Lost in the Kitchen by: Dave Barry
“Lost in the Kitchen” Dave Barry
In Dave Barry's essay "Lost in the Kitchen" Barry shares his opinion on sexual equality through a personal experience with his family on Thanksgiving. In the conclusion paragraph a point is made that before women's liberation, men took care of the cars and women took care of the kitchen. Now after women's liberation, men no longer feel obligated to take care of the cars. By this, Barry is meaning to say that before women's liberation, women had their specific, "feminine" jobs and men had their "masculine" duties to take care of. After women were liberated, those roles were disrupted and women became viewed as more qualified to take on those more "masculine" responsibilities. At first, one can imagine that men might have felt their definite masculinity slipping away from them and been insulted, but as time has passed that pride has subsided and men are now giving in to the new role women play in society, or as Barry implies, men have not only succumbed to this, but have gotten lazy. I disagree that the balance of responsibility between men and women is weighted more heavily on women due to men's passive or lazy tendencies because especially in a family situation, there are too many variables for the blame to rest on just one gender.
There certainly are circumstances where, especially in a household, passiveness or laziness is the driving force behind imbalance of roles between men and women. However, this is interchangeable when it comes to gender. For example, my very own parents fit the stereotype Barry creates in reverse. Both of my parents cook, but my father is the chef. My mother has her few special dishes that she’ll repeatedly cook and we do enjoy, but my father is always in charge of the specialty concoctions. My dad does the grocery shopping which he takes on after a full day of work, buys more groceries than we need and while attempting and failing to put them away due to lack of room, proceeds to clean the kitchen,
In Dave Barry's essay "Lost in the Kitchen" Barry shares his opinion on sexual equality through a personal experience with his family on Thanksgiving. In the conclusion paragraph a point is made that before women's liberation, men took care of the cars and women took care of the kitchen. Now after women's liberation, men no longer feel obligated to take care of the cars. By this, Barry is meaning to say that before women's liberation, women had their specific, "feminine" jobs and men had their "masculine" duties to take care of. After women were liberated, those roles were disrupted and women became viewed as more qualified to take on those more "masculine" responsibilities. At first, one can imagine that men might have felt their definite masculinity slipping away from them and been insulted, but as time has passed that pride has subsided and men are now giving in to the new role women play in society, or as Barry implies, men have not only succumbed to this, but have gotten lazy. I disagree that the balance of responsibility between men and women is weighted more heavily on women due to men's passive or lazy tendencies because especially in a family situation, there are too many variables for the blame to rest on just one gender.
There certainly are circumstances where, especially in a household, passiveness or laziness is the driving force behind imbalance of roles between men and women. However, this is interchangeable when it comes to gender. For example, my very own parents fit the stereotype Barry creates in reverse. Both of my parents cook, but my father is the chef. My mother has her few special dishes that she’ll repeatedly cook and we do enjoy, but my father is always in charge of the specialty concoctions. My dad does the grocery shopping which he takes on after a full day of work, buys more groceries than we need and while attempting and failing to put them away due to lack of room, proceeds to clean the kitchen,