Angry Men, Angry Mothers

There are usually only a few men in my Sociology of Food class. In their answers to questions in class and in homework, most are indistinguishable from the women: concerns over diet and body image, some hints of anorexia, love of cooking, wishing there were more time, and money, to cook well and to eat well with others.

But there are always a few men who are in the course but not of it. They sit uncomfortably in the back or the far sides of the classroom. The look on their faces during class discussion indicates that they think what we are doing is a waste of time. They come to me bewildered over the class assignments, or they write answers to the assignment questions that are mostly critiques of the questions.

I try to bring in all points of view in class, including the "why the hell does this class exist" point of view. But if I pay too much attention to the disengaged men, if I look at them too much during classtime, if I maintain what I consider a good measure of vulnerability to class dynamics during discussion and in my occasional lectures, I get nervous and start to teach badly. These men, I realize, are not just in my food class, there are always a few in the classroom whenever I teach, but the food class is particularly interactive and one of the smaller (at 86 students) that I teach, so I tend to notice them more there.

This quarter, I've created some new assignments, one of which was to interview three people about their "food-centered lives." As usual, these men made it clear that such an assignment is a waste of time, and that whatever I was asking them to do and whatever conceptual tools I was asking them to use to analyze these interviews were useless. But it was in the interviews themselves that I got a glimpse of where their disengagement comes from, where the anger that makes them refuse to listen to the ideas presented and, in particular, to the person presenting them. The anger comes from their mothers.

Nearly all the students interviewed family for this assignment. Many of them interviewed grandparents, but a number interviewed parents as well, particularly mothers. We had read Meredith Abarca's Voices in the Kitchen, which talks about how Latina women sometimes turn the kitchen, which can be a place of oppression for women, into as a space of creativity, power and independence. The kitchen is always both a place of subjugation and empowerment, but creative cooks play with this boundary, using their artistry to push into the realm of power over their lives. Several students interpreted this in their interviews as women learning to love their kitchen and their place in it, which isn't quite what Abarca was saying. They interpreted consent as creativity. However, the angry men had a very different take on the book: that it didn't tell them anything about their mother's food lives. Their mothers, they said, always wanted to be cooks in the home, but they had to work, and they spent their lives angry at their fathers because they wanted to stay home but couldn't, because their fathers didn't make enough money to be the sole breadwinner.

These were a separate set of moms from the other students in the class, the students who came from full-time mom households or from households where moms were happy with their paid work lives. These students told stories about their mom's happiness in the kitchen or about how their moms were constantly juggling their work and kitchen lives, or how their mom's and dads shared the cooking the way they shared bringing home the bacon. These stories weren't always about family contentment, but they were about how people coped with the lives they had, rather than wished for lives that were completely different.

The men with angry moms cared deeply about their mom's anger, and were angry for them. These, I realized, were also moms I didn't meet very often. As a professional mom, I live in a town and a neighborhood that requires an income that only high-earning men (high enough to also have stay-at-home wives) or two-professional families can make. The working class moms who have to work and are angry about it don't live where I live, don't go to school with my children. I only meet them in the presence of the angry men in my classroom.

Of course, that is another reason why these women and their sons are so angry. The feminist revolution that enabled me to have a life of professional juggling -- happy with both family and work even while it drove me crazy on a daily basis -- is the same one that took them away from the kitchen where they wanted to be. I benefited from this revolution by entering the workforce and competing with their husbands for education and the professional jobs available with that education. Standing in front of that classroom talking about kitchens, my brains chock full of the social capital that only comes from a huge social investment in a person's education, I stood for exactly what the angry mens' angry moms had lost: I was the professional woman describing the changing world in which fulfilling my dream came at their expense. These men grew up around this anger, which I suspect these women must have expressed not just as anger toward their low-earning husbands, but also anger toward women like me, who grew up with a mom who was happy to go into the workforce even if it was under the unfortunate circumstances of single momhood.

These angry men will never accept me as a professor, no matter what I say, or how I try to include their perspectives in class discussion. I can try to expand the concepts of the course to understand the frustrated kitchens they come from, part of a world in which single-earner families with happy moms spending hours in the kitchen only exist at the top of the heap. I can explain how academic women don't tend to tell the stories of the working class women who want to stay home. But the contradiction will remain apparent: I am what angry mens' angry moms are mad about. Simply by being who I am, I am an imperfect political contradiction that no amount of intellectual inclusivity can resolve.