Cupcakes: Tools of the Patriarchy

[Gahars]

The Trouble With Cupcakes

I've tried ignoring them or just being slightly bemused by their ubiquitousness, but I've finally realised that I'm sick of cupcakes. They're everywhere, with their candy colours, inch-thick icing and red-velvet sponge.

Well, I mean, I don't like cupcakes all that much either, so I guess-

...I get that they're supposed to be beautiful, artful amuse-gueles. But really, they're only artistic if your idea of aesthetic achievement stretches to artisanal M&Ms. They're not pretty so much as prettified.

But I also get that I'm not their target market. Cupcakes seem designed to appeal, in the main, to young women. They are glossy lifestyle accessories for the post-Sex and the City generation. And with prices to match: in some of the fancier establishments, they're $3-4 (approximately £2.50) for a single cake, or $1 a pop for a bite-size mini.

Um, sure? I mean, I don't know if I'd describe them like that, but-

Now, anyone who knows me and my industrial-scale chocolate habit will be ready to yell "hypocrite" here. But I'm not preaching abstinence from treats. What irks me about cupcakes is that, for their implied young female, figure-conscious, on-off dieting customers, they set up this horrible dynamic of enabling indulgence in a forbidden object.

Um-

You know what cupcakes really are? – butter-iced snares of self-loathing that sell precisely because they exploit young women's insecurity about their looks and identity, and offer a completely false and self-defeating solace of temporary gratification, almost certainly followed by remorse and disgust.

Please, they're just cakes. I-

They're just cakes, you say. Ah, but they're not just cakes: like any cultural artefact, they have implicit values baked in. And the values I see in cupcakes are of a demeaning, self-trivialising sort of hyper-femininity. This is where I start to sound like the worst kind of moralising Puritan killjoy, but it's just really hard for me to believe that serious, self-respecting adult women would be at all susceptible to this gooey, sickly-sweet embodiment of female wish-fulfilment.

...

TL;DR: Cupcakes are tools of the patriarchy, designed to oppress womyn. Like all foods, cupcakes are inherently sexist. If you really care about women, why aren't you subsisting off of tofu paste yet?

 

[PityOnU]

What the fuck is wrong with people nowadays?

Seriously, being a feminist in today's society just means you hate men.

 

[yuyuyup]

I regularly read liberal feminist blog "Jezebel" and have come to certain understandings of what a "patriarchal society" entails, among other such teachings. While this blog article conveys a sense of sympathy for the feminist movement, I don't believe it actually encompasses such ideals. I would guess feminists would label this article "white knighting," in other words the author (a man) is trying to earn brownie points (or rather cupcake points) by putting women on a pedestal instead of treating them like equal human beings. Of course I am still learning about people so I could be off the mark.

 

[DS1]

This dude just mad that videogames aren't art and now he's going after female version of videogames, teh cupcake.

 

[Wolvenreign]

This is what I've always found facepalm-worthy of the sort of feminists who cry "patriarchy" at even the slightest provocation.

Honestly, the only difference between this sort of feminism and general conspiracy culture is that the former believes that men are the perpetrators of these outlandish conspiracies while the latter has the imagination to say it was lizard men or some other whacked-out nonsense.

Also, both of them go counter to a saying I've found very true in life; "Assume incompetence before malice." Being evil takes hard work, but stupidity is every bit as vast as our finite nature.

 

[Theconejo]

On the topic of cupcakes, to enjoy a better frosting to cake ratio, one should remove the bottom portion of the cupcake and flip onto the top portion, creating a mini layer cake, or makeshift whoopie pie. Makes consuming these things easier.

I was never a fan of magnolia's actual cake part of the cupcake, that and buttercream frosting is gross. Butter that is whipped with sugar, gross.