Everyone better stay out of my kitchen. I’m all for teaching kids to cook. But I don’t want amateurs on the field during the Super Sowl of cooking days.
“Meme”
Here is what I would like to say of my experience. Not to snap at this, or provoke a battle-of-the-genders. Just to say what I’ve experienced.
I’m a recovered germophobe but I still do the cleaning because it’s not even work to me, it’s just a casual part of my routine. I cook all from fresh and every meal, because I lost like 58kg after getting over my ED. My mother was insanely (abusively) strict when we were just small kids, so we were trained to clean the dishes, put things away, blah blah.
But anyways after sobering up and lots of therapy, the bad parts (the obsessive parts) of all that went away, but doing that stuff had just become an ‘easy’ part of my life.
But here’s the little thing I don’t even want to say. Women hate that shit lol. Isn’t that awful to say? I’m always taken aback when I’m scolded for doing the things women say guys should do more of ahha
I think at my age it’s a lot of the entrenched gender roles biting all sides. Yes, please open up the gates to the domains women historically have controlled. Guys need to shape up in a general sense in these areas, but let us in plz!
I get what you’re saying, but the attitudes are luckily changing and the amount of women who frown on men doing housework is rapidly shrinking.
I agree, I’m just trapped in my generation and I hate it
And as much as people can verbalize the “right” things, people don’t actually hold those attitudes deep in their hearts and they’re not reflected in their actions to the degree we would hope
The number of people assert the way things should be but then don’t actually want it is quite shocking to me
Society being agender-by-default, with gender being opt-in, would solve a lot of problems.
My kid is 27, if he wants to make TG dinner, I’ll eat it.
Maybe I didn’t help cook as much but was my job to clean after pretty much every dinner. Always thanked my Mum for the dinner nightly (regardless of my taste preferences). Pretty much set the table for dinners all regular night and cleaned up.
Larger dinners with company she let me stop cleaning after awhile but these days I’d gladly clean till the end, she made the best dinners.
Lol, I’m a dude and, I remember when I was a kid, there was sometimes holiday stuff where the adults would make… the um… (okay I had to google it) it’s called 湯圓 and I just mess with it while they were making it, I’d make weird shapes out of it lol. I don’t think I actually helped, I’m just a troublemaker xD
I only know how to cook basic stuff, I suck at it. I know how to pan-fry eggs, but that’s about it. I think I sort of know how to make a very basic 煎餅, from scratch, the mixing flour and egg and stuff, kinda forgot by now… but I have memories of doing it.
I kinda feel embarassed now that I talk about it. I have no life skills. (pls don’t judge xD)
It’s never too late to learn. Drag doesn’t know any Chinese recipes, but bao should be pretty easy, and すひ is fun and simple, but still has technique to making it look nice. Heating up dried pasta and adding sauce is so easy drag already explained the recipe, so it’s good for beginners.
My boys are now in their 30s. They always helped with the big family dinners. Even made a couple of them on their own for the rest of us. I do not understand how anyone in my age group, Gen X, could not have raised their sons to be completely independent but somehow, I’m in a minority.
My mom made me do that 40 years ago already. That is a thing, no? Sure, it was Christmas dinner, as we didn’t have thanksgiving, but it’s the same nonetheless. You do it together as a family
My best memories are of helping my mother and grandmother cook Thanksgiving and Christmas meals!
Those sound like lovely memories!
The most common cooking task is cutting stuff which makes me feel pretty manly
I support teaching all kids what it takes to exist, regardless of gender.
I just popped in to say that back in the long ago, in my family, only so much help cleaning up was tolerated from men-folk before they were exiled to football on TV so the women could sit at the kitchen table and talk. Trying to assist in cooking was nearly impossible by anyone who wasn’t my grandmother or the aunts that had been cleared for assistance.
I was taught to cook and clean by these same people, but it was clear that at big family meals like Thanksgiving that most of us were in the way if we tried to assist.
I guess what I’m saying is, for sure teach everyone all of it, but big meals might not be the best time. (depending on size of family and a variety of other factors).
At least clear your plate to the sink! :)
Specially young boys if you involve them they will be invested in the entire process! This is great advise!
For those who are talking about how this didn’t happen in your household growing up, please remember you are 1, at best 2 generations removed from full on enforcement of gender roles suppressing things like this, many times physically enforced. So yea, maybe your dad was the one who baked the turkey or did the dishes, but you can be damn sure his dad didn’t.
Do people not normally involve their kids in this sort of thing equally?
Not in my family. Us women were expected to be the cooks, cleaners, everything. Every family get-together the men would just sit and talk and the boys would go out to play, and the older women would do the cooking, then come make the girls do the dishes.
My sister and I finally called them out on it, and to their credit they did try and make the boys help with the clean-up… although they never did that great of a job, because they’d never been taught how.
Growing up, no.
Will my potential kids be sharing the work equally? Definitely. I always got into so much trouble for asking why I had to do housework and my brother didn’t.
I hadn’t realised quite how different the female upbringing experience was to the male one until I talked about it with my partner. Quite different it turns out. We’re both about 40, and from Ireland, and she was absolutely expected to do shit like this when the men weren’t.
Event today some of her siblings families are heavily heavily sexist.
No kidding. The enforcement is often kind of brutal too. As a couple the house not being clean creates a pervasive sense of judgement that falls on the feminine half of a couple. It doesn’t matter if they are a killer breadwinner with an amazing career and winning at life the messaging and conditioning from childhood and enforced by older friends and relatives is still that they are at their core a failure if their house doesn’t meet regulation. That judgement is not extended to the masculine partner because he’s kind of expected to be a hapless subordinate who maybe helps but is not responsible for it. That old “sorry about the state of the place” is practically just begging for social leniency from deeply ingrained shame.
If your fem partner is neurotic about cleanliness that’s basically why. They are made to feel horrible about themselves when company comes calling.
This is so real, I swear to god. I joke about how neurotic I am about housework, and my house is always pristine, but still my worst nightmare is someone stopping by unexpectedly. My house can be spick and span and I’ll still apologize for the state of it.
And how old is that?
My mom involved my brother. I took the opportunity to play video games all day.
