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Caveman Cooks
Ever since I was nine years old, I have wondered
about the idea that a woman’s place is in the
kitchen. I still don’t know exactly where
women belong, but it seems to me that when a woman
is in the kitchen, she is often just getting in the
way of a man trying to cook dinner.
My oldest sister married an Italian man who knew
how to cook. He cooks. Their children are all happy
she doesn’t. My sister-in-law has a deal with
her husband: he cooks, she does the dishes.
It’s a match made in kitchen heaven. My own
situation is similar. I cook, I do the dishes, Liz
does both on special occasions. She makes dinner
when we have company and does dishes a couple times
a week and after she has trashed the kitchen making
a huge meal for company. It works for us.
In a very complicated scientific study of all
the celebrity and guest chefs found on the Food
Network website, it turns out that men outnumber
women 2 to 1. This proves my original premise: that
a man’s place is in the kitchen.
But here is the paradox. Cooking, in general, is
not very manly. If it were, there would be a big
screen TV where the pantry should be so we could
watch the Lions play while we were cooking the
turkey on Thanksgiving. Instead, the kitchen TV has
a girlie screen that is so small it is impossible
to watch any sports at all. Besides Emeril, men
don’t throw things into the pan and yell
“Bam!” (We could, but chances are good
that a lot of it would end up under the burner and
eventually catch fire.)
So why do many of us do it? And why do those men
who don’t cook feel a tremendous sense of
inferiority and lack of self worth? Does cooking
allow us to get in touch with our feminine side? I
don’t think so. My theory ties in with my
overall hypothesis that men need to stay in touch
with their ancient ancestor, the Caveman. Caveman
Og had to hunt for his food. When he brought a
freezer full of mammoth steaks back to the cave,
his wife Igla was more than happy to cook it up for
their children, Og Jr. and Iggy (that was a
girl’s name back then).
However, when Og was out on the hunt, which
often took days and days of stalking and attacking
(this was before bait piles and tree stands), he
had to cook for himself and his hunting buddies.
The food had to be good enough to not only nourish
them but help them ignore the fact that they were
sleeping on the cold prairie ground with other
hairy, smelly men instead of cuddled up in a nice
warm cave with their hairy, smelly wives. Anyone
can cook a mammoth, but it takes a man to make
prairie grass, slugs, and mud into a culinary
treat.
So, when a man enters a kitchen with an apron
on, his psyche yearns for those primeval days when
men hunted, men killed, and men could whip up a
really nice quiche. When you look at it that way,
women want to be as far away from the kitchen as
they can possibly get.
©2008, Mark
Phillips
* * *
Women, it's true, make human beings, but
only men can make men. - Margaret Mead
Mark
Phillips is a Stay-At-Home-Dad and freelance
writer. Along with raising his four children, he is
developing a franchise called “The Vacuum IS a
Power Tool.” It is designed to help SAHDs
maintain that which makes us men, instead of hairy
Mom-substitutes. He earned a B.S. in
Communication/Theatre Arts and teaching
certificates in English, public speaking, and
psychology from Eastern Michigan University. After
six years as a high school English teacher and
Director of Dramatic Arts at Powers Catholic High
School in Flint, Michigan, he changed careers and
became a Stay-At-Home-Dad. www.TheVacuumIsAPowerTool.com
or E-Mail
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