Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Gender Roles

The topic of the day on the radio was traditional gender roles and what people think of them. The presenter gave the example of cooking, which traditionally falls under the duties of the wife, and asked listeners to weigh-in with their thoughts. As I listened, I plotted the answers in my mind. The X-axis started with the conservative camp and the farther you moved to right the more liberal you get, until we reach the answer a Swedish wife would give. That would be, of course, close to positive infinity. On the other hand, the Y-axis represents the number of opinions at each point of the X-axis.

Statisticians would tell you that you should expect a neat bell curve, which means there will be a sweetspot in the middle where we have the most opinions and then the farther you go away (either more liberal or more conservative) the less number of opinions you should get. But interestingly, the exact opposite happened. An insane amount of listeners were extreme in the their opinions from the uberConservative declaring it's God's will that wives cook for their families to the ultraLiberal who preached equality. The moderates were puny in numbers and opinions with one of them thinking that wives should cook, but they should be asked nicely by their husbands. Morons.

To me, this wasn't an easy question to answer. You see, the typical liberal answer that states that husbands and wives are equal and therefore anyone of them can cook is flawed for two reasons. First, we need to factor in who is more qualified to do the cooking. Though I don't have the numbers, I'm pretty sure that more girls learn how to cook as they grow up than straight guys do, at least in our culture. Which automatically makes wives more qualified for cooking. A second important input is who is more available. What if the wife is working 18 hour days, while the husband is a writer who works mostly from home and has more free time?

Which presents a problem, what if you are a fellow liberal, but you aren't that liberal to start cooking? I feel ya, here's what you could do:

1. Marry the fat nerd. Chances are she didn't have a social life and spent her teen years baking cakes and stuffing her face with them. Get a high-profile corporate job and ensure you get a hawt assistant. Do the assistant and go back home for a fine, fine dinner.

2. Not a career man? Ok, marry a 50-year-old corporate executive, who will be your suga mama. She'll barely come home between her busy schedule, which will give you a chance to do the hawt Asian chiquita you'll hire as a cook with your wife's money.

3. Not into adultery? Hmmm... consider switching teams. As a gay man chances are you wouldn't mind cooking in first place. And if you do, your partner probably won't.

Problem solved.

10 comments:

DailyAntics said...

Marry, not Mary!

2alak CEO Fesh!

Fesh said...

*Fesh quickly fixes the typo

Err... now can I be CEO pls? :D

jessyz said...

I love cooking, but my husband enjoys helping (which means adding tons of hot sauce to everything and chopping the stuff I've already chopped into smaller pieces) but I don't think he'd mind doing the cooking himself. He just doesn't have the time.

silent observer said...

heheh
so I'm a female and I should be offended by reading this and shit but I'm not because it's funny
but I've seen a lot of straight guys who cook delicious food. Why are all the cooks at high end restaurants males. It's a misconception that women are better cooks. really

Anonymous said...

congrats fesh stanford aint no godforsaken northland! say hi to condi for me! had to come out of retirement to congratulate you!

Fesh said...

Thanks man! :) Been a long time, hope all is well with you!

Munqy said...

POST POST POST

Fesh said...

I think b-school has drained all the writing out of me. Now, for me to write anything I need: a. a very unrealistic deadline b. a random word limit e.g. 1350. and c. an incredibly boring topic.

And since we're on it, have a 1000-word paper due in a few hours about Poverty and International Development. yay.

Forsoothsayer said...

feinak ya zeroocool??

feshfesh...it's odd that u think the opposite end of the spectrum from the wife doing all the cooking is equality....i would have thought the other end is the MAN doing all the cooking. the way you put it says a lot about your notions of equality :) and you think moderates are people who think the wife should do the cooking if the husband asks nicely? a7a, that would be a terrible world.
well, i'm sure you can cook by now anyway....you've lived alone for bajillions of years. tela2eek brince aslan.

Fesh said...

uhm ... when I said: The moderates were puny in numbers and opinions ....Morons. Which part of this would make you think I agree with that view? :)

And yes, I agree with you the other end of the spectrum is the man doing the cooking. That's why I gave the example of a wife with a very busy corporate job and a husband with more free time. In that set-up I'd see the husband doing the cooking.

And why did you pull me back to the blog? It's in hibernation :)