Finding the Cattle Queen
April 10, 2026 at 04:25PMThe Cattle Baron, a Manhattan steakhouse, may be best remembered for its 1968 print advertisement “of a woman kneeling naked in a Stetson,” whose “body is portioned out with painted lines, each segment labeled as a cut: chuck, rib, loin, rump, soup bone, and so on.” For the latest issue of Cake Zine (titled, perfectly, Steak Zine) Rachel Ossip uncovers the story of the “Cattle Queen,” whose image made her “steakhouse royalty, feminist icon, [and] fungible tourism graphic.”
Something about this image causes people to replicate it, a quality we call viral in the digital age. And while the Cattle Queen’s kneeling form seems like the most popular interpretation, the concept of superimposing cuts of meat onto a woman’s body certainly preceded her. On the cover of the 1955 book A Cartoon Guide to the Battle of the Sexes, a butcher stands beside a skinned and diagramed lamb while a thought bubble shows him imagining a woman passing by as similarly stripped and cut. A couple years before that book’s publication, in 1953, the French editorial photographer Lucien Lorelle created “Le boucher amoureux” (“The Infatuated Butcher”), a photograph ostensibly taken for Lorelle’s own pleasure. In it, a perky, nude blonde stands upright, gazing over her shoulder at an aproned man who holds a brush and a small tin of paint. He admires both her body and his own work: The woman’s entire form is covered in red lines and letters, curves delineating “culotte” from “gîte à la noix” in a detailed rendition of the butcher’s chart.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/04/10/cattle-baron-steakhouse-ad-rita-bennett/
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