Go Cooking!

From a young age men and women are told they are supposed to act a certain way. They can’t do certain things even if it’s something they enjoy. David Sedaris enjoyed doing things that were typically seen as feminine. In order to blend in to society’s norms he had to pretend he enjoyed the typical “masculine” activities. In Go Carolina from Me Talk Pretty One Day he wrote, “Baking scones and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous.” He was forced to live a double life so he could be a “normal” guy.

            Due to his mention of baking I’ve thought about how society views cooking in different ways. They think of baking as feminine while grilling is masculine. It’s not as if there’s some special skilled involved that makes one gender more suitable than the other. Women can learn grilling just as easily as men and vice versa.

            Contrary to popular belief, not all women know how to cook or bake. For example, people think I would be good in the kitchen and then I prove them completely wrong. It’s as if everyone thinks there’s some sort of intuition of baking that every girl was born with. In the South this idea is pushed even further. A stereotypical “Southern” woman knows how to make a casserole or has some famous dish she makes. All the guys know how to grill or make barbecue for cookouts (and love football; Sedaris didn’t but had to pretend he cared).

            I know that in my family these stereotypes do not exactly ring true. In my house my dad is the chef. He grew up watching his mom homemake almost all their meals and helped, too. Because of that, baking bread or a cake isn’t a hard task. He’s the one with the “famous” recipes.

            My mom, on the other hand, can hardly cooked when compared to my dad. We often joke about it, and I’m probably not giving her enough credit. She can cook a few things. However, my dad taught her almost everything she knows. His cooking was actually a part of what won her over.

            They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but it works the other way around, too. If a guy enjoys baking or something else that’s typically “feminine” I say he should do it or if a girl would do something “masculine” nothing should hold her back. Don’t live a double life like David for fear of ridicule.