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I never understood why men see cooking as unmasculine, I myself as a man see it as the 2nd most masculine thing after hunting for the food yourself.

Nothing more masculine then going down to the sea, catch a fish or several and then grill it on a grill with some potato while drinking beer.

“I never understood why men see cooking as unmasculine”
Men don’t see it as “unmasculine”, nor have they ever seen it as such. I’ve been seeing this a lot recently from the leftover women circles. The same group that thinks men are “intimidated” by them having a career. It’s gaslighting at its finest.

Those are both things which do, in fact, happen. It’s a holdover from women not being employed in most jobs in the first place, expected to be completely dependent on their men. So all home chores, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, became heavily associated with femininity. And so too it became associated with masculinity to have a career.
It’s not gaslighting, it’s history.

What things happen? No man has ever said cooking is “unmasculine” and no man has ever said he’s “intimidated” by a woman’s success or career.

You’re actually engaging in the same gaslighting with your post. None of what you said is true.

Uhh- I dunno how to tell ya this but, this is not gaslighting. I’m not sure what your personal experience was growing up, but I and every other guy in my class who took home ec classes in school was generally made fun of at some point for it. It’s true that now it’s way less of a thing, but it totally is a thing that existed, and still exists somewhat today. Great that you didn’t experience it, but to deny the reality of others isn’t a great idea. Heck, the first class was learning exactly what the class was and telling the boys in the class that its a set of skills that everyone should have regardless of gender. Legit by calling it gaslighting, is gaslighting myself and the people who had that happen.

Feel like it’s more a things that’s reminded to the jocks than anything. Most guys didn’t give a crap when I was in school a couple decades ago now, but the ones that did need to be reminded were the clowns that thought they mattered because they were on the football team. (One that consistently was terrible, making it even more baffling)

Meanwhile, we’ve had how many male professional chefs? Heck I remember watching Ratatouille the other day, and Collette complaining about cooking being a male dominated industry.

Maybe it’s a regional thing to some degree.

Sometimes it is fear or shame – if they don’t know how or are bad at it, they can hide it by claiming it’s “not their job”.
Sometimes it is pride or arrogance – they don’t want to do it, so claim it is “beneath them”.

What’s worse to me are those who denigrate cooking for the family as being beneath a man’s dignity, but that being a professional chef is respectable and only for men. The hypocrisy and arrogance are just staggering.

I really like this quote from Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander.

“I’ve heard men complain of doing woman’s work, and women complain of doing man’s work,” she added, fastening her bony thumb and forefinger on Gurgi’s ear and marching him to a stool beside Taran, “but I’ve never heard the work complain of who did it, so long as it got done!”

https://quotefancy.com/quote/1996301/Lloyd-Alexander-I-ve-heard-men-complain-of-doing-woman-s-work-and-women-complain-of-doing

https://fantasyliterature.com/reviews/taran-wanderer/

I’ve said this before, and I shall say it again.

If you are a woman, you should know how to cook.

If you are a man, you should know how to cook.

If you are a functioning adult, you should know how to bloody cook!

It’s the functioning adult part that trips most people before they can learn to cook.

(I know I am ranting, it’s nothing against you, or even your comment, I’m just sick of hearing people around me say that, and I usually can’t just tell them what I say here, for various reasons. I just need to say this SOMEWHERE)

I have an official government document stating I am very much NOT a functioning adult (neither mentally, nor physically), but I can (and have):
-Cook many, many main dishes (from something as simple as scrambled eggs, to complicated stuff like Beef wellington)
-Make several side dishes (salads/soups/bread)
-Make several types of dessert (including, but not limited to: cakes, pies, cookies, jams, puddings, candy)

No, I was never a professional cook, nor have I ever trained to be one. It’s just stuff i picked up how to do from family/friends/acquaintances/the internet over the course of my life.

All of this to say:
Not being a functioning adult is no excuse to not know how to cook, at least not nowadays.

This is a fuzzy field. The OP reads like suggesting maturity. In other cases we read about cooking as a an everyday entrance to learn how to learn among even mature incompetents. (Those who are so incompetent – having never acquired the trainable ability to learn – that they can’t judge their own incompetence. Examples abound.) I’ve used it as an example myself, and I’m happy that whatever context has sourced such a document doesn’t involve any of that.

