In 1967, in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district, my grandfather Jerry opened a steakhouse. The Cattle Baron took the energy of a theme restaurant and gave it an adult polish. Red and white tablecloths, quilted wall panels, dark wood accents, and uplight chandeliers accented the red brick walls, while waitstaff appeared in “Western attire.” The following year, advertisements in Playbill and the New York Post implored eaters to “Break the Dull Steak House Habit” by patronizing Jerry Ossip’s Cattle Baron. “We looked around at the steak house scene. And we found it dreary,” the ad proclaimed. “We opened up the Cattle Barron for you men (and your women) who hunger for the best steak in town—and something else, besides.”

The real draw sat just above these words: a black-and-white image of a woman kneeling naked in a Stetson, glancing seductively over her shoulder. Her body is portioned out with painted lines, each segment labeled as a cut: chuck, rib, loin, rump, soup bone, and so on. The something else on offer, one must guess, is her—or whatever kind of louche access she implies. The sexual revolution was underway, and this combination of text and image urged the viewer to imagine the extent of what could happen in low-lit banquettes as dark liquor flowed. By all accounts, the ads were a scandalous hit.

I never met Jerry—he died years before I was born—but the lore that surrounds him filled my childhood. He was a charming man who often hosted celebrities in his restaurants; the Cattle Baron sat on 46th between 7th and 8th, in “stage country” as its ads proclaimed. Jerry thus became a go-to source for gossip columnists and was frequently cited recounting who appeared with whom. He wasn’t opposed to a gimmick; a promotional postcard for the Cattle Baron suggests that you could not only “select your own prime steak” but then also “brand it” (with a hot iron, I presume) before it was broiled “exactly the way you want it.” After your steak, you could order the Pony Espresso—a punny name for your average shot of after-dinner caffeine—to accompany dessert.

My uncle Brad, who was 15 at the time, remembers my grandmother’s discontent with the ad’s nudity; while she would never have called herself a feminist, the fiery bottle redhead certainly had opinions. She chewed Jerry out, appalled by the salacious image. “Boy, he got an earful,” Brad laughed. The newspapers apparently agreed with her: Although the model was naked in the original ads, Jack O’Brian, a gossip writer, reported in his Voice of Broadway column that the New York papers “made her wear a bikini.” Thus, in some of the early advertisements, a faint silhouette of underwear and a bra curve around her hips and back, seemingly added to the pasteups as an afterthought—or, in this case, a correction. Nonetheless, her magnetism is undeniable, even in that version with the most alluring areas crudely covered.

By the fall, large-scale, pin-up style posters featured a color version, with western-inflected serifs boldly proclaiming Jerry’s slogan: “Break the Dull Steak Habit.” The poster spread widely, perhaps in part because this injunction could mean almost anything when divorced from the specific context of the steakhouse. It implores you to live a more-than-ordinary life, with the suggestion that you will then encounter a more-than-ordinary woman. The warm tones and details visible at a larger scale only increase the model’s allure: Her auburn hair shines in the light, her darkly lined eyes look heavy-lidded. The flushed skin of her ass and thighs seems to glow, its rosy freshness contrasted by a patina of dirt on the soles of her feet. She’s not quite sitting, and instead seems poised to stand, perhaps to turn to face you. It is hard to look away.

I first saw her, in the less polished black-and-white version, back in the summer of 2016. As a birthday present for my father, my stepmother had framed a small card with the image alongside other ephemera—a menu, a signed check to pay patrons back ten cents for the cost of their reservation phone call (a classic Jerry gimmick)—from the Cattle Baron. My father hung the collection on a wall in the kitchen, and every time I visit, I try not to stare. Looking at her, I ricochet between desire and revulsion, lured in by the simple draw of her body, cleverly emphasized by the painted forms, and yet repulsed by the clear misogyny it communicates.

Somehow, my well-loved grandfather provoked the creation of an undeniably compelling yet undeniably bigoted image. Even so, I don’t think Jerry—or anyone involved in the original ad’s creation—could have quite imagined the ultimate stir she would create.

