Somehow our culture has turned cooking into a feminine hobby, even though around the world cooking is often considered manly. We all hear the words “French chef” and think of a man akin to the fat chef chasing the cartoon crab in Disney’s the Little Mermaid, and most male celebrity chefs seem to be from other countries and cultures, like Gordon Ramsay Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto and but if we think of American TV show characters that cook or bake professionally, we are likely think of Monica Gellar from Friends. And then if you take away the professionalism of their cooking and baking that gap widens. We picture Jessica Day, the extremely feminine cupcake loving main character on New Girl.

And when we think of home cooking, most Americans think of women, whether it’s their own mother or grandmother, or the perfect mothers from TV shows like That Seventies Show. It seems that either the narrative we see is that women are forced to cook for their families like a 'nineteen-fifties housewife, or they need to prove their feminism by refusing to cook anything more than Kraft mac n’ cheese.

There is this stereotype going around about feminists that we reject femininity and anyone who conforms to traditionalist feminine roles. However, even though I’m a feminist through and through, the thing I’m best at in the whole world is cooking. I love it apologetically and I think feminists need to reclaim cooking. But it isn’t just for women and men who want to impress women like TV tells us. We won’t see true gender parity until we stop assigning gender to everything, but more importantly we need to remove negativity from femininity. Cooking, just like feminism is for everyone.