Thesis:
Until we dismantle the cultural resistance to women wielding knives with the same authority as men, the kitchen will remain yet another space where power is served, but not to them.
In the heat of the professional kitchen, the fire burns differently depending on who holds the cleaver. For men, the career of a chef comes with the sharp edge of intensity: the hard-ass personas of Gordon Ramsay, Anthony Bourdain—figures who thrive on chaos and command respect by force. For women, however, the recipe is modified. Their culinary careers are packaged with softer edges, wrapped in the warm categories of homemaking, entertaining, and nurturing. Does your blood pressure rise when Ina Garten comes on screen? Nancy Meyers aesthetic is one of the most popular Pinterest searches. Martha Stewart may have been to prison, but her tablescapes don’t exactly connote hardened criminal. The divide is clear. Why does professional success in the culinary world look so different based on gender? If you can’t handle the heat, you might just have to redefine the kitchen.
Idiot Sandwich
The mythology of the male chef lives in an arena where only the most unrelenting survive. The professional kitchen has long been dominated by men where leadership is measured not in precision or creativity, but in how loudly you can berate a line cook. How aggressively you can sauté mushrooms. It’s Gordon Ramsay slamming bread on a contestant’s face, yelling “What are you?” until she chokes out, “an idiot sandwich.” It’s Bobby Flay’s entire show built around the concept that no matter how talented you are, you’ll still lose to him. It’s Anthony Bourdain romanticising the kitchen as a place of “battleground conditions,” where a chef demands “blind, near-fanatical loyalty” and the only opinions allowed are the ones he provides (Bourdain, 56).
Professional culinary culture has become one of hyper-masculine bravado, where food is not just a sustenance but a sexually charged weapon. Everything is at once a sexual indulgence and a challenge. “Don't touch my dick, don't touch my knife.” (Bourdain, 60) Anthony Bourdain’s discovery of food as a vehicle for more came at an attempt to “outdo [his] foodie parents” (Bourdain, 16). He talks about his first oyster–he “became a man” when the glistening, nearly-alive object slid down his throat in a way he describes as “vaguely sexual” (Bourdain, 16). Oh, and this was in fourth grade.
Of the oyster, he waxes, “And in that unforgettably sweet moment in my personal history, that one moment still more alive for me than so many of the other ‘firsts’ that followed–first pussy, first joint. . . I attained glory” (Bourdain, 16).
This “forbidden fruit,” Bourdain discovered, was something he could wield (Bourdain, 17). “Food had power.” (Bourdain, 17) His obsession with food did not begin with feeding people, nor was it about the craft. It was conquest. It was to “gross out my still uninitiated little brother” (Bourdain, 13). It was visceral. He describes scooping gooey Vacherin, slathering baguettes with Normandy butter, eating whole fish, “loving that I was eating heads, eyes, bones, and all” (Bourdain, 13).
Women are technically allowed in this space, but only on male terms. Bourdain, for all his reverence of the “rare” women in professional kitchens, admired them not for their culinary skill but for how well they could keep up in the pissing contest (Bourdain, 57). A female chef was worthy of respect if she could be as crude, as violent, as sexually aggressive as the men in the kitchen. He describes Beth, a line cook he admired for retaliating against an ass-grabbing cook by humping him from behind, “How do you like it, bitch?” (Bourdain, 58). Ah, yes. The sacred rite of passage. The knife-work, the fire, the endless hours of labor–none of it mattered until Beth proved that she too could participate in the time-honored tradition of workplace harassment. Every girl’s dream.
Bourdain insists, “I don’t want you to think that everything up to this point was about fornication” (Bourdain, 25). Maybe not, but he treats food as a vehicle for ecstasy. To him, eating isn’t just nourishment—it’s a full-body experience. It’s Dionysian. It’s a visceral act that demands presence, desire, and reverence for the human experience. His feeling toward food is undeniably sensual, not just in the obvious ways (oysters, knives, the occasional writing checks with their cock moment) but in how he feels every bite, every texture. Every insane moment in the kitchen is immersive, never performative. Food is poetry, rebellion, sex, and survival all at once. From a literary perspective, his descriptions are hypnotic. Even if you don’t want to be him, you want to eat like him, taste like him, because it looks pretty fucking great:
With Love, Meghan–and Every Other Woman in the Kitchen
Unlike the gritty, sensual kitchens of Anthony Bourdain or seen on The Bear, cooking media advertised toward women frames their talent as an act of love and servitude, less about artistry, more about entertaining and family. The most clear distinction: their kitchens are inside houses–not restaurants.
Nara Smith handmakes everything from hot dogs to candy canes, cough syrup to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, kimchi to pad see ew–and yet, every video begins and ends with the same refrain: “my husband was craving…” or “my children asked for...” In Laurie Woolever’s Care and Feeding, (that title alone says more than this essay ever could) cooking is not about ego or Michelin stars, but about obligation—the unseen, unpaid labor of feeding a family, the daily grind of making meals that will be eaten in minutes and forgotten just as fast.