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In September 1968, a group of downtown feminists known as the New York Radical Women organized a protest against the annual Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The protest’s press release promised “Picket Lines,” “Guerrilla Theater,” and “Leafleting,” as well as “Lobbying Visits to the contestants urging our sisters to reject the Pageant Farce.” There was also a “Freedom Trash Can” into which attendees were asked to toss the trappings of feminine oppression: bras, girdles, false eyelashes, issues of Ladies’ Home Journal—“bring any such woman-garbage you have around the house,” a flyer goaded. Even though nothing was burned—fires were illegal on the boardwalk—that one trash can sparked the great myth of feminist bra burning.

Unfortunately, the pageant protest is better remembered for that nonexistent conflagration than for any of its more interesting realities. The New York Radical Women penned an accompanying manifesto that opposed everything from the pageant’s racism (“Since its inception in 1921, the Pageant has not had one Black finalist”) to Miss America’s mandatory cheerleading for the military, and, of course, the unrealistic beauty standards on display. Protestors called the contest a “cattle auction” and used the round-up metaphor as a theme for the demonstration. One woman led a sheep through the crowd on a leash, while another passed around a copy of the Cattle Baron poster. Journalists captured women smiling out from above the “Dull Steak Habit” slogan, and Life quippily captioned one such photo: “An objector offers a meaty criticism.”

The poster seems to have struck a chord with the feminists, and it continued to pop up at protests. Sheila Paige’s short documentary Testing, Testing How Do You Do? (1969), filmed at the following year’s pageant protest, opens with a long pan down the length of the poster. It shows up again a few years later, in 1971, at the first Women’s Liberation Demonstration in London, edited with paint to read “break the dull mis-steak habit.” Today, the poster is rarely, if ever, remembered for its relationship to the Cattle Baron, despite the name printed prominently in the bottom right corner. Instead, in museums and academic papers, Facebook posts and news outlets, it is referred to as a “feminist protest poster” by “anonymous.”

By 1971, my grandfather had sold the Cattle Baron and moved on to other ventures. That same year Longchamps, the group that had purchased the restaurant, attempted to trademark the infamous image, but was met with resistance. Three students at Harvard Law School filed a petition with the US patent office, opposing the trademark for its “harassment value.” The named filer, Janet Benshoof—a second year who would later go on to found the Center for Reproductive Rights and help secure women’s right to emergency contraception in the United States—told the Harvard Crimson that the image was “degrading to the image of women” and was therefore “against public policy.” The Crimson article also mentions that, while Longchamps claimed to no longer be using the image to advertise the Cattle Baron, the poster itself—vended by the printer, Poster Prints Company, in Pennsylvania—was still “very popular” and was being “sold all over the world.” I can corroborate this detail: I have found a photo that shows the poster taped on the window of a butcher’s shop in Sydney, Australia, and the auction record for a replica printed in Uppsala, Sweden.

Though Benshoof and her collaborators’ petition didn’t seem to stick, the vast number of remakes over the years suggest there were few, if any, legal protections around the design. At some point in the 1970s, an illustrated version of the image was printed on terrycloth beach towels, embellished with a slightly altered slogan: “Break the Dull Beef Habit.” The same towel was sold as a souvenir in (at very least) Glen Lake, Michigan; Panama City Beach, Florida; and Nassau, in the Bahamas, changing only the name of the city printed over the woman’s left shoulder. On each, the Cattle Baron’s name is substituted for an anointment: The words below her legs declare her the “Cattle Queen.” Now that’s how I’ve come to refer to her, replacing my previous shorthand (the more distasteful “meat woman”). Steakhouse royalty, feminist icon, fungible tourism graphic—she deserves a proper title.

