Examples of Stay in the Kitchen in anime and manga.
- Appare-Ranman!: David, the official driver of the team Xiaoleng works for, clearly believes she has no place on the racetrack and believes she's only good as maintenance or as a housewife. The team's pit crew also initially have the same view until they actually see her driving ability in action.
- Berserk: Casca, being a female knight in Medieval European society, occasionally gets this treatment, especially from Adon, the leader of Tudor's Blue Whale Knights. Every time he and Casca fought, he would berate her for being a woman and threaten to have his men have their way with her (if he didn't take her first). Eventually, he gets killed by Casca. Guts also gives a speech to this effect to her once. At the time, she was having her period which got her to faint from exhaustion and got both of them to fall off a cliff as he tried to rescue her. Right after, he berates her by saying that a woman has nothing to do in war since it only took her PMS-ing to become incapacitated and that women's weaker and less enduring body was unsuitable for warfare. Casca being who she is, it doesn't work. Their ensuing Back-to-Back Badasses moment further proves him wrong and gets him to view her as a potential lover. However, among the Band of the Hawk, this trope is nowhere to be seen: Casca is the second-in-command of the entire mercenary group, and the men of the Band have nothing but respect for her both as a fighter and as a leader.
- Bleach: Orihime falls into this on occasion. Despite having immense Reality Warper powers, everybody except for Rukia and Chad is convinced that she should stay out of fights because she's not suited for battle. Which is true on one hand as she has a naturally gentle disposition and hates hurting even her enemies, but on the other hand, she's very good at defense when properly motivated (the strength of her powers depend on her willpower and state of mind). However, the one time she decided to interfere in a fight and saved Ichigo's life, Ichigo told her "Thank you, but never do this again." but it was to have a 1-on-1 fight with Ulquiorra. Future attempts at taking a level in badass don't really amount to much, as she's immediately sidelined before being able to do anything beyond healing. However, she's taken more steps as being Ichigo's shield from Uryu's arrows and protect him at times, even marching up with him to get to Yhwach. In fact, Ichigo when about to finally fight Yhwach tells Orihime he's counting on her to protect him.
- Brave Series, full stop. While the guys have awesome adventures with their Humongous Mecha (who are also all men), girls are either The Heart or their mother. The only time we had a female Brave was in GaoGaiGar FINAL, which was an OVA for an older crowd.
- FBI agent Raye Penber chides his fiancee (who used to be an agent as well) for getting too interested in his case in Death Note. She had left her job prior to the series, as the couple had apparently decided she should become a housewife after their marriage... but she was also clearly the better agent of the two and Penber would soon regret not listening to her.
- To say the least. In a book that detailed a previous case she was involved in, she was so good she impressed L. Which makes her couple chapter appearance all the more annoying.
- This is thankfully removed in the live-action movie adaptation, where Naomi warns him to be careful and not be reckless, and he merely playfully teases her about sounding hypocritical, as she used to go on dangerous missions with L a lot, but otherwise he doesn't seem to object to her interest in the case. Word of God is that she was Too Cool to Live- that she was "an obstacle that Light couldn't overcome at that time"- and was therefore grief-stricken with absolutely no luck.
- Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' has a scene where Krillin tells his wife Android 18 to look after their daughter while he helps battle Freeza's invasion, in spite of the fact that 18 is far stronger (which she explicitly points out). However, this seems to be less about sexism and more Krillin viewing it as Something He's Got to Do Himself, since Freeza killed him on Namek. Later on in Dragon Ball Super he has absolutely no problem with 18 fighting, and the pair even become a Battle Couple during the Tournament of Power.
