“But isn’t that a little bit of a cliché?", she asks Butterfly. “Isn’t it a wonderful one?” Butterfly shoots back. Williams dismissive tone in reviewing the cookbook, read like a tired reprise of yesterday’s feminist rhetoric: “You might be a hot, lovely servant who everybody in the office (not just your husband) wants to go home to. But you’re still one step up from the dog, lady. Don’t go there! Choose equality! Choose life!”
Really? Look around. While you’re still out burning your bra, the protestors have gone home! The new generation of women are living the new status quo. It no longer has to be either/or; we can start embracing the equality that our mothers and grandmothers wanted us to have. Which means we can enjoy guilt-free jaunts into culinary goddess territory if we want to.
This is the beauty of the new domestic dynamic. We can cook for our men simply for pleasure, without having to worry if it’s going to set us back a few generations. And what’s a man’s heart got to do with it? Be honest, cooking a thoroughly enjoyable meal can be just as much about indulging our own smugness as it is about our men’s appetites. Our homes are no longer feminist fortresses. Unfortunately work, for many, is still a war zone. Daily I face battles with older male colleagues who snigger at my aspirations. But these men are literally a dying generation. They’re the ones who have witnessed women going from wives to secretaries to executives, and they don’t like it. What gets me through my day is knowing that they’re the ones on their way out!
I’m willing to bet that Stasha Butterfly has got many more strings to her bow than just cooking for her man, and that she’s set her sights higher than a single cookbook. And I’ll bet you again that if her man, the other half of this “quasi-maternal model of a relationship”, asked her to give it all up so she could be a stay-at-home cook, she’d tell him to go sing for his supper. To me, Stasha Butterfly represents a new generation of women. We are now safer than we have ever been and embrace aspects of conventional gender roles that we otherwise felt we had to reject on principle.
Granted, it’s still a delicate balance. On the one hand, we must remain mindful of the struggles that women before us endured to ensure we could have social equality. It’s a recent triumph, and Zoe Williams is right to worry that cavalier attitudes towards the implications of female domesticity may jeopardise our hard-won liberties. Yet I worry that attitude such as hers could be an even bigger threat to the progression of women: refusing to move ahead. Why not look at what we could be, instead of clutching stubbornly to dated concepts of female liberation?
Williams derides women who “make like (extras) from Mad Men” but what about groundbreaking characters like Peggy Olson and Joan Holloway? For all its sexism, chauvinism and misogyny, I’ve always thought that Mad Men boasts the strongest female characters on TV. The dignity and determination of the housewives and burgeoning career women are a reminder of what we have to be grateful for. Were these phases clichés? No, they were integral chapters in the transitional process – we had to be there, to be here.
Now, we have a generation of men who are accustomed to regarding women as equals. Ironically the opponents against whom I have to take a daily stand are not men. As women, we are our own harshest critics and I constantly feel the need to defend myself for supposedly superficial qualities that let me down as a woman who can be taken seriously. Apparently, if I look pretty and cook for my man, I’m a shame to womankind.
The society in which we live today offers unprecedented choice. For better or for worse, we have the right to assume roles of our choosing without apology or qualification. After centuries of women being told what they could and couldn’t do outside the home, it seems absurd that we might now be ostracised for what we do in our homes. Maybe like me, you see cooking as a recreational activity, and delight in the pleasure your food gives your partner; or maybe you hate cooking, for yourself or anyone else. The point is, your choice to cook or otherwise makes you neither more nor less of a woman. The enjoyment I get from cooking for my man doesn’t define me – I am also ambitious in my career and I look forward to one day making my daughter proud as the woman who puts food on the table, both literally and figuratively. I embrace all aspects of my womanhood, as I see it, and I encourage you to do the same in your own way.
Meera Innes is an executive assistant at an international development think tank, moonlighting as an expert muser. Meera doesn't currently blog because she doesn't like feeling self-indulgent, although she is all for being indulged by others. She can be found tweeting the mundane.