I.e. cooking involves route learning and elements of planning, scheduling et cetera while it gives you “objective” (for your own tastes) feedback if you are doing it correctly or not. The degree of difficulty can be increased from cleaning vegetables to world class cooking (at which end people learn how to cook for a wider set of tastes and at high quality).

This is sort of orthogonal to maturity, but at the same time there is a correlation between maturing and learning. I doubt neuroscientists know what brain-body parts are involved in general, what plasticity can rescue functional absence or loss at various stages et cetera. The Dunning-Kruger incompetents are still a questionable area, as well – does the statistics show that it is purported to show, how do the putative problems occur, et cetera.

I should add that during learning (a new field) we are all functionally incompetents until we get “the hang of it” (enough context to start riddling the problems and how some are solved – say, for biking how to keep the balance until the velocity helps stabilization).

Wow, this blew up.

“Functioning” adult was meant as an out for those who posses physical or mental conditions that are inhibitive/prohibitive to being able/learning how to cook (I hasten to add that not all impairments affect this matter, as DemonoftheDeep demonstrates above).

Whilst learning as an adult is certainly one interpretation (and something that occurs far too frequently), my stance is that one should learn how to cook (if only the basics) prior to adulthood, to avoid having to learn the hard way when one is no longer living with family.

@Aussie Bloke, we are in agreement on the cooking, I’m sorry if I read “maturity” into your age condition of the sentences.

[I should add, since it was discussed, that the terms “functioning” and “impairments” are more problematic to me. I think the current idea is to acknowledge that human traits have distributions (and factors like development, plasticity, rescue, training and environment makes it a dynamic situation). But that has nothing to do with the topic.]

Ive never heard any guy claim knowing how to cook is unmasculine, many who are just not interested or see it as tedious and would rather just have simple food, but never a aversion do masculinity. In my family the good cooks are all the guys, my mom and sisters are terrible, but dad meself and my brothers all are good cooks, my oldest brother goes all in with his smoker, ah that brisket.
Even extended family that trend hold true, a two uncles are even professional cooks.
I’ve heard this trope many time in shows and movies, but never seen a case of irl. The only thing close was school bullies mocking a guy for taking home ec, but I wont really count that as they would mock anything.

For those who are haven’t encountered this whole, “the kitchen is the woman’s domain not the man’s” kind of gender role expectation, it does in fact exist and is not just “gaslighting”.

Growing up in the US south (yeah… plenty of bleh), Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s place always involved all the women doing the cooking and cleaning after, with the men sitting on the couch and watching whatever sporting event of choice on the tv. The only exception was grilling. Men did the grilling. If it involved a stove, oven, or even just the prep work for the grill, then it was the women’s responsibility.

When I brought over my eventual husband, he helped in the kitchen with both cooking and cleaning. My grandmother and others tried to tell him he didn’t have to, reminding in so many words that he wasn’t supposed to be responsible for that. But he didn’t care, has always enjoyed cooking, and eventually they didn’t bother trying to discourage him, even if it was still obvious that most didn’t really think he was supposed to be there rather than the couch with the other men.

If you haven’t encountered this kind of gendered expectation of roles and places in the home, honestly congrats. That’s really awesome to be reminded that plenty of people didn’t grow up with that kind of hierarchy impressed upon them. But I promise, it does exist.

(Also, it was never really expressed directly as cooking is not masculine, just that it’s not the man’s place to do so.)

Well Phil is more on the cute side than the big burly manly man side, and Lien does like cute. Remember her asking Nami for those Scottish Fold style cat ears? So that probably explains her comment. And if Kate is happy with Phil the way he is and Phil is too then that’s what matters.

I can’t see how anyone can say cooking isn’t masculine. There are so many celebrity chefs who are men and make the big bucks that it boggles the mind.

Yep- but it is a thing that used to happen and even now it’s engendered into society. It is waaaay less common now though which is great, but a lot of people still feel like men should only be cooking if its a cookout at the grill- as that is “mans territory” and other such weird bullcrap that sticks around to this day. I probably should have drawn Michelle with a smile in the first panel so people wouldnt take her too seriously. She’s just creating conversation and trying to steer things to learn more about him.