- Fist of the North Star:
- One off-putting moment comes in a conversation between Rei and Mamiya. Rei orders Mamiya to stay out of battle, as that isn't a woman's purpose. Her response is that she's gone through enough trouble that she isn't a woman anymore. The counterargument from Rei? He shreds her clothes, and when she covers herself in shock, he asks why she's doing that if she isn't a woman. Kenshiro assures Mamiya that Rei was being Cruel to Be Kind because he projected the massacre of his family and the kidnapping of his sister during her marriage onto the recent murder of the orphaned Mamiya's little brother. Rei actually doesn't refuse Mamiya's support against Kiba Daioh's forces any further, but the story only depicts her as a liability to the point Rei eventually sacrifices his life to ensure her safety. His final words to her are that she should be able to live and seek happiness "as a woman", and then she effectively drops out of the story.
- When the scene was adapted for the first Hokuto Musou/Ken's Rage video game, it is instead Toki who assures Mamiya that Rei wasn't being sexist, but wanted to keep her safe out of love — with narration from Rei more clearly confirming this. What makes this notable is the original writer was in charge of what got included in the Pragmatic Adaptation of the story.
- After Rei's sister Airi is found and rescued, Raoh's forces attempt to capture her as a hostage against him during their siege of Mamiya's village. She appears shooting bandits down with a crossbow, telling Rei to not worry about her anymore. Surprised at how much she has grown, Rei proudly declares she can live and die as she chooses and all the fearful male villagers become inspired to fight back as well. Rei is unable to say the same about Mamiya just later on, though, and it's understandable — she's pointing a crossbow at Raoh, a callous warlord who can and will reflect the bolt right into her face. She still takes the shot in a futile show of defiance, much to the incapacitated Rei's horror, but is saved by Kenshiro.
- Played a bit in Fullmetal Alchemist when, by the start of the last arc, Edward tells Winry to stay at home and cook a pie for him once he is back. Then again, Winry can't fight like Riza, Olivier, Izumi, or Lanfan, meaning that she would only be in danger if she decided to help him like she asked many times. He doesn't act the same way with the other mentioned women, because he knows theyŕe fully capable of defending themselves.
- The Genius Prince's Guide to Raising a Nation Out of Debt (Hey, How About Treason?): Despite the Earthworld Empire being accepting of all ethnicities, women still face discrimination in politics. This is deconstructed because the emperor didn't name an heir among his incompetent sons or his competent daughter, making the empire's instability worse after his death.
- Not a straight example, as it was more "let's all kill Ban!" than "life-threatening fight," but Get Backers still has a funny example:
- Gundam:
- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing has Wufei who, thanks to the combination of a strict, traditional Chinese upbringing and a Freudian Excuse (his wife got killed in battle), is dismissive of female soldiers. This tends to get exaggerated in the fandom, and he does grow out of it relatively early on.
- Yazan and his comments of not liking to see women on the battlefield for some unknown reason. This gets REALLY exaggerated in EU non-canon non-bandai games like Gundam Musou or SRW. All his in-battle quotes vs female pilots involve referring to them as schoolmarms, nurses, homemakers, or other such female-centric professions. Even against the heavy hitters like Haman, Puru Two, Roux, and Lunamaria, once beaten he derisively dismisses them and will occasionally quote the trope title at them. No Freudian Excuse though, he's just a hilariously over-the-top chauvinistic bully. Ah, if only Yazan could be in the same SRW as Gauron and Gates.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam AGE, only one Federation pilot was a female, unfortunately, she was also the only female pilot to survive the series.
- In Hetalia: Axis Powers, Austria makes a brief attempt to forbid Hungary from fighting off the Prussian army. He quickly lets her do what she wants when he sees how disturbingly determined she is to get Prussia's blood. In the anime, the dub of that episode makes a lot of jokes about Maria Theressa being queen and Prussia's belief that "chicks couldn't lead". There's an interesting inversion in a flashback of when Hungary realizes she's a woman. She comes to the conclusion that she should give up fighting and be content as Austria's maid, while Prussia tries to encourage her to stop wearing dresses and go hunting with him.
