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I cook for fun and pleasure. She wouldn’t tolerate the high maintenance carbon steel blades. The fancy cast iron cook wear, spun steel and my other goodies. She basically wants something she can use and toss in the dishwasher.
 
Yeah it's interesting. I have a friend who is a chef and works in 2 michellin star restaurants. He really likes his knives, a shibata, and a few others. He doesn't know a ton about them but he likes them. I think that's where a lot of pro chefs fit in. They don't obsess over it or treat it as a hobby and join forums like we do
The number of Porsche owners who actually take their GT3s to a track day are a decided minority.
 
I guarantee there are women here, but why would any woman want to out herself in a public forum. Do you have any idea how women are treated by anonymous men online?
Some of my friends are women, so yeah.
 
i suspect most women who cook either professionally or as a serious hobby are busy honing not their knifes, but their cooking craft.

many, i guess (and some i know), have more than adequate knives (even great ones) – but are busy using them, not comparing their dicks collections with others.

.
 
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A cheap, sharp piece of metal cuts food. Arguably this forum is geared towards people having a better knife, but having a better knife doesn't make a better chef. Unless you're in a pro environment where you do heavy volume then a more expensive knife isn't realistically going to make a difference for most people.

My suspicion is that many people (maybe more boys than girls) look at expensive sharp knives and think, "that's so cool." Then they ostensibly try and work on their cooking so that they can buy expensive knives without having to deal with the social consequences of being a person who buys a lot of knives. Looking at this forum, the knife aspect leads and cooking is secondary.

I also suspect based on "traditional" gender norms that many people (maybe more girls than boys) care more about cooking than knives. If that's the case those people probably wouldn't encounter this forum or topic much at all. People into cooking tend to hunt recipes rather than knives.

TLDR: people who are interested in knives would be drawn to this forum. People who are interested in cooking probably wouldn't be as much. Based on many cultures' gender norms it follows that his forum's gender distribution is probably skewed to be male heavy.
N=1 but for me it's completely the opposite way as you described. My interest in cooking knives came after cooking... in a desire to make the whole affair more efficient and fun. Which it absolutely did...although I admit that diminishing returns territory probably starts around that 150-200 euro mark.
Expensive is for me a downside; if I can have the same quality for cheaper I absolutely will - but I'm probably biased in that regard because I'm Dutch and poor.
And to top it off I'm not particularly arsed with other knives. I was always very utilitarian when it comes to outdoor stuff (Mora + Opinel FTW), nor do I care about collecting EDC crap or daggers to put on display.

What I do think might be at play (although I'm reluctant to 'generalize across whole genders') is that it seems like males have a higher tendency to acquire a gearfetish over a hobby. So for example many people here not only followed up their cooking hobby with a knife collection, but also a pan collection. You see similar situations in woodworking and other hobbies. Interesting data points certainly do exist but I'd be cautious to draw any far reaching conclusions from it, especially when many gender norms have slowly been shifting anyway.
 
In between the general belief that Gyutos shorter than 240mm are for sissies and the hundreds of posts from guys joking about "hiding" their latest purchase from their SO, I'd just wish the OP good luck. Not a critic but just what it is.

I'd be all about having dozens of women around here posting vids where they basically show much superior skills/efficiency with a 165mm Santoku... and then basically implying that their husband is such a killjoy or a dork that he "does not get it" and that she's smuggling her latest knife in the household and he's basically unaware enough that he does not catch upon it. Which, if you ask me, has a much higher chance of being true than the opposite.

I suspect, if such a crowd was around, they wouldn't be so readily welcomed. A lot of "240mm or sissies" men around here would feel so small in their shorts they couldn't even stomach it.

Before that happens though, most women that will come around here will quickly be fed up with the underlying G.I. Joe's culture. When you "smuggle" a new knife in and she doesn't say a word, believe me, it's just because she's smart enough to know that you need your toys, and patient enough to put up with it. And if she ever gets fed up with the smuggling, it will be because your blatant immaturity (and thinking of her as stupid) will have become enough of an affront that she cannot put up with it anymore. Then you'll probably see that she's made a mental list, and dates, of all the smuggling.

When you look closely at what's underlying a major difference between men and women, it appears that women tend to nurture what they conquer, whereas men tend to see what they conquer as a simple obeying "object" soon not worth their attention anymore - unless they have the "MOST" of them, the "BEST" of them, the "FASTEST" of them, the "BIGGEST" of them. It's not always true but it's there. So when comparing knives and cars to shoes and bags, men are driven into their hobby as to show superiority, whereas women are driven into their hobby as to show discernment, taste, and awareness of tendencies. The next pair of shoes or the next bag is not "SUPERIOR", it's nurturing the form that they've already conquered.

If women were exactly like men, then as soon as they would give birth, MOST of them wouldn't care about the baby anymore - giving birth would be the summit conquered, and she'd move onto something else to conquer.