1. I agree, more men need to be unmasculine. Unmasculine men are far hotter than masculine mine.

2. There’s nothing unmasculine about cooking. Just look at Gorden Ramsey.

3. Everyone belongs in kitchen. Kitchen has food.

1 – We can have both, even odd mixups like really feminine looking but very boyish attitudes like some odd scrambling of a tomboy but not- there’s probably a name for this isnt there? Tomboy is a girl that is associated with boyish attitudes, while a tomgirl is a boy with feminine attitude- not sure what the name for that would be. Then we can have very masculine looking men that are very girly-

2 – Cooking should be a neutral trait because everyone should know how to cook, but it used to be that women dominated the air (tv) when it came to cooking. Only men in cooking were career chefs and business owners that sold food like diners and such. Obviously men cooked for themselves too, but society in many places made it a feminine trait to know how to cook. The apron after all, decorated with frills and such was an iconic symbol of femininity. (And cute boys look great in em now too- XD )

3 – 100%

Never understood that premise. Everyone I’ve met has always been amazed and impressed that I ca cook, and cook well. I’ve never once encountered someone who considered it girly to cook.
Some of the other comments here imply that masculinity is somehow wrong. There’s nothing bad with masculinity in itself, but the societal stereotypes built around it. There are plenty of “ultra masculine” men who know how to cook, or make careers of it.
Not a complaint, I just find it weird. World’s a weird place. 😛

The more I look into it the more I find that certain places it was very common for it to be seen as an unmasculine thing to cook, unless it was your career, in which case you were a responsible business person- which overcomes the “feminine preparer of food”. As you can tell from the discourse in the chat- I seem to have hit a defunct topic that has already started to turn over again. What society deems masculine and feminine shouldn’t also be characterized as good or bad, but those traits certainly are seen by some to be good or bad. For example, the idea that men can be stoic in the face of adversity- is not actually a thing only men have, It’s a trait they are more often shown to possess than women, but that doesn’t mean its true, nor does it mean a stoic woman is more masculine. They are just traits certain people have associated with genders. The image of the “Stay at home Mom” that cooks, cleans and maintains the home while the father goes out and provides for the family- has been a trope for a very long time. That dynamic provides a few ways of looking at things, one, a stay at home mother provides a safe and clean environment for children and for a husband, this enables the husband to spend time at work to make money and provide things for the family. They are a team, making life easier for both of them by contributing needed things. Then some people think of the two jobs- that the stay at home job is clearly the easier of the two- and then that leads them to believe that women are somehow inherently unable to deal with the harshness of a real job and are only capable of doing basic things at home. They see the father as more important, thinking, she needs him, but he doesn’t REALLY need her. Which is utter bullcrap. This unfortunately has been the case in places all over the world, but especially the USA.

The truth is, some jobs, are easy. Some husbands, go out to a job, that frankly anyone could do, and barely do any work at all, and get paid. Usually those kinds of jobs have a lot of responsibility, but none of that prevents a woman from doing the same job. While working at home, would likely be far more physically taxing- which flies in the face of “women not being strong enough to deal with real work”.

This is all stuff most of you already know, but – It wasn’t really that long ago that it was extremely common. Society changes, but it can also loop. We are seeing some of that now again actually, because there’s a lot going on, on multiple fronts mind you, dealing with gender. The dealing with masculine and feminine traits and bias is often people going back to some of those older ways of thinking. That men are meant to do one thing, and women another. This has exploded in circles that I think might be caused by some men having difficulty adapting to the change in how much freedom women have now. It used to be to get a woman, really all you needed was to be an ok person, and a nice job or money- heck often didn’t need to be a nice person either. That that careers aren’t a male domain, women can actually afford to look for a partner they want to be with, and not settle with someone to try and make it work. Men seem to not have adapted to this as quickly. It’s sad to me that many seem to have adopted the idea that, we should just go back, that women having jobs was a mistake and we need to correct it- so they can get desperate women to marry them o_o;

We have a loneliness problem all over the world, that’s for sure, but its a challenge to overcome, not back track on.

As for what is masculine and what is feminine. That will shift and change, probably already making this comic seem obsolete! Obviously the characters don’t concern themselves with it, and Phil has lots traits people would consider feminine. Some people might even call some of them bad. The people it really matters too- they don’t.
(did anyone survive reading this post? Y’all are hardy folk-)

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