Another version appeared the following decade, in 1981, on a postcard illustrated by an artist named Bill Day. There, she is called the Texas Cattle Queen, and she sits atop a blue background with all the typical slogans, plus the phrase “Texas Tender Beef.” Twenty years later, in 2001, Urban Outfitters printed the Bill Day version, labeled Kansas Cattle Queen, on a pale blue ringer tee. As might be expected, there was immediate backlash, spurred by complaints from Linda Anderson, who worked as an assistant in the gender studies department at Yale. “For me, this was the literal dismemberment of a woman’s body,” Anderson told the Yale Daily News. “I saw this woman being cut.” Urban Outfitters swiftly removed the shirt from its shelves.

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A few years ago, my stepmother and niece tried to convince me that we should all get tattoos of the Cattle Queen. While I managed to dissuade them, I’ve come to find we wouldn’t have been the first: Some internet searching has dredged up at least two tattooed variations—one a faithful replica, the other a satirical sendup with the woman’s ass cheeks labeled “hot pastrami,” her arm a “Jewish hot dog.” I’ve found the poster version printed on T-shirts, both a vintage number likely contemporaneous with the poster and an AliExpress knockoff you can order today from the Xiangshang Store for $9.91. And then there are the dresses and jumpsuits that superimpose section cuts onto form-fitting white garments, like the one worn by Hopie Wadsworth, the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association’s “October Beef Month Girl” of 1972. (If you desire such a garment, don’t despair: The seller imyourpresent offers made-to-order “Cuts of Meat” dresses in four different styles on Etsy.) I’ve even found a custom-sewn crop top made out of a “Florida” version of the beach towel.

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. Rather than coquettish, she seems skeptical, a little amused—perhaps she’s laughing at the smudge of paint accidentally rouging the butcher’s cheek. She looks at him, and so we’re situated as voyeurs to the exchange, left to simply observe the playful dynamic. The true innovation of the kneeling version is not her pose but her gaze: The butcher is gone, and the Queen looks out of the frame, making eye contact with the viewer. She waits there, on her knees, for us.

In 1990, a photo of the towel illustration appeared on the cover of Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, reinforcing the image’s earlier feminist affiliations. Adams’s text rails against the parceling of both animals and women into consumable pieces: “faceless body parts, breasts, legs, udders, buttocks.” If butchering transforms flesh into meat, being into nonbeing, “metaphorical sexual butchering” likewise uses language and imagery to disassemble women into commodified portions. In her introduction to the thirty-fifth anniversary edition, published in 2024, Adams links the contemporary rise of so-called carnivore diets (and the derogatory label “soy boy”) to the instability of masculinity in the face of increasingly flexible understandings of gender and gains toward gender equality. Masculinity and meat eating are rhetorically and symbolically intertwined; the Liver King lives under the sign of the same reactionary machismo that has ushered in an era of trad wives, men’s rights activists, and the legal dissolution of abortion rights. And what food speaks to manhood more than steak? Adams quotes the controversial British journalist A. A. Gill, who wrote in Vanity Fair, “A steak feels, looks, and tastes like winning.” The Cattle Baron poster and its countless knockoffs tap into this ingrained affiliation: To eat steak is to be virile; to be virile is to eat steak. The butchered woman at the center is simply a meal, the means to this end.

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It took months of searching to find the image’s actual creator. I had hoped my uncle Brad would have a lead, but he was still a kid when the ad was made. I finally turned up names in the July 1968 issue of Art Direction magazine: An early version of the print ad was featured inside of another ad, for an image retouching company, which credited the full team. The image was taken by photographer Dan Wynn, under the direction of Dennis Zultowsky, for a short-lived advertising firm known as Joe Sacco & Friends. Wynn had been taking portraits of celebrities since the early ’50s and would go on to become a photographer for the then-new New York magazine. Only a few years after photographing the Queen, he would ironically capture the portrait of celebrated feminists Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in DC.

Wynn’s photographs are sensitive, playful, often sensuous, and have real presence. His archive has the original black-and-white photographs of the Cattle Queen, in which you can see that the painted cut lines extend clearly under the model’s breasts. I was hoping that, by finding Wynn, I would be able to find something out about her, too, to learn who she was beyond the tones of her flesh. But, unfortunately, much of Wynn’s archive has yet to be catalogued. His archivist didn’t even know her name.