If men were exactly like women, then they'd buy 100 knives because one or another would look prettier and more adapted alongside cut celeries, mushrooms, or radishes.

Which is NOT saying reciprocation never happens. It is just saying that the underlying tendency is what it is, and therefore the distribution is what it is.
I think there's a lot of pretty flawed assumptions here. What makes you think all women would naturally prefer short santoku knives... or men only care about knives to compensate for small peepee? I think you're really doing an injustice to the forum and its members the way you describe them. There's many people here who do prefer longer knives (for very valid reasons) but I think the '240mm or sissies' is really just in your head.
Admittedly I used to have similar misconceptions about 270s... until I actually tried them.

I'm sorry but this reads a lot like some feminist extremist straw man argument. Especially when the majority of your 'gender descriptions', are not only way too generalizing, but also sorrily outdated.
Has it been your experience that men's hobbies and women's hobbies align a lot? It has not been mine. My wife has her own hobbies. She finds that mostly other women do those hobbies. My hobbies, I find other men doing them.

Seems OK to me. If that's mostly how it is, I don't see the point in pushing back on it. People enjoy what they enjoy, and that's fine.
That's always an underlying question that's really hard to answer. 'What would be the potential population of women interested enough in the hobby to hang around here'... are we getting close to that number or for whatever reason vastly 'underperforming'?
I'm sure forums related to horses, indoor plants and crafts also have a very skewed predominantly female population, but I don't think that's necessarily because they have an environment hostile to men.
Back in my climbing days it always struck me that the climbing community had an overrepresentation of gay women and an underrepresentation of men. But was that really indicative of a problem requiring solving?
 
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I cook for fun and pleasure. She wouldn’t tolerate the high maintenance carbon steel blades. The fancy cast iron cook wear, spun steel and my other goodies. She basically wants something she can use and toss in the dishwasher.
Preference for easier to maintain / stainless and an interest in knives (or pans for that matter) do not exclude eachother.
 
I was wondering this just the other day. I always seem to pick hobbies that lead to me being celibate!


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This has certainly been a matter of discussion and debate in the past. Especially when it surrounds Chelsea Miller . I remember a particularly heated discussion last year(?) in the ugly knife thread(?). I think one of the members that was part of that debate has since deleted their account. Maybe for unrelated reasons
 
Now this is interesting. have you considered topless marketing while swinging a hammer?
Don't forget to add glistening sweat to the chest area, dark moody lighting and slow-mo shots with sparks!
 


What I do think might be at play (although I'm reluctant to 'generalize across whole genders') is that it seems like males have a higher tendency to acquire a gearfetish over a hobby. So for example many people here not only followed up their cooking hobby with a knife collection, but also a pan collection. You see similar situations in woodworking and other hobbies. Interesting data points certainly do exist but I'd be cautious to draw any far reaching conclusions from it, especially when many gender norms have slowly been shifting anyway.

This is what I tried to express yesterday, but you did a better job of it. I know I geek heavily on the equipment.

Pans! I got lucky and bought some very nice ones (omelet pan, lg saucepan, dutch oven) in heavy copper (3.5mm) from a defunct Canadian firm (Coventry Copper) over forty years ago while doing undergrad in Baltimore. I have since acquired a coupla other nice but not niche pieces, and feel like my cookware selection is up to any job I care to tackle. Knives, now … they squeeze my nerd gland hard.
 
If you take yourself seriously as a chef, then you probably love working with knives. They go hand-in-hand. We’re hosting a couple of well known chefs for a dinner party next month (one man, one woman), and as nervous as I am, I’m really excited to show them my knife collection.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’ve never seen shittier knives than when I worked in a pro kitchen (I mean I have, but the guys I worked with were using a Victorinox tomato knife or a Victorinox scalloped pastry knife for 90% of tasks).

Really nicely and politely?
You were SO close!

Back in my climbing days it always struck me that the climbing community had an overrepresentation of gay women and an underrepresentation of men. But was that really indicative of a problem requiring solving?
These days I feel like I’m the only one there who’s not on a first date… It’s insufferable!
 
I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’ve never seen shittier knives than when I worked in a pro kitchen (I mean I have, but the guys I worked with were using a Victorinox tomato knife or a Victorinox scalloped pastry knife for 90% of tasks)
Exactly my 25+ years experience too, I was talking to an older chef last week and he said he's not into knives, "all ya need is a Vic chef knife".
 
Exactly my 25+ years experience too, I was talking to an older chef last week and he said he's not into knives, "all ya need is a Vic chef knife".
Same.

All you need to do is watch a 15 second clip of Gordon Ramsay using a steel to understand how much knowledge and appreciation most chefs have for their knives.

Best case scenario they sunk cost themselves into talking up whatever flashy Shun they got suckered into buying. Most just want something sharp.
 
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