONLY place I order iced tea anymore is Subway cuz it’s marked as unsweetened.
Thanks, rabbysmom. That is what I was trying to say. This is a regional linguistic difference and nothing to get excited about. Just across the border into Mississippi many restaurants only serve Tea and Unsweet Tea. It came as quite a surprise to me when I first moved here that “Tea” meant sweetened by default. It is definitely a Southern thing.
@Cofftea Regarding Midwestern restaurants serving sweetened tea, my guess is that either the parent company is based in the South (and therefore their recipes and terminology is as well) or it is peculiar to that restaurant. Or the South is creeping into the MIdwest. I can tell you that when I lived in Ohio and Colorado I had never heard of Unsweet tea.
@Carolyn, I’m not sure I beleive the thing about the location of the parent co. because it’s that way nearly everywhere except Subway. We don’t call it unsweet tea here, just iced tea. But it’s more often than not sweetened before it gets to you. That’s what ticks me off and is something to be excited about because they’re 2 different products and they try to pass one off as the other.
@Cofftea, not sure about the whole sweet/unsweet tea protocol in other places. Guess it’s just hit or miss wherever you go depending upon the establishment.
@chrine Hey! It’s really cool that there is another Charleston person on here :) I actually live in Mt P but it’s easier to say Charleston since people are more familiar with the town.
Women! Look how they turned a [Manly] thread on the [Masculine] topic of [TESTOSTERONE] gender into a discussion about [feminine…] “Sweet tea”.
My rationalization (Jason, women also have the ability to rationalize ANYthing) is that this is totally on topic because it proves his point. hehe.
I’m all for a singles site spinning off. Gosh knows I can’t find any tea drinking ladies
Minus the fact that it seems like every girl on here has a boyfriend/fiancee/husband. XP That’s where a singles site comes in! A site full of lonely girls searching for some tea-related romance.
I’m totally a dude. I used to work at a print shop a few summers ago, hauling tons of paper, getting terrible papercuts, driving a forklift and generally getting greasy, sweaty and grizzled.
And I drank my pomegranate green tea blend out of my bright green tumbler. I kept telling people it was black coffee. Heh. Were THEY none the wiser.
But seriously, many of these posts and replies don’t really pertain to the topic. They would be much better in their own “Sweet tea/Unsweet tea” discussion so others could actually find them. Maybe one of the lovely ladies can do us the honor of creating such a discussion? ;)
Sorry Jason, women’s flow of discussion tends to do exactly that… flow from one topic to another. here’s one:
http://steepster.com/discuss/29-are-you-sweet-or-unsweet
Private instant and mail massaging would also help deter this.
Sorry Jason. When I responded to your post my response really was about male tea drinkers and I was stating what my husband drinks. Didn’t think it would turn into a discussion, but it did. (oops!)
@rabbysmom: It’s ok, it happens :) It just makes sense for the sweet/unsweet tea to be in its own discussion since I’m sure a number of people would like to contribute…and they probably won’t find posts about that in the “manliest” Steepster discussion.
@Ricky: Good call…we’ll just have to build that first. I’ll do another post in here about people moving their conversation.
It’s interesting, but in fact tea has historically (at least in the western world) been a woman’s drink. They were the ones who populated the posh ‘tea salons’ and it’s even said that these all-female gatherings helped women organize and became the foundation of the women’s lib movement.
Coffee (usually black and strong enough to put hair on your chest if it wasn’t there before) on the other hand, has traditionally been seen as ‘The Drink of the He-man’ (it’s also one of the few drinks guaranteed to make me puke – I wonder what that says about you guys ;P).
Of course these are both old stereotypes and now there are lots of women who drink coffee (ew) and lots of men who drink tea. I’m still trying to recruit the boyfriend-creature, though unfortunately he’s of the opinion that, coffee or tea, if it doesn’t have a ton of sugar in it, then it’s no good. Men!
;)
I’m not only a member of the dangling persuasion, but I started a tea business. The one consolation to my (apparently) effeminate career choice: When I have told my manpals about owning a tea bar, they frequently do not hear me correctly and assume I said _ _ _ – ty bar which seems to impress them quite a bit. Sometimes I correct them.
Haha! That’s a great approach. Next time I’ll just kinda mumble when people ask what I do and maybe they’ll hear “I run a _ _ _ ty website” :D
I plan to make a future in just that -
Strip bar/tea house.
I kid you not. I was having a conversation with someone about this yesterday.
a side note – THIS is an acceptable offshoot from the original topic
JMKauftheil, if you ever do open that hybrid, pleasepleaseplease call it Strip TEAse. That’d make my day.
It’s that, or “The Ti-TEA bar”.
Just imagine: you’re sitting at the tea bar, enjoying a cup of Tie Kwan Yin, and there’s the “Iron Goddess” herself, scantily clad with her ta-tas in your face. Is that not what tea is all about?
LOL! I vote Ti-Tea. :D
And that is actually way too easy to imagine. In my head she’s dressed a bit like Xena. :p
The TiTea bar: We love oolong time
Then there’s “Oriental Beauty”, “Lady Grey”, “Jazmine Pearl”, “Aly Shan”…
“Titsubin”, “Brown Betty”,
If you want a private room with a girl, you come talk to me because I’m the “matcha maker”
The puns just write themselves.
(by the way, auditions starting soon, ladies!)
I told a friend of mine about a Jade Oolong I had once. He said it sounded like a porn-star name, so I think you’re on to something. :D
(…if you don’t open the bar, then someone ought to write the novel set in it. It’d be… a murder mystery, I think.)
I’m sure I could put a novel (or at least a story) together on that…
Honestly, not too far from the kind of stuff I usually write XD
But, seeing as my style and tastes go, it would probably be more along the lines of light-hearted, mundane fiction. Or straight out erotica. Or a tasteful coupling of the two. Even if I put in a murder, it would still be pleasantly mundane XD
I’m not deterred by that. Sounds like something I would do. Except the erotica probably wouldn’t be all that tasteful. :p And the whole thing would be wildly mediocre.
Oh… you’d be surprised about the Erotica. As long as it doesn’t get smutty. Hehe.
Maybe I’ll get to work on that after I finish the piece I just started that’s based vaguely on a Chinese waitress that I’m kinda in love with.
For anyone who participated in the sweet/unsweet conversation, if you go ahead and move your thoughts into this discussion (http://steepster.com/discuss/29-are-you-sweet-or-unsweet) I’ll delete them from here. Just shoot me an email (jason@steepster.com) and tell me what content you’ve moved. Thanks.
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