Real men don't use forks:
Forks were used occasionally, but not every day. Montaigne,
writing in the 1570s in a passage about the force of habit, mentions
forks but says he rarely uses them. And they were still associated with
sinister behavior. In an essay in Feeding Desire on the sexual
politics of cutlery, Carolin Young notes that in 1605, an anonymous
allegorical novel about the courtiers of Henry III portrayed a
mysterious island peopled by hermaphrodites, whose behavior is
characterized by theatricality, artifice, and falsehood. Sure enough,
the hermaphrodites eat with forks, spilling more food than they manage
to consume in their pursuit of the new and the unnecessary. Young traces the “unsettlingly effeminate aura” of the fork all the way
through 1897, when British sailors are still eating without forks,
considering them to be unmanly.
A Hindu once told me that eating with a fork - instead of fingers - is liking having sex with a condom.
