This article is so bad it may have been written by a 14 year old. Open floor plans are a thing because cooking is now a communal activity and not something servants and housewives do in the back closet of the house. A lot of parties are now hosted out of the kitchen it just makes sense.
cooking is still done by women twice as much as by men Average hours per day: Food preparation and cleanup:
Average percent engaged in the activity per day: men 0.39 women 0.79 men 48.3 women 70.3
Dude you have no idea how bad it used to be. And again - "ugly open plan architecture" is a Toll Brothers/Quadrant/Centex/Lennar thing, and they all got their start in the '80s. Compare Hepburn/Bogart in Sabrina to Ford/Griffith in Working Girl for a Zeitgeist taste. This wasn't a "ha ha we'll take away that poor woman's last refuge - the KITCHIN!" (twists moustache) issue. It's a shitty design for shitty people issue.
My wife's friend gave her a book about babies when she was pregnant for the first time. It had a checklist of things to bring to the hospital, annoying which, nestled between ,"pajamas" and "toothbrush" was "sandwiches for father". It was a new edition of an old book, so I guess they missed that update.
This discussion is relevant to my interests. Americans did a ruthlessly efficient job of purging our culture of traditions. We're nomads, we're on stolen land, we're a nation of immigrants where homogeneity is required. The closest thing we have to a universal coming-of-age ceremony is the driver's license and those are becoming less and less universal. Americans also did a ruthlessly efficient job of destroying birth practices. For nearly all of history, birthing has been women doing women stuff while men stay the hell out of the way but after WWI it became clear that a hospital bumped your survival rate from 80% to 95% or so which turned a rite of passage into a surgical intervention and surgery simply isn't a part of our cultural fabric. There's been backlash against this because every woman knows that "having a baby" is different from "having your tonsils out" no matter how hard hospitals want it otherwise. Meanwhile men have a tradition of being manly and celebrating their vitality which you totally don't get to do anymore. I've managed to duck out of bachelor parties by saying "bachelor parties are lame unless there's strippers and coke" or "a good bachelor party is one that you are embarrassed to participate in" and baby showers by saying "baby showers are for women and any man who disagrees is a simp." This attitude is prevalent which is why we now have this blight of "gender reveal" parties involving tannerite and forest fires but the basic problem is - I want a ritual - I have three girlfriends and my husband - and my family lives 300 miles away - what do. Take it from the guy who owns a birth center: what you do is drag your hubby along to all sorts of shit he has no business and less interest in participating in. American birth is basically "we're going to talk to the woman, do everything with the woman, assume total primacy of the woman and also assume she's dragging her chump husband/boyfriend/partner/whatever along with." I can attest that the non-bearing partner in a lesbian relationship is every bit the third wheel conventional husbands are because there's simply no fucking room for them in the process. But fuckin' hell she'll be there because we aren't sexist dinosaurs passing around cigars anymore, Brenda. So pretty much every guide to pregnancy you will find includes the perpetual, tired, tongue-in-cheek trope of "your husband is there to be in the way, be confused, be worried and be clueless yet we love them so much don't we girls lol." We literally wrote a 190pp guide to get around this bullshit. You have a baby with us you get a mutherfucking 1.5" binder full of shit we wrote. Because "what to expect when you're expecting" is ridiculously terrible and in a conventional American childbearing relationship you will end up with at least two copies.