What is up with the gender of barbecuing, anyway? It’s the only time something flips coding from really feminine to really...
What is up with the gender of barbecuing, anyway? It’s the only time something flips coding from really feminine to really masculine based on whether you do it in the house or in the yard. And, I mean, I’m not being glib about this – the cultural and aesthetics of barbecuing are very similar to the ones for home cooking generally. Like, the Barbecuing Aesthetic is:
- Being happy to use cooking rools
- Wearing a cute apron
- Serving people food
and the cultural role of the barbecue is nearly identical to the role of “entertaining” or “dinner parties” under the tradwife paradigm: it’s about having an excuse to be extra, about bringing to have a fun party while also building social status and impressing everyone with what a good host you are and how much more you have your shit together..But it’s in the yard!! oh shit
I guess it has to do with the fact that barbecue descends from bush cooking and fair cooking, which are both things that would have happened in traditionally male-dominated spaces. But extending this to the ten feet of grass in front of the house seems a bit cheeky, to say the least, and it really is amazing how most of the aesthetic and cultural reference points translate between barbecuing and indoor cooking directly, rather than needing extensive translation to make them palatable to a male audience.
bbq as drag performance
https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/rare-history-well-done-2016/#transcript
Barbecuing was pushed by popular magazines as a masculine activity to get men more involved in family life.
aw yeah, I was hoping it’d be some kind of thing like this. I love this shit.
This is actually really to the point because it notes that several other approaches petered out before barbecuing took off, which gets back to the original question of “why barbecuing”? The interview raises a point that several commenters raised, which is that the focus on meat makes it seem more masculine, but I don’t think that alone explains it, because (as the rest of the interview discusses) America was on a total meat bender at the time and “feminine” cooking was also incredibly meat-focused, to say nothing of the fact that skinning animals and butchering your own cuts of meat was in the past much more a skill that housewives were required to possess. So it’s interesting.
Moulds, the guy being interviewed, recounts Jack Dempsey’s argument for the barbecue thing:
Well, [Dempsey]’s saying, basically, that men have an innate ability to spice up meals. Right? Because men are really good at specialization, men are really good at fun techniques and spectacle, and so he associates men’s cooking with various masculine activities like Boy Scouts, camping, hunting trips.
And then Moulds (who is a librarian rather than a domain researcher, so this is presumably a bit speculative) expands on this with his own take:
Well, I think meat’s the perfect thing, right? Meat is carnal; there’s something primal about meat. About cooking meat hearkens back to the cave men, it hearkens back to cooking over fires with a group of dudes, you know. It’s really something that only men can do. There’s a bit a danger to it. There’s a bit of expertise. So, that’s why the barbecue just resonates, I think, I argue, with these fathers. Because it’s not something that’s every day, it’s something that requires man.
This makes more sense to me. It draws on the bush food aesthetic I mentioned, but Moulds also cites here this thing where grilling is unusual in a way that makes it more complicated and risky, which can help sell it as “the kind of cooking that’s too cool and serious for women.” (Unfortunately nobody ever used this gimmick to sell men on the macho excellence of home deep frying, and so we’ve lost our ancestral Holiday Doughnut technology.)
He also situates it in the context of the postwar tendency toward American exceptionalism and of the sense (no doubt driven by huge advertising and lobbying budgets) that Americans had patriotic duty to restructure their society around the chaebol – which was also a factor in the sprawl that proliferated yards for people to do barbecuing in to begin with.
This show looks good as hell and they publish transcripts, so I’m definitely gonna dig into their stuff.
fire + meat + outdoors, it’s the “I’m not gay, but” of cooking
ok but south caucasus culture (and also i just assume turkish and a variety of others) has literally the exact same hard binary where men never lay a finger on food cooking inside the house and women never lay a finger on the meat grilling outside. if anything the binary is even more strictly enforced here, since the act of grilling meat holds a pretty central place in the culture and is considered a masculine act par excellence. these customs are in all likelihood many hundreds of years old at the absolute minimum, and obviously 20th century marketing campaigns from the booming american meat industry aren’t likely to have influenced them much
which isn’t to say that wasn’t the case in the united states, but i think with such a striking case of parallel evolution there have to be other factors at play besides lazy evo-psych crap about cavemen. if i had to guess, i would say the single largest factor is an overarching mental framework common to both the south caucasus and mid-century america: the gendered division of space. in both cultures, everything physically inside the walls of the house is a feminine domain (under control of the housewife and mother-in-law in america and armenia, respectively, subject to only a sort of detached oversight from the man); everything beyond the doorstep, in the public space, is a masculine domain. sort of the same way the presence of a church or temple divides space into sacred and profane
the one stumbling block is the absence of a clear concept of the yard in the south caucasus; the way homes are typically constructed here allows for no such liminal space which is simultaneously the private property of the tenant and a public space open at least to observation. but the enduring image of the suburban man of the house studiously tending to his lawn gives us a pretty clear suggestion that yards fall generally on the masculine side of the rubric, and that the boundary between the two remains the physical doorframe of the house
with that said, i would suggest that the fact that grilling is done in the yard is most likely the primary reason for its perceived masculinity. not necessarily because such outdoor activities evoke man’s hunter-gatherer ancestors - who i assume knew very little of comfortable wood patios and spaceship-chrome propane grills - but because the guys who invented modern grilling were (re)producing a framework wherein everything that takes place outdoors is masculine, as a received truth that doesn’t require further justification. certainly that’s how it is here
any other cooking that takes place outside the home is likely to be considered masculine as well (look at the ratio of male to female chefs in restaurants, perhaps?), it’s just that grilling and maybe camping are disproportionately culturally salient and so we’re motivated to invent non-general explanations for them
my top-of-the-head suggestion is it has to do with travel, that until the railroad or early automotive era a regular male even non-army life would include making camp and cooking basic meat at the side of the road on your way to somewhere