It’s the kind of article that makes you think the liberals are satirizing themselves. But it seems to be serious. Jacob Brogan has written an article on Slate subtitled “I’m a feminist. I’m a dude. And I hate that I love to grill.” Brogan confesses, beating his chest with tongs:
I’m uncomfortable with the pleasure I take in something so conventionally masculine. Looming over the coals, tongs in hand, I feel estranged from myself, recast in the role of suburban dad. At such moments, I get the sense that I’ve fallen into a societal trap, one that reaffirms gender roles I’ve spent years trying to undo. The whole business feels retrograde, a relic of some earlier, less inclusive era.
Brogan can’t be convinced of a more egalitarian spin: When the men of the house grill, the women of the house don’t have to cook...and they often appreciate not turning the oven on inside during the toasty summer months. That could sound downright submissive on the part of the grilling males.
Instead, Brogan the cultural anthropologist suspects grilling bros are engaging in “homosocial” contact to prevent that other more intimate kind of contact, with Vaseline:
....grills become symbolic meeting points. They enable what scholars call homosocial contact, a kind of same-sex intimacy that deflects the supposed dangers of sexual contact between men but allows them to confirm their masculinity by excluding women. Grilling, in other words, allows these characters to cozy up to one another while still maintaining their understanding of themselves as truly manly men.
Brogan also suggests that grilling is public, while cooking is private, so the women cook while hidden away:
Unlike most other traditionally “feminine” forms of domestic cooking, grilling typically happens outside, and hence in the public sphere. The putatively masculine quality of grilling may derive in part from the old public-private gender split. In that sense, it shares a common cause with the belief that women belong in the home.
But do men only grill when there are friends coming over? Personally, I grill constantly in the summer, usually without any guests, and it’s just not just meat. Side dishes also go on the grill. (Try the Tater Tots in a dab of olive oil paired with some smoke.)
The summer anti-feminist conspiracies come not only from the sensitive male feminists, but from the sensitive girls at Jezebel, who passed along the crazy question "Is Office Air Conditioning a Sexist Conspiracy?" Yes, it's suggested that the AC is a male conspiracy to punish women at work:
Science has already told us that women feel more sensitive to cold temperatures, which is why going to movie theater can feel like stepping into a freezer. Working in an office all day can also be torturous if you forget to bring along a sweater. Over at The Washington Post, writer Petula Dvorak theorizes that intensely cold office temperatures are yet another example of the patriarchy dominating an environment. Dvorak researching this by talking to both women and men who are outside on their breaks away from their cubicles. Many of the women were “thawing out,” trying to soak up the warm weather. When the men were asked if the temperature inside their offices was too, they had no issues. How nice for them.
All this theorizing is good for something...besides some clicks from wild-eyed liberals. We need a few laughs around the grill.