- In I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up, the main character, Machi Morimoto, overhears her male boss talking about her with another man. While Machi's boss is impressed with her work, the other man proposes that her work instead be given to a man, since he believes that even if the man isn't as good, he won't end up quitting to get married and have children. Machi isn't all that put out since she fully admits that she's only working to support herself, but as a result of her "marriage" with Hana, she gradually becomes assertive enough to take on more work.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency: Played Straight, albeit briefly, when Joseph offers to fight Kars in Lisa Lisa's place on the basis that she, despite being a skilled Hamon User and Joseph's teacher, is still a woman. After Lisa Lisa calmly calls him out on it, Joseph backs down and lets the fight continue.note Lisa Lisa: I haven't lived my life so that a teenage brute has to stand up for me.
- Fumio's boss tells Kenta that he personally thinks mothers should stay at home in the first volume of Karin.
- Subverted with Nanami from Katanagatari. Her father refused to teach her Kyotoryuu and decided to make Shichika the next head of the Yasuri clan — not because she was a woman, and not because she was Delicate and Sickly, but because she was too powerful for him to properly train. Not that it mattered - she mastered Kyotoryuu anyway by simply watching her father train her brother.
- Martian Successor Nadesico:
- The Jovian colonists have an all-male military, and while few of their women are shown it's heavily implied they follow this trope. The reason is that they based their society around Gekiganger 3, an old-school anime where the only major female character was The Heart.
- In what could be considered a hilarious inversion of this trope, male lead Akito really, really wants to stay in the kitchen himself. And for his love interests to stay out of it.
- Mazinger Z:
- In the original TV series, Kouji Kabuto makes such comments on a semi-regular basis, mostly as (rather bad) jokes. Too bad for him that his girlfriend Sayaka is a hot-tempered Tsundere who won't have any of that, so she usually bitches him out or downright beats the shit out of him. And thankfully, it's taken out of newer continuities. The Irony of it is he is a pretty good cook and he is quite proud of it.
- Great Mazinger: During Venus A's first battle he got in the way of Action Girl Jun Hono several times. In one of them, he stated, "Girls must not fight". The ironic -and frustrating- part is he intervened right when Jun was gaining the upper hand, and because of him, she was unable to defeat the Warrior Beast.
- UFO Robo Grendizer: In the Gosaku Ota manga, when Kouji flew to make First Contact with the Vegans, Dr. Umon, Daisuke, and Hikaru were watching it through a screen in the Laboratory. When the saucers tried to shoot Kouji down, Daisuke started yelling in pain. Hikaru offered to carry him to a bed, but Dr. Umon screamed: “You stay out of this, woman!”. In his defence, he was –understandably, given the circumstances- nervous and stressed, and he did not want her to discover Daisuke's secret, so maybe he would not say that in normal situations, but still… At least he never said anything like that in the Go Nagai manga and the anime series.
- In the OVA Mega Man: Upon a Star, Roll tries to help but proves incompetent. Mega Man is only able to convince her to stop "helping" when she gets their only time machine destroyed. Interestingly, her gender isn't invoked - it's largely her lack of experience and her non-combat design. In a later episode, though, it is invoked when she tries to use powered armor to help out.
- In Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, flashbacks show that Jiguro initially refused to train Balsa in because he thought women didn't have the muscles to fight. However, after he saw her reenact one of his battles for an audience, he changed his mind.
- The protagonist of Nagasarete Airantou, Ikuto, ends up cast away on an inescapable paradise island inhabited only by women. He refuses to adapt to circumstance and insists that it's the man's job to protect the women from the island's dangers, despite being significantly outnumbered and less strong, competent, and knowledgeable about the island than anyone else. As a result, he's constantly putting his own life in danger and consequently jeopardizing the colony's long-term survival prospects. Amusingly, he constantly gets the shit beaten out of him for this attitude. He can't seem to get over it, though, despite repeatedly being thrown all the way across the island because he took a blow for a girl.
