Part I. Cheering for the Girls – Just Because I’m One

Food was the order of the evening: I was reading about the first Thanksgiving, and Hell’s Kitchen was playing on TV. I had to watch. After all, the only way that I could get in touch with my old life as a molecular biologist was to play in the kitchen and do culinary experiments. I wouldn’t dream of being harassed endlessly by a perfectionist chef, of course. I could simply live vicariously through the show’s contestants – or let them live courageously for me. Last night, I found myself doing more than just watching how food was cooked, and how contestants dealt with the pressure of the Kitchen and each other. I found myself cheering for the girls, especially when they started winning the challenge. The contestants underwent a blind taste test, where they were made to eat different foods while blindfolded. In true fan girl fashion, I said, and quite loudly, “The girls are winning this. Girls have better palates than men.” Granted, the girls did win the competition, but I found later that I did not cheer so much because I knew that girls would win a challenge based on their physiological abilities – I kept recalling that most of the world’s best known chefs are men, and women had to prove their worth. The question was – why?

When I was young, my peers accepted, and wholeheartedly, the idea that women were weaker than men. I could not and would not swallow the concept. I have spent the last few years lobbying for women’s strength, from correcting my classmates in college when they stereotyped women as clumsy scientists, to loudly cheering for any women’s team when it was pitted against a man’s team anywhere. Tonight, watching Hell’s Kitchen meant that I had yet another chance to cheer (albeit in the privacy of my dorm room) for women, whom I believed could be as good as men at cooking. Weren’t we the mothers and housewives? The kitchen queens?

Scream, Gordon, Scream! (courtesy of http://www.fox.com/hellskitchen).
Gordon Ramsay might have sneered at the Girl’s Team, but the ladies still won the night.

That would be my greatest contradiction: seeing women as the stronger sex in the kitchen because of the housewife label. I really didn’t care if there were many other ways for chefs to be great, the ways having nothing at all to do with gender. I am a woman, and my natural impulse was to cheer for the girls: I had to, because I would not lay down the old arms I had fought with as a child; and I wanted to, because I know I believe, deep within, that men just can’t make it where women have held their turf for hundreds of years. Equality – of course! Now boys, just acknowledge that all those years we women were forced to stay in the kitchen should mean that we’re also better at the craft. Of course, I won’t say that out loud, but I’ll still cheer for the next girl who wins the competition – because she’s just like me, waiting to prove something, wanting to show that women have an edge thanks to a label.