LeoFox wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 6:14 pm
faj wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 5:38 pm
The ladies in the house like it
Maybe mbanu can address this: why is it that men in general seem to dislike floral teas - and esp any kind of tea that has been "scented"? Often it is not just dislike but looking down on the item, as if liking it suggests something negative about the person who can like it (esp if that person is a man).
Even my dad is snickering that I am drinking more jasmine tea.
For the United States, I think it is because floral teas are the tea of choice for the dominant hot tea-culture, and in the U.S. this culture is still very gendered. So men who participate sometimes are tempted to define their tastes against this. Originally this was done with Lapsang Souchong, which is also a scented tea, but one that in the U.S. was associated with men, due to cultural connotations regarding smoke and endorsements from famous American men such as Teddy Roosevelt or the banker J.P. Morgan.
I'm not sure that I understand British tea choices well enough to say anything there, other than that tea-choices seem to split along social class more than gender lines. (One thing I would be really curious about but am not sure has been looked at is how the perception of Earl Grey tea changed in America from before and after it being featured as the favorite tea of the male lead on the popular TV show Star Trek.)
In a more general way, I wonder if part of it is also who talks about tea online... Whenever people mention jasmine tea in China, it always seems to be "Northerners drink this tea" rather than, "I, a Northerner, drink this tea." There are also types of flavored tea that are not even mentioned as an other, like the Babao "Eight Treasure" tea that, at least according to books on the subject, is popular in Hunan. It's not even people commenting, "Oh, they put garbage in their tea in Hunan", it is just not mentioned at all. So you have a sort of one-sided narrative shaping what the geography of the tea-world looks like.
Sometimes I think this may be due to language barriers. Most people would not realize that jasmine tea is a known type of tea in West Africa, for instance, because the West African drinkers of this tea don't seem to post on the English-language internet very often.