Men who cook are awesome!

Coming up to the Thanksgiving holiday, my social media news feeds were full of posts about all of the food that was being cooked.  There were a few that really caught my attention though.  There were more posts about being surprised to see men in the kitchen, jokes about how bad the food would turn out with the men cooking...things like that.  The above cartoon really caught my eye because of the stereotypical tone to it.

It is certainly a widespread gender stereotype that the kitchen is a place for a woman, not a man, and that men who cook are somehow not "manly".  Men are typically expected to be on the grill or smoker cooking the meat, and women are to be pining away at the stove making sure everything else is perfect.  Men are stereotypically expected to not know anything about how anything in the kitchen works.  There are however, plenty of men who love to cook and they do it very well.

In my family, growing up the best cooks were my uncles.  When we would have family gatherings everyone would be in the kitchen together with my grandmother making their respective dishes that she had assigned them.  Those were some of the best times!  When I grew older and started dating, I was surprised to find out that most of the guys I met knew nothing about cooking anything more than a hot dog.  I was also surprised to find that the overwhelming majority of people I met outside of my family thought that was okay.  They felt that it was normal for a man to not know how to cook, or have any desire to be in the kitchen, and that it was a bit "unnatural" for a man to be comfortable in the kitchen cooking.

There are so many famous male chefs, that I would think that it would somehow change the gender stereotypes about men and cooking, but it hasn't.