Don't forget the anti-asian racism implicit to the belief that soy, a food eaten widely in asia, makes you weak and feminine (whatever that means). The backlash to soy is inextricably tied to old stereotypes of asians as weak and docile.
More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. It's not about Asian people. It's about a specific type of white person.
No shit. The person you're responding to wasn't even remotely suggesting this. ;P
Their entire point is that by acting as if soy is this problematic ingredient, but failing to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems, is inherently racism-tinged/backed. It has always been an attempt to decry non-meat-eating as effeminate by attempting to attribute a poorly drawn study from well over a decade ago that people seemingly barely read through.
Furthermore the premise of soybeans being feminizing, the claim made up thread that prompted this sub-discussion, is a 21st century meme that cannot possibly explain why 18th, 19th and 20th century farmers in North America grew soybeans for their livestock but not themselves. Nor is the reason for this because they hated Asian people, the reason is because they were never well exposed to Asian culture in the first place. Even if you want to blame that on the Chinese Exclusion Act (at the end of the 19th century) and therefore racism, the production of soybeans for animal feed was already established generations earlier. The large expanse of the Pacific Ocean and the slow permeation of culture prior to the information age has more to do with it that anything else.
We're talking about an era in which North American coastal communities thought lobster was a shitty food despite Mediterranean Europeans knowing it to be delicious since at least the Roman era. Food culture didn't travel fast, it took people several generations to figure out foods new to them even when those foods were well understood by people who looked like them and with whom they had relatively high cultural exchange.
No, it has been around for longer than that. Soylent is a tertiary at best aspect to this.
Regardless of which particularly product prompted this, the point is the meme is new but westerners not eating soy is not new and cannot be attributed to the meme, nor is the meme even about asians. The memes mocked white guys in the west who eat soy products, particularly soylent. As for the general aversion to eating soybeans, read the Wikipedia page for soy. It has a short history of soy consumption in North America since the introduction of the beans here in the 18th century. For most of their history in North America they were raised almost exclusively as animal feed. This wasn't because of a meme that didn't then exist, nor because anti-asian racism; it simply wasn't considered very good to eat. America got the bean itself from Asia but not the culture of tofu production and consumption. In the 20th century methods of processing soybeans for human consumption started to be developed in North America, but it would take several decades to gain any appreciable traction.
The "soybeans are effeminizing" train of thought only came about very recently in response to soybeans actually being consumed now in North America. The memes about "soyboys" exclusively featured white men who were usually skinny or skinny-fat, office workers who lacked physical strength, not laborers, usually with thick-rimmed glasses and an enthusiasm for immature interests like video games or saturday morning cartoons. The memes were about these sort of white men, not about Asians.
Tldr: these memes weren't about Asians and neither were they the reason it took so long for soybeans to catch on. That's completely ahistorical, wrong by centuries.
In my experience hardcore competitive bodybuilding culture in particular does not cross over with 4chan very much. The users of 4chan tend to be too young to have entered to competitive bodybuilding scene so the generations are different, plus there are other cultural issues. Putting time into 4chan and time into the gym are not obviously exclusive of each other but in practice end up being so.
It certainly seems that the soy-estrogen theory became widely accepted “bro science” somehow; I just don’t know of any evidence that it was in any way related to anti-Asian racism.
I actually run an imageboard myself. Btw, if anyone from 13chan is reading this, the solution to the challenge is "im_from_13chan_that_means_im_cute"
I love 13chan <3