The tofu test: the dating question women are asking about soy

Women have been sharing a dating test for men online, and it is just one question long.

The women sharing it say you ask it early, while you are still working out whether you like someone, and that it works precisely because it is not a trap and does not sound like a test. The answer, they say, tells you something about how the man across the table thinks about women.

The question is about tofu.

Ask him what he thinks of it, or of soy generally. In the accounts being shared, most men say something unremarkable and the conversation moves on. The answers the test is looking for are the other ones: “isn’t that full of oestrogen”, or “that’s gay”, or a face suggesting you have proposed eating a flannel.

Where the trend came from

On 2 February 2026, TikTok creator Esme Hewitt (@esmehewitt (opens in a new tab)) posted a video that has since had nearly half a million views and 70,000 likes.

Her argument went wider than tofu:

“I do think there is a correlation between attitudes of meat, and women and the environment and empathy and just what kind of person you are.”

And it all revolves around this point:

“The way that people view meat as a whole, especially the idea of not getting enough protein, that really reminds me of toxic masculinity.”

She put it more plainly: “You can’t just have a veggie burger once in a while? And why are you turning up your nose to tofu?”

The Daily Dot (opens in a new tab) covered it, and so did AOL (opens in a new tab).

So where did the idea come from that soy is feminising?

Soy contains compounds called phytoestrogens. Phyto means plant. They are plant oestrogens: structurally similar to human oestrogen, but not the same substance, and they do not behave the same way in the body.

And it’s this word, phytoestrogen, that is doing all the damage. From there it is a short hop to a conclusion that sounds like common sense and is not: eat the oestrogen food, become more like a woman.

The clinical evidence does not support it.

A meta-analysis pooling 41 clinical studies (opens in a new tab) found that soy and isoflavone intake did not significantly affect total testosterone, free testosterone, sex hormone-binding globulin, estradiol, estrone, or the free androgen index in men.

Four decades of trials. No significant effect on any of the measures people worry about. This is no longer a scientific debate with two sides - it is a claim that has been examined thoroughly and has not held up.

Then it got a name and a face.

In early 2017 the idea acquired a word. Soy boy is generally traced to anonymous message boards, where it was used as an insult for men seen as weak or effeminate and aimed particularly at vegan and liberal men. It reached wider forums that spring, and by the autumn it had a matching cartoon caricature, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, used to mock the same type of man.

That is the moment a piece of bad science stopped being a misunderstanding and became a weapon. You do not need to explain phytoestrogens to use the word soy boy. The insult carries the claim inside it, pre-packaged.

And then it kept going.

Nearly a decade later it is still circulating, largely untouched by the evidence, because it was never really being argued. Soy became a prefix, a shorthand, a way of labelling a kind of man. The science stayed where it was and the meme went everywhere.

What the insult actually says

The insult only works if being like a woman is bad. That is the mechanism: to call a man a soy boy is to say he has become womanly, and to expect that to wound him. Whatever else is arguable about the trend, that part is in the word itself.

The reality of the test

Plenty of people are not keen on tofu, for reasons that mean nothing at all. Some do not like the texture. Some do not like the taste. And a great many people, particularly outside Asia, have only ever encountered it cooked badly: boiled, unpressed, unseasoned, served without a plan. Not being enthusiastic about that is a fair review.

What the women using it say it is good for is sorting, not diagnosing. In their telling it puts people into four groups.

There are the ones who love it, who will tell you where to get the good stuff and how they press it. There are the indifferent, who have no feelings about beancurd whatsoever. There are the ones who say “not for me” in a sentence and move on to something more interesting.

And then there are the ones for whom your dinner has somehow become a referendum on their masculinity.

As one commenter on the original video put it:

“Experiencing how people respond to my veganism is a TELL on themselves.”

That, for the people running the test, is the whole return on a four-second question.

We are taking back the word

Soy Boy is one of our badges on Grazer, and it is not there as a joke at our own expense.

We put it there because that word was built to make men embarrassed about eating plants, and we would rather it belonged to our community. So we offer it to the men who eat plants and ask them to wear it on purpose.

That is the flip we are after. Not quietly absorbing an insult until it stops stinging, but taking something designed to make this community smaller and turning it into something to be proud of. We eat soy. We are not embarrassed about it. Wear the badge.

Have a look at the rest of the badges · Open Grazer