It seems like too much of a coincidence that Wynn and Jerry both cut their teeth as photographers in the Air Force during World War II. (Jerry was known for having almost taken the awful photograph of the mushroom cloud blooming over Hiroshima—his camera did, in the hands of the Enola Gay’s tail gunner—but that’s a story for another time.) I imagine they might have met in the service; perhaps Jerry gave Wynn a call when he was opening his new steak joint. However it happened, Jerry, Sacco, Zultowsky, and Wynn inadvertently created an icon.

In Wynn’s photograph, subtle details, like the dirt artfully smudged on the Cattle Queen’s soles, produce an aura of intimacy and mystique. In the spring of 2025, Lukecampis, a prolific young YouTuber who mostly makes videos of his cats, posted a short clip entitled “BREAK THE DULL STEAK HABBIT [sic].” Talking to his camera in a green hoodie, Luke drawls, “If you ever wanted to know what one of my favorite pieces of art is, it would be this.” Then he slides a piece of furniture out from in front of a framed original Cattle Baron poster. “That’s my honey right there,” he coos. “She even got dirty feet.”

The queen’s dirty feet were also noticed, and carefully replicated, in 2024 by the singer-songwriter Dawn Landes and the photographer Heather Evans Smith. Landes had stumbled upon The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, a 1971 collection of folksongs affiliated with women’s liberation, and decided to record an album of songs from the book after the decision came down in Dobbs v. Jackson. She enlisted Evans Smith to help her reproduce some of the images from the original Songbook, including one of the more popular photos of the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest, in which a young woman holds the Cattle Baron poster. Worried about the legality of using the originals, Landes and Evans Smith not only restaged the protest image, but also recreated the poster itself.

The pose and the angle were particularly challenging. “You can’t just sit your butt on your feet,” Evans Smith explained. “You’re slightly hovering to [get] the look.” Landes found it uncomfortable. That photoshoot was her first time posing nude, as well as her first time meeting their other collaborators. “At one point, I had to stretch, and I remember feeling so exposed and vulnerable,” Landes tol me. “And I thought, what did the woman feel in her photoshoot? Because I was surrounded by amazing women. We were all in on this together, making this piece of art. And I’m sure that woman was in a room full of men.”

I’m embarrassed to say that, despite the months I spent looking at her, obsessively researching the poster, I’d never thought about how it must have felt to be the Cattle Queen. Thighs burning to keep the hovering pose, skin exposed to the cold air, holding oneself carefully in order not to smudge the paint. I guess I was no better than the average Cattle Baron customer, thinking of her simply as an image, rather than a person. After I spoke with Landes, finding the model’s identity felt newly urgent, and yet my trails were all turning up dead ends. Then, in the middle of O’Brian’s Voice of Broadway column from October 17, 1968, she finally appeared: “Rita Bennett, who posed for the Cattle Baron steakhouse ads with her nudish body labeled like beef-slicing directions, finds the same photo now being peddled in life-size posters.”

Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to find on Rita Bennett. I dug up a few additional newspaper mentions of her—that bit that explained the image’s original censorship (the added bikini), then a later gibe that she was being “romantically red-dogged” by the football player Bob Anderson. Most of what I’ve uncovered, though, comes from Ashley West, who runs the Rialto Report, a blog and podcast that investigates the history of the adult entertainment industry in the 1960s and ’70s. West got in touch with Bennett soon after he began the project, as she was one of the few adult actresses of the era who used her legal name for this work, and was thus relatively easy to find. The two struck up a correspondence and stayed in regular contact for ten years. By West’s telling, Bennett’s life was more bleakly stereotypical than one would hope: An only child from Long Island with an abusive father, she’d left home for Manhattan at 16 and began to work in bars. Aware of her allure, Bennett used her good looks to her advantage, drank to numb her discomfort, and usually left her shift with a random guy. But she was desperate not to end up, like her mother, dependent on a violent man, so Bennett began modeling, working as a topless dancer, and, eventually, appearing in low-budget sexploitation films. Her film credits are a litany of the hackneyed roles reserved for women: “Model (uncredited),” “Girl Running in Slow Motion (uncredited),” “Sunbather (uncredited),” “Cultist (uncredited),” “Prostitute (uncredited),” “Corpse (uncredited).” Of her few named credits, two are simply as “Stripper.” Her last was as “Emma,” a.k.a. “Miss 48’s,” a showgirl who appears briefly toward the end of Scorsese’s Raging Bull.