- Shikamaru Nara of Naruto displays these tendencies at the beginning of the series, only bothering to fight in the final round of the Chuunin exams against Temari because Naruto shoved him into the arena with an encouraging slap to the back, and ends up forfeiting the match because he knows he's going to lose anyway and didn't want to bother with trying anymore. Temari later has to rescue him from yet another girl. He drops the attitude when Shippuden starts and seems to respect women more now. The implication is that he's actually afraid of women because of his parents. Ironically this has led to the fandom belief he will marry a girl like his mother. He ends up with Temari.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
- Early on Negi Springfield sort of had this attitude toward his students, although it's less sexism and more the fact that he believes it's his fault that they're in dangerous situations to begin with, which makes it his responsibility to protect them.
- His father Nagi, however, seemingly played this straight. Princess Arika refused, and he took her refusal on stride... and they both went to annihilate an enemy base.Eishun: Is this what you call a night out?!!
- No Longer Allowed in Another World: King Siberian believes that his son should toughen up so that he could become king of Grün while his daughter — who is far more athletic and willing to learn martial arts — should act more like a princess. This behavior became even more strict and his son and wife died in a tragedy.
- One Piece: In Zoro's backstory, Kuina, the daughter of the head of the dojo, was vastly superior to Zoro, who was skilled enough to fight adults even back then, and seemed set to inherit the dojo. However, her father wouldn't allow it, saying that women couldn't be as strong as men. Zoro, infuriated by the idea that he'd only surpass Kuina just because she got weaker, made her promise that one of them would become the world's best swordsman. After Kuina died, leaving Zoro to fulfill their promise, Kuina's father regretted his attitude, suggesting in the anime that Kuina might have started to overcome her own limitations.
- Osu! Karate Club:
- Although Takagi is annoyed to have a girl like Momochiyo participating in his Karate Club, he encourages her to fight a group of female delinquents by teaching how to ambush them and exploit their weaknesses. He firmly refuses to let girls into the gangs under his leadership, though. When Megumi is brutally raped and murdered for associating with Takagi, it is revealed it's the second time such a thing has happened and that it is the reason why he keeps girls at arm's length.
- Takagi is completely unable to take a group of masked ninjas seriously when he realizes they are all female. He tries ignoring them, and when that fails he tosses a few steel beams around them until they soil themselves out of fear. The protagonist quips, in the most well-meaning way he can manage, that "Men should live like men and women should live like women. Leave the fighting to the men..." The narrative also stops presenting the Creeping Shadows as a credible threat from then on, with them failing to help Takagi against other antagonists and having to be rescued by Jinrai, who happens to tell them the same thing as Takagi. Then the girls become mundane housewives in the epilogue.Takagi: Women are fragile beings... No matter how evil they are, it's a man's duty to protect women.
- Sayuri is the only female gang leader in the Great Tokyo Alliance and rules through fear and cruelty until even her right-hand man can't stand her anymore and bitterly decks her right on the face. The whole time, Takagi remarks she's wasting her life to the delinquent gang life and contemplates how it "Must be real tragic being a woman..."
- Invoked and justified in Ouran High School Host Club. During the infamous Merit Scene, Kyouya invokes this on Haruhi, mostly because she continuously made it a point to say that her sex shouldn't matter for anything, even for fighting. After pulling Haruhi under him with just one hand and standing half-naked over her, Kyouya underlines that, if her pathetic attempt at warding off much stronger and taller male bullies wasn't proof enough, acting as if her sex shouldn't matter is not only ridiculously naïve but also dangerous for a girl of her small frame and delicate build. However, Kyouya had no intention of molesting Haruhi and she knows it. He just wanted to demonstrate the fact that a/ she's a woman and b/ she's untrained and fragile and thus shouldn't be trying to brawl with men who are obviously much stronger than her.
