Fair Sex Quotes

“No sugared association is stronger than that between sweetness and femininity. Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Women are honey, sweetheart, cupcake, candy girl, honey-bunch--- or they're tarts. In the Bible, "The lips of an adulterous woman drip honey" (Proverbs 5:3). Meanwhile, black women have been "caramel," "brown sugar," "mocha latte," "chocolate," and "molasses,"--- both desired and diminished. Making sweet foods is considered women's work--- and eating them is too. Girls receive an Easy-Bake Oven; cake mixes are marketed exclusively to women; home bakers are overwhelmingly female. Candy and chocolate are heavily feminized that a Yorkie bar in the U.K.--- normal chocolate, massive chunks--- until recently stood out by marketing itself as "not for girls."
It's not just in American and European food cultures that this holds true. I spoke to food writer and journalist Mayukh Sen about the gendering of foods within Bengali cuisine. "Sweetness is very much gendered female in Bengali cooking," he explained. "There's a word, mishti, that stands for both Bengali sweets and is also used to describe someone, usually a woman, who is 'sweet' (pleasant, youthful, and nonthreatening/demure)." In Japan, amato and karato refer to those who love sweets and those who prefer salty, savory, and spicy foods, respectively, and yet these labels loosely trace the dividing line between men and women. Jon D. Holtzman writes that a Kyoto-based confectioner--- by all accounts a man who loved his sweets--- assured him that he was more a karato kind of guy: "strong, energetic, and ambitious.”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019