And to be clear, this isn’t about hierarchy. We’re not here to weigh cooking in the home against a Michelin-starred restaurant. The difference isn’t in skill or labor; it’s about language and perception. The skills could be the same. The labor, just as demanding. But the accolades? Not even close.
This divide—between food as art and food as duty, between the chef and the homemaker—reveals more than just different approaches to cooking. It exposes deeper social, gender, and class dynamics that shape who gets to be called a “genius” in the kitchen and who is simply doing what’s expected of them. The perfectly roasted chicken, in the hands of a male chef, is a triumph of technique, the subject of slow-motion cinematography and glowing profiles. In the hands of a woman at home, it’s “boyfriend chicken.”
This difference in narrative is displayed so clearly in the visual sets created across media. We’re all anticipating With Love, Meghan, where the former Duchess cooks for her friends and family in a brightly lit, pristinely cream tableau of domesticity. It doesn’t take a meeting with McKinsey to recognize this for the marketing technique that it is: a show designed to soften the public’s perception of her. The message: a woman in the kitchen is palatable, even likeable, promoting Meghan as a woman after love, not ambition.
Or Selena and Chef, where a wittle gorl needs to be taught how to use her ginormous, movie-star kitchen. Meanwhile, that wittle gorl owns a billion-dollar business leading the beauty industry.
Social media has its own push and pull with gender and cooking. Meredith Hayden built her following through day-in-the-life videos showcasing her work as a private chef, a masterful blend of traditional culinary skills and influencer-friendly storytelling. She’s propelled this into massive profits–cookbooks, luxury cookware partnerships, and Super Bowl commercials to say the least. A trad-wife Hayden is not, yet her brand still stands in stark contrast to any man cooking for a TikTok audience.
Men who cook on social media have their own algorithmic advantage. Just search “thirst-trap chef” and behold the parade of slow-motion sauce drizzles, seductive meat slaps, and unnecessary licking. Raw chicken is caressed like a lover, butter is smeared with erotic reverence, and every dish is served with a smolder. It’s not about the food—it’s about the performance of cooking, where the main ingredient is horniness.
Social media, for all its democratizing power, wrestles with the same contradiction: a woman belongs in the kitchen, but only if she’s selling something more palatable than power.
Gaslight, Gatekeep, Gourmet
The kitchen has long been framed as a space of obligation for women and opportunity for men. Historically, cooking has been domesticated, the wife and mother in its leading role. Guests in her kitchen become sous-chef by invitation, their tasks prefaced with, “I would love your help, if you don’t mind!” or “are you sure, it’s no big deal if you can’t.” No one would ever walk into Gordon Ramsay’s domain with the same deferential tone, and Ramsay would never soften his authority with flexibility or accommodation.
This reflects the stark contrast of power between men and women in their kitchens. For women, cooking is an expectation tied to caregiving. It’s not enough to prepare a meal, she must also cultivate warmth, an atmosphere where everyone is welcome to her cutting board. For men, it is typically not a task of service but an assertion of power.
When’s the last time you heard someone offer to help a man with his grill?
Live, Laugh, Lacerate
Camas Davis was at a crossroads–personally and professionally–when she made the radical decision to move to France and learn the art of butchery, a field traditionally dominated by men. It was brutal, gory, and beautiful, forcing her to redefine her relationship with meat–and herself.
Davis acknowledges the external reactions her work started to provoke, but she challenges you to step closer and learn before making assumptions. She does something many of her male counterparts don’t: she opens her world up to community. Through The Portland Meat Collective, an initiative she founded, Davis teaches butchery to anyone curious enough to enroll. She guides them through the beauty of nose-to-tail eating–using every part of the animal. Women have long built knowledge and survival around community resources, and Davis leans into that tradition, turning butchery into an act of both skill and collective sustenance. Here, she is both hunter and gatherer, her work as generous as it is bloody.
Butchery doesn’t commonly find itself in the curated kitchens of Garten or Stewart, but Davis isn’t going for tidy homemaker. Nor is she hardening herself to match the masculinity of the field. She’s just trying to feed you.
Now, we see women emulating Davis, breaking down the “gross” bits on camera. It’s Molly Baz snapping down a whole chicken to parts, the gentle crack of the backbone underneath her palm, all charm. Gone are the days of pretending you aren’t doing more than frosting and roasting.
Let Her Cook
For generations, women have been told the kitchen is their domain–as long as they use it correctly. They can cook, but never command. They can nourish, but not lead. They can perfect a dish, but only if it’s to serve to their loved ones.
The reality is, women have been handling the heat forever–at home, in professional kitchens, and everywhere in between. So maybe it’s time to move away from the stove and let her cook. Because she already has been. This time, give her the credit.
Gaslight, gatekeep, gourmet— SO CLEVER
"a woman belongs in the kitchen, but only if she’s selling something more palatable than power." put that on a shirt.