- Crops up quite a lot in Princess Knight (which makes sense, as the series was made in The '50s and thus suffers from Values Dissonance). One notable example would be when someone must travel to the realm of Venus to get a potion to bring Sapphire back to life. Sapphire's mother instantly volunteers only for Prince Franze to say, not unkindly, that she should stay in the castle and he ought to go because men were more naturally suited for adventuring. There are two inversions. No one seems to mind that lady knight Fiebe is participating in tournaments and fighting the king's soldiers (granted her sole reason for doing this is to get a strong husband to settle down with). Also, throughout the series, all the heroes decry the law stating that women couldn't rule as being misogynistic and outdated. Eventually even the immature Plastic grows a pair and gets the parliament to unanimously agree to abolish that law, before giving Sapphire the crown and telling her she deserves to rule no matter what her gender.
- Ranma ½'s eponymous character has this attitude towards his fiancee Akane, but only towards Akane —he has no problem with more skilled/more powerful Action Girls like Shampoo or Ukyou joining him on dangerous missions or training trips. Whether this is because he feels she would just get in his way (as he claims, vociferously) or because her relatively lower abilities (compared to the rest of the cast) make him sincerely worried about her is up for debate.
- The manga and, more frequently, the anime, plays down this trope sometimes, leaving Ranma frustrated enough with Akane to try and leave her to her own devices against the current threat until his worry eventually makes him eat his words and come back to save her.
- Surprisingly, Reborn! (2004)'s portrayal of women is quite often this (especially weird considering that the series' creator is a woman, and its target audience has changed to become women).
- Kyoko, Haru, and I-Pin are shown to mainly just stay in the kitchen cooking and cleaning and doing the laundry for the men while the men go off to train and fight. And just when they get sick and tired of being lied to, and refuse to stay in the kitchen until the men at least tell them where they are, they get convinced by Bianchi and start feeling guilty that the men are completely incapable of taking care of their own health and food needs, and eventually reach the conclusion that they'll give up and go back to the kitchen (and if it weren't for Tsuna deciding to tell them anyways, they would've just continued on the same way as always).
- Tsuna's mom who is rarely seen outside of the kitchen. Chrome too doesn't seem to be very strong despite being a guardian...Arguably, since the primary fanbase is women, they all want to see the cute boys act slashy with each other rather than the girls.
- A variant is done in Red River (1995), where Ilbani tells Princess Alexandra that, Yuri aside, it wasn't proper for a noblewoman to go into battle. Given that he doesn't seem bothered by Yuri's three maids helping out with the fighting, apparently that philosophy doesn't necessarily extend to non-nobility.
- Rune Soldier Louie touches upon this twice:
- This is self-imposed by the female mages of Ophun. When Jeanie and her friends come to Ophun in hopes of finding one to add to their travelling party, Ila and Louie explain that female mages in their town don't have the stomach for adventure and prefer to lock themselves away with their studies. Which is why Ila suggested they take Louie instead.
- Near the end of the 12th episode, Jeanie finally has it out with Louie for thinking he came back for her because she was a woman. Which struck a nerve since it reminded her of the time when her former comrade, Hector, sacrificed himself by staying behind so she wouldn't have to die. However, Farbe sets the record straight by explaining Hector had done it because he's secretly been in love with her. Not because she was a woman; thus, subverting the trope.
- In Sailor Moon, Jadeite (in the original Japanese version and the 2014 Viz Media English dub) makes a sexist remark directed at Sailors Moon, Mercury, and Mars, that girls are useless and can only run, scream, and cry, triggering their Berserk Button. They make a rather anvilicious speech about showing him what women can do and proceed to run him over with several airplanes that he had originally sent after them. He survives, though afterward Queen Beryl freezes him to death in a crystal for failing yet again to dispatch the trio.
- Simplar, in the s-CRY-ed manga Akira Mijyou leader of La Résistance gets something the same with her lover Hannish Lightning, despite the fact we have seen her take down dozens of HOLY solders and save the main character. Lightning then gets his ass kicked by a woman and has to be saved by Mijyou.