By the time West met Bennett, in 2007, she was bankrupt, living in a tiny Midtown SRO, and drinking heavily. West told me that, during their conversations, Bennett would often pause to throw up in a plastic bag. He last spoke to her in 2017. At 76, Bennett had just moved up to the Hudson Valley with her big dog, Buck, and seemed happier there. But the next time he tried to reach her, there was no response. Eventually, West contacted the management company for Bennett’s apartment and was told that she had died at some point in the previous months. She’d had no family to claim her body, and no one seemed to know where she was buried.

One of Bennett’s prized possessions had been a portfolio in which she’d kept decades of photos from her modeling career. “Some were ad campaigns, some were ripped from magazines that featured her, some were pictures of New York buses, and she was on the side of the bus,” West explained. “Then there was that great picture of her as the butcher’s chart.” West recalled that Bennett was particularly proud of the image but bemoaned that its popularity never amounted to more, for her, than the small fee she’d been paid to model. Though her image had spread across the globe, no one knew Rita Bennett’s name. After she passed, West tried to recover Bennett’s portfolio, but he got there too late: It had been thrown in the trash alongside the rest of her few belongings.

This was not the story I wanted to find. On the poster, Bennett seems aglow with life. It’s difficult to imagine her aged, let alone dead. I had always hoped that the woman in the picture had been able to launch some of the poster’s notoriety into her own success. And perhaps she had, if only briefly—one of the few other records I could find of her, in a newspaper column from June 1968, announced Bennett’s ascent to radio:

The Baroness, the shapely beauty featured in the advertisements for the Cattle Baron Steakhouse, 221 W. 46th St., in real life, model Rita Bennett, who hosts special events there, is now represented over the airwaves. A radio version of the personality has been introduced for the purposes of enlarging the theme.

Unfortunately, I can’t find anything further about the show—and I can only imagine what “special events” might mean in this context.

For any person of conscience, the basic tension of the Cattle Queen—or, should I say, the Baroness—is the simultaneity of Bennett’s allure and the discomfort of her blatant objectification. But beneath that contrast lies a deeper paradox, one which Carol J. Adams’s work helps to explain. In the poster, the Baroness’s body is marked for consumption. The painted lines and labels imply a symbolic death: Her body has been turned from flesh to meat, from living to unliving. And yet, with her mouth parted, her thighs tensed, and her gaze steady, she is so clearly, vividly alive. Is this, at its essence, the pain of being any kind of woman? To be, even today, nearly sixty years later, caught between obvious being and a sense of public nonbeing, between agency and impotence, subject and object? Between feeling like living flesh and a piece of meat?

As they recreated the images from The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, Landes, Evans Smith, and their collaborators compiled clips of each photoshoot into a music video for “Hard Is the Fortune of All Womankind.” Landes rakes the ground while wearing a bonnet and marches down the street in the guise of a suffragette, twisting the lyrics of a classic folksong to tell a new story. Finally, we see the Cattle Queen alive and breathing. “Come sit down here by me, as long as you can,” Landes as Bennett sings, smirking at the camera. The wheels of her wagon are greased, her whip is “in [her] hand.” Wherever we are, she’s only briefly passing through. “So fare you well darling,” the Cattle Queen croons. And then, she tips her hat.

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