"Brewed by a Female"

About 5 years ago, when the world was shackled to the indoors because (ok pause, the best My Little Pony song just shuffled in my playlist...ok 2 minutes later, back to Hozier) of Covid, I was making chai for my parents. I don’t know exactly what was so different about this specific pot of chai, but it was then I was knighted as the house’s chai-brewer. Since then, every 5 p.m. chai time has been hosted by yours truly... low and behold, I’d become a woman in the kitchen.  

Since the times of Martin Luther and the Reformation or Thomas Hobbes and the Enlightenment, women have been chained to the indoors as the house’s cook, among other “homemaking jobs.” Although today, standards have begun to change in the west drastically, the stereotypical “cook” being female remains...or does it? Alongside the “female cook,” there lies the opposite of the “male not-cook.” Expected to be the money-makers in society, men apparently don’t have the time or skill to be good cooks.  

One might be initially surprised by the fact that 77.3% of professional chefs are men, but no data comes without being skewed. Most jobs are male dominated, so why do females belong in the kitchen over men? When I try to argue this, I always think of this one clip of Gordon Ramsey, Mr. Hell’s Kitchen himself, going up against his mother in a pie-baking contest...and losing. Does that make his mum a better cook? I can’t answer that question for two major reasons: For one, do I look like someone who’s met the Ramseys? Be so for real, I’d spend the money it’d take to do that on buying shawarmas. The second reason, more importantly, is that cooking isn’t something one can be genetically better at. Men are better high divers because their pelvic bone isn’t wide enough to push a child out. Women are better at rhythmic gymnastics because of the increased elastin in their hamstrings. Even then, that doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions in both fields.  

Regardless, my point is most skills can’t be assigned a sex, so when posed the stereotype of “women are better cooks,” or “women belong in a kitchen,” I’ll shove Uncle Roger, Michael Cimarusti, Megan Gill, and Julia Child at you...put those four in a room and the room will leave the next prodigy-  

I might be the “chai-brewer” of the house, but it was my dad before me, not my mom (she doesn’t even like chai, truly a tragedy that I’ve lost her to green tea)   

Every standard is a coin, but this one shares a face. The stereotype is FALSE. There is no “female cook” or “male bad cook,” there are simply good cooks and bad ones, both sexes sharing both sides. No sex "belongs" anywhere, people belong.