- In Sengoku Komachi Kurou Tan, Shizuko faces some early problems as the men in the village she is appointed to lead initially object to the idea of following a girl's orders, but quickly change their tune when her methods bear fruit. Some of Nobunaga's vassals also express their displeasure with her (whether it's making use of her ideas or bringing her to the battlefield) until Nobunaga gets angry with them over the matter.
- In The Seven Deadly Sins, in Jericho's backstory, her brother Gustaf told her to give up on her dreams of becoming a Holy Knight because she was a woman. Determined to prove him wrong, she succeeded in becoming a Holy Knight. Later, it's revealed that Gustaf truly cared about her and only said that because he was worried she would one day be killed.
- Taken to nightmarish extremes in Shitsurakuen, in which the female students are "owned and protected" by the male students as part of the Exaclan game system as female students were unable to use the gloves required to duel. As a result, they have no rights whatsoever and are utterly miserable and downtrodden as a result. Unfortunately it is anything but a Power Fantasy for most male students who duel as it eats away at their moral conscience at this unfair relationship.
- In the Sorcerer Hunters manga, Gateau takes this stance with his younger sister, Eclair, telling her that girls are cuter when they're being protected; this is more than a little jarring, considering that Eclair is (and has always been) the more talented and stronger of the two. On some occasions, she tries to accompany the team on missions, but Gateau refuses to allow it every time, even going as far as slapping her to make his point. Nobody comments on this, even though every woman in the manga is an Action Girl (with the possible exception of Salad). His attitude would be justified by the fact that she was kidnapped by the series' main villain when they were younger, but the reason he kidnapped her and left him to die was because she was the stronger sibling and he wanted her to fight for his cause. Which she later did, willingly. On top of that, he had this attitude long before she ever went missing; a flashback shows him bringing her home after she beat the crap out of a guy who called her weak. He tells her she went too far and that if she doesn't act more feminine, no one will want to marry her. When she says it's too much trouble to depend on someone else and that she wants to be strong to protect her loved ones, he laughs at her.
- Soul Eater: Following his Face–Heel Turn and coming out of nowhere in a series with no shortage of prominent and very capable female characters, Justin tells Marie that although they're both Death Scythes hers is only "a woman's power" and therefore weaker. She quickly proves him wrong on that assumption by punching him into the air. Stein reasons that she might need his assistance on the basis that, unlike Marie, Justin became a Death Scythe without a meister but doesn't mention her sex at all.
- In Street Fighter II: The Manga Politically Incorrect Villain Vega says this nearly word-for-word when fighting Action Girl Chun-Li.
- In Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, Lag Seeing is initially unwilling to have Niche as his dingo partner, claiming that it's too dangerous for a girl her age, even if 1) having a dingo is necessary to take the exam and Lag has no alternatives in sight, 2) she fights well against the armor bugs, 3) he's only 12 himself while she is really two hundred years old and only looks like a child because she didn't experience the tremor of emotion that her sister did. He drops the attitude at the end of the arc in which he first expresses it, after recognizing that he couldn't have managed without her help.
- Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- by Syaoran of all people. Chunyan is left behind with Sakura, despite both having extremely powerful latent magic in a land where the three heroes have virtually none. Justified as, despite having great magical power, the girls have no idea how to use it: Chunyan's mother died before she finishes her training, and Sakura is kind of out of it as she has only retrieved two feathers at this time. Kurogane puts it best when he says, "You never know when she's rowing the boat or asleep at the oar." The boys, on the other hand, are all veterans in physical combat.
- In a filler arc, where the group returns to Chunyan's country, an Amazon Brigade has started up.
- Gender flipped in the Yozakura Quartet manga. As Hime and Kyousuke are trying to convince Akina to stay out of the fight, Hime tells Akina to stay in the kitchen, saying cooking and cleaning are more like him.
- It's rare but not unheard of for female duelists in the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise to get this treatment. For example, when Aki decides to become a Riding Duelist in Yu Gi Oh 5Ds, her motorcycle class includes a group of guys telling her she should be playing with dolls.
