slutburger

I meant to write a post about Padma Lakshmi's now-infamous "slutburger" ad for Hardee's/Carl's Jr. a while back, but somehow the chance to do so when it was still relevant slipped by me. So, I'm gonna do it now instead, when I haven't seen it on the air in weeks and no one cares. Awesome.


Still, here she is:



Anyone besides me want to help her lick barbecue sauce off her ankle now?

I consider my post-ad-watching desire to put my tongue in Padma's burger-filled mouth to be well within the realm of normality. However, it seems plenty of folks would rather call her a sell-out and accuse her of all manner of sexual indiscretion, rather than kiss her. And this, I both do not understand and find rather grotesque.

A few weeks ago, my mom sent me this little blurb about it from my hometown paper. It struck me as one of the most out-of-touch things I've encountered in a bit. First of all, it's author claims the slutburger ad is "the sort of thing you'd expect from a Paris Hilton" but not a "classy beauty" like Padma. Because only girls with porn vids running rampant through the corridors of the internet would dare flash cleavage while eating a burger, right? Certainly no one with goods enough to nab a preeminent novelist the likes of Rushdie would do that, right? Well, why the hell not?!

The blurb from The Tennessean's food blog wants to act like it's all indignant that this woman so often associated with schmancy food would dare lower herself to hawk fast food, but this surface argument that it's author is attempting to make holds absolutely no water. For Exhibit A to that effect, I bring you this behind-the-scenes video in which Padma explains her own personal nostalgia for shitty fast food burgers. And frankly, the idea that Padma Lakshmi, gosling-like goddess of the haute cuisine scene, has a big heart-on for a burger just makes perfect sense to me