"The question that interests me slightly more is whether it is in fact gendered to have a snack-dinner and I want to say that it isn’t but I kind of have to say from personal experience lo these nearly 40 years on this planet that it is."
The entire Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant chain stands as a monument to male willingness to eat snacks for dinner.
Reminded me of a line from Marjorie Hillis's delightful "Live Alone and Like It," and found it in the appropriately-named chapter "Solitary Refinement:" "You will be able to eat what, when, and where you please, even dinner served on a tray on the living-room couch--one of the higher forms of enjoyment which the masculine mind has not yet learned to appreciate." Not perhaps "girl dinner" exactly, but an argument for the casual dinner being gendered even in 1936.
Yeah, dinner alone vs. with someone seems to me to be the line. For the last year I have been in the happy position of practically never cooking dinner unless I want to. The kids are moved out and the husband, looking for fewer calories, nearly always eats an egg for dinner. I eat whatever I want and I try to keep it small and reasonably healthy, so quite often it is something on the snack end of the spectrum, or odds and ends out of the fridge. Anyway I'm pretty sure snacky dinners have always been a thing, a thing of the person eating alone and not having to live up to anyone else's expectations.
My go-to lately has been an open face sandwich in the Danish style on that dark flat rye bread, with sliced hard boiled egg and pickled beets. Cucumber too since there's been a bumper crop. Yum.
"It seems more that the difference is between meals alone and meals with another person" this was my first thought--it's an easy fallback when you only have yourself to feed and making a full meal for yourself is just... not in the cards.
Thinking about what a girl dinner would be in my case would be just like, cheese./charcuterie... but that may just be because I had such a dinner with a guy friend and kept worrying he thought I was trying to seduce him or something.
"The question that interests me slightly more is whether it is in fact gendered to have a snack-dinner and I want to say that it isn’t but I kind of have to say from personal experience lo these nearly 40 years on this planet that it is."
The entire Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant chain stands as a monument to male willingness to eat snacks for dinner.
Reminded me of a line from Marjorie Hillis's delightful "Live Alone and Like It," and found it in the appropriately-named chapter "Solitary Refinement:" "You will be able to eat what, when, and where you please, even dinner served on a tray on the living-room couch--one of the higher forms of enjoyment which the masculine mind has not yet learned to appreciate." Not perhaps "girl dinner" exactly, but an argument for the casual dinner being gendered even in 1936.
Yeah, dinner alone vs. with someone seems to me to be the line. For the last year I have been in the happy position of practically never cooking dinner unless I want to. The kids are moved out and the husband, looking for fewer calories, nearly always eats an egg for dinner. I eat whatever I want and I try to keep it small and reasonably healthy, so quite often it is something on the snack end of the spectrum, or odds and ends out of the fridge. Anyway I'm pretty sure snacky dinners have always been a thing, a thing of the person eating alone and not having to live up to anyone else's expectations.
My go-to lately has been an open face sandwich in the Danish style on that dark flat rye bread, with sliced hard boiled egg and pickled beets. Cucumber too since there's been a bumper crop. Yum.
"It seems more that the difference is between meals alone and meals with another person" this was my first thought--it's an easy fallback when you only have yourself to feed and making a full meal for yourself is just... not in the cards.
Thinking about what a girl dinner would be in my case would be just like, cheese./charcuterie... but that may just be because I had such a dinner with a guy friend and kept worrying he thought I was trying to seduce him or something.