"You've been up for 15 minutes and you haven't made me a sandwich?" one woman's boyfriend would say to her every morning.
It's the kind of inane, vacuous statement that makes feminists recoil and some ill-advised men wonder if they could get away by saying the same to their significant others.
But sandwiches, to this particular writer's Alexander Skarsgard look-a-like boyfriend, are comparable to "kisses or hugs," she writes. "Or sex."
In a piece published Tuesday evening by the New York Post, the figure behind the popular blog, "300 Sandwiches," reveals not only her identity but the story behind why she decided to start a site centered on sandwiches.
After all, who doesn't enjoy a good sammie?
Enter Stephanie Smith: A stunning, successful, 30-something reporter for the Post's gossip column, Page Six, who shared in a confessional piece aptly titled, "I'm 124 sandwiches away from an engagement ring," that she had purchased the domain 300sandwiches.com - carefully documenting each crafted sandwich while offering tidbits on her life and relationship – as a ploy to get engaged.
"Maybe I needed to show him I could cook to prove that I am wife material," she contemplates. "Was our happily ever after as simple as making him a few sandwiches?"
"Three sandwiches a week, times four weeks a month, times 12 months a year, meant I wouldn't be done until I was deep into my 30s," she shares with great mathematical aptitude. "How would I finish 300 sandwiches in time for us to get engaged, married and have babies before I exited my childbearing years?"
Which is why you should congratulate her: She's hit the halfway mark already, with 176 sandwiches down, 124 more to go. As she's rapidly dwindled on standard sandwich options, Smith's graduated from the typical turkey, bacon, avocado combination, testing out sophisticated alternatives like "lobster roll sliders" and "shrimp Bahn Mi." Admittedly, we've stumbled upon her blog through Pinterest and utilized her recipes for our own personal enjoyment.
Though we see the glaring flaws in Smith's story, we would like to highlight her unwavering dedication to this hefty endeavor. "Even after covering movie premieres or concerts for Page Six, I found myself stumbling into the kitchen to make Eric a sandwich while I still had on my high heels and party dress," she says.
And despite the backlash she's receiving over this piece, Smith seems happy with her present situation: "No matter what's on the menu, [charming boyfriend] Eric smiles and says thank you," she writes in conclusion. "He's just happy I cook for him at all."
The Internet, however, is not responding to Smith's piece kindly.
Writes Slates's XX blog:
In the face of all this romantic disruption, some lovers are frantically constructing new frameworks—diamond-fishing sandwich blogs, for example—in a desperate attempt to reduce our strange and wonderful human experiences into another rote mechanical exercise. Stop. Love each other. Eat sandwiches. Don't trade either of them for anything.
The story is like something out of a fairytale, one of those weird old German ones you can't read to kids, where an peasant girl's stepmother forces her to make 300 sandwiches for the Devil, and then a series of horrible things happen to the girl, and at the end of the story she freezes to death.
Now, before you get all upset about a modern woman living the punch line of a sexist joke, remember that Stephanie still has 124 sandwiches to go. She could still be radicalized, somewhere around sandwich 172. And then when she gets to sandwich 297, she reveals that she has been poisoning him, slowly and steadily, all this time
As for her boyfriend's reaction to the daily supply of sandwiches, he has this to share with women everywhere: "You women read all these magazines to get advice on how to keep a man, and it's so easy," he says. "We're not complex. Just do something nice for us. Like make a sandwich."
Right.