On the new domesticity

What to make of "the new domesticity"? Ms. Matchar sums up my take on the whole situation here:

“Sometimes a can of jam is just a can of jam,” as Freud (never) said. Our tech-saturated generation craves creative hands-on activities, and nostalgic hobbies such as canning, knitting and baking fit the bill. We’ve realized that just because something was historically devalued as “women’s work,” that doesn’t mean we have to shun it to be taken seriously in the world. Plenty of young men are embracing their domestic sides, too.

She loses me here:

But lately, many women (and a few men) are diving into domesticity with a sense of moral purpose. The homemade jar of jam becomes a symbol of resistance to industrial food and its environment-defiling ways.

I'm all about resistance to industrial food, but it's not homemade canning that's going to make the difference. In any case, just like I don't see why food preparation is a gender issue (I did want to smack someone who called me a housewife because I made dinner for a group of people when we were renting a cabin at the beach a year ago), I don't see "the new domesticity" as a backlash to feminism. But then she writes this:

Many champions of the DIY movement explicitly say that domestic work shouldn’t be about gender. But I’ve also noticed a resurgence of old-fashioned gender essentialism from some surprising sources. I’ve lately been hearing things like “There’s just something natural about women taking on the nurturing role in the home” coming out of the mouths of women’s studies grads and Ivy League PhDs.

I don't know about that. There's something to be said for basic domestic skills... my dad always says that everyone should be able to sew on a button, and even I can do that.

It may be that a young stay-at-home mom in Pennsylvania recently told the writer, “The only way to know what’s in your food is to make it yourself.” But I could have told her that too. I've told you that, and I mean it.

I'm dating someone who knows as much about cooking as Gracie does, and is about as handy with kitchen gadgets. Would I judge this level of cluelessness more harshly if he were a woman? Probably not. I don't judge it; it just baffles me. I didn't learn to cook because I thought I should, as a woman; I learned to cook because I like to eat good food, and, my upbringing was not far from what Gary Shteyngart wrote in "Sixty-Nine Cents":

My parents believed that going to restaurants and buying clothes not sold by weight on Orchard Street were things done only by the very wealthy or the very profligate, maybe those extravagant “welfare queens” we kept hearing about on television.

Not long ago--perhaps the last time I was in Boston--my father--not my mother, who couldn't believe I would pay for a professional haircut, but my father--talked about how he couldn't believe the way his coworkers treated themselves to restaurant food willy-nilly. For us, restaurants were always a special treat. And even now that my parents can afford the occasional restaurant dinner, they don't particularly like it, and this is partly because they're both decent cooks. Yes, my father, too, is a decent cook. He recently told me that he started making vegetables "my way." As for me, especially being vegan (not to mention, mortgaged), restaurant food is rarely worth it. I can make decent food at home and know what's in it.

The guy I'm dating is a vegetarian. This shocked the hell out of one of my friends--the same one who came to my AVD party last year having eaten ahead of time because she didn't think she'd be able to eat anything vegan. Anyway, this friend urged me to play down my own veganism, not mention it to guys, because no one wanted to date a vegetarian, much less a vegan. Guys like to eat, she said. But I digress. So, this vegetarian I'm dating, who didn't own a salt shaker until a couple of weeks ago (after I sent him home with some leftovers and suggested he maybe add salt), didn't think that individuals could make decent vegetarian food. That it had to be ordered at restaurants. We're working on that.