@emgenie tweeted this article: How I wooed my man with a sandwich, and after reading the first paragraph or so, my blood started to boil.
Maybe this article was just to troll people like me, as I feel a lot of articles are these days especially on NY Post.
Here’s the gist of it if you don’t want to read the article:
My boyfriend, Eric, is the gourmet cook in our relationship, but he’d always want me to make him a sandwich.
Each morning, he would ask, “Honey, how long you have been awake?”
“About 15 minutes,” I’d reply.
“You’ve been up for 15 minutes and you haven’t made me a sandwich?”
To him, sandwiches are like kisses or hugs. Or sex. “Sandwiches are love,” he says. “Especially when you make them. You can’t get a sandwich with love from the deli.”
…..
As he finished that last bite, he made an unexpected declaration of how much he loved me and that sandwich:
“Honey, you’re 300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring!”
Tell me Stephanie Smith, would you really want to marry the jackass who made that remark?
Ridiculous.
I’LL GIVE YOU A SANDWICH ALL RIGHT…
Call me a raging feminist, but flippantly (even jokingly) saying: “Hey woman, make me a sandwich!” … or .. “You’re 300 sandwiches away from a ring!“… makes me want to give him a sandwich all right…. a knuckle sandwich.
Can you imagine a woman saying that to a man?
“Honey you’re 300 sandwiches away from my agreeing to marry your sorry ass!?”
Like marriage is the only thing women think about and want. You have to be kidding me.
I can’t stand a woman who accepts such sexist teasing, because even if you are standing silently by and shrugging your shoulders when your boyfriend jokes about chaining to you to your kitchen or dishwasher makes me want to slap you too.
(I don’t play favourites with wanting to slap men or women. Stupid is stupid.)
IT IS NOT THE SAME THING AS SAYING FOOD = LOVE
I am the first person to tell you that food is love.
When someone takes the time to make food for me, it’s love. Edible love.
It’s one of the reasons why I fell in love with BF, was because he understood food as a way of showing affection.
….but it’s wholly another to joke about it in such a sexist way.
Just because you are a woman it doesn’t mean you need to know how to make a sandwich to prove you are “wife material” and what kind of stupid rule is that?
Should you also iron 500 shirts, and fetch him his slippers every night with the newspaper like a dog too?
So maybe you should start calling him “Master” or “Sir”, because you’re obviously the slave.
My sexist, idiot father actually once (seriously) asked my mother why she didn’t fetch him his newspaper and slippers when he came in the door, after they had both worked a full 8-hour day.
My mother simply looked at him, laughed in his face, and said: Should I bark and wag my tail when you come in the door as well?
It isn’t funny to me in the slightest, and if I ever heard anyone in my family decide to joke like that about women, I’d rip them a new one, father or not.
BF has never, ever in his life, made such jokes (I don’t even know if they exist in France, but certainly not in his social circle), and I have never heard his friends or his family EVER say such things in mixed company or otherwise.
It’s not even an issue, sexism, because it simply doesn’t even exist as an issue between us.
We’re equals for everything, for better or for worse.
(As an example, I have to come up with 50% for all of our bills, 50% for our future house, 50% for our retirement, and 50% for everything we do together. There is no such thing as him carrying me financially, or vice versa. We both make the same kind of money (roughly), so this is not unfair to me in the slightest.)
The one time I remember him talking about sexism, was a long time ago when his father and mother were invited to an uncle’s house for dinner.
His uncle took out wine and said loudly to everyone at the table: “Hey, just so you know, the wine is only for the men at this table, not the women.”
It’s not that women didn’t drink or weren’t allowed to drink (on the contrary!), it was that the uncle really thought that women were not worthy of drinking his wine stash.
You can’t get more sexist than that.
His father declined the wine, and then said: “I guess the next time you come over to eat with us, you won’t be having any wine either because it’s just for women at my house.”
(This was of course not true, but it sure drove home his point.)
WHAT ERA ARE WE LIVING IN ANYWAY?
Maybe it’s not even such a big deal to some of you to say or hear such things, you might even find it cute, tongue-in-cheek or just an article meant to stir up trolls like me, but as someone who works in a male-dominated industry and is, as a woman, the butt of these jokes about 80% of the time I work, it loses its charm pretty quickly.
It is not funny.
I can’t tell you the number of times at work where I’ve heard all the off-colour, sexist jokes about vacuum cleaners, fridges, dishwashing and all the crudest jokes you can imagine about their wives or girlfriends joking around with other guys, just because they feel the need to front how masculine they are.
Maybe their wives or girlfriends would actually give them a good ol’ slap if they actually heard them joke like that in their presence (or in another woman’s presence for that matter), but it doesn’t change anything for me that they do it in the company of other men.
When I hear these jokes, I give them a blank (poisonous) stare and tell them: That was inappropriate.
They usually turn red and try to say it was just a joke, but I don’t say anything and just give them a long stare, which makes the whole situation awkward, but at the very least, drives my opinion home.
I don’t rant, and I don’t get on my soapbox to preach to them. They already know what I mean.
THESE IDIOTS ARE JUST INSECURE
If you think you’re being macho saying such things, it just goes to show how insecure you really are about your own masculinity that you feel the need to joke about this.
When I hear those jokes, I immediately peg the guy as someone who feels the need to act like he’s a man because he really doesn’t feel like one, either being emasculated at home, or otherwise a closeted misogynist.
Otherwise, why would he feel the need to show his dominance over women?
If you guys laugh at these jokes even out of trying to be a friend or to fit in (even if you don’t believe in such jokes or don’t like them), you are just as stupid and as crude as the guy who made those jokes.
So what should you do instead if you don’t want to confront them?
Don’t laugh.
Just listen to the “joke”, let that awkward silence hang, then switch the subject.
Or excuse yourself and leave.
If they think you’re not being “one of the guys” because you disapprove of such jokes, do you really care what those idiots think of you anyway? Do you want to be in their circle, stooping to their level of intelligence?
Real guys in their personal and work lives, don’t make jokes like that.
Maybe they have had to button their lips and re-train themselves to not joke in such a crude manner, but I have never met a guy I have respected who has ever joked or hinted at joking like that about women.
They’re too intelligent to stoop to such crude remarks, regardless of their station and social class.
NO ONE SHOULD ACCEPT THAT CRAP, NOT EVEN MEN
In the same vein, I don’t like it when women joke about men being dumb or being useless for almost anything at home, or even if they joke about their husbands or boyfriends being their bank accounts and slaves because they’re essentially paying for sex with them, are just as stupid.
I don’t find it funny either.
It’s just as inappropriate to make those kinds of sexist jokes about men as it is about women.
So for everyone out there? Don’t take that crap.
Call out your idiot partner when he jokes about ordering you to go make him a sandwich or she jokes about how whipped you are because you’re her man.
Tell them it isn’t funny, full stop.
Then think twice about staying with such insecure jackasses who feel the need to put men or women down and “in their place”.
Someone who (even jokingly) says they’ll make you their wife if you can make them 300 sandwiches, or how they’ll grudgingly have sex with you if you do _____ for them, is someone who’s a moron.
Every joke has a half truth and unless you are willing to accept that you are and always will be a second-class citizen in your relationship (some people are, and that’s their choice), then you should re-evaluate who you are really considering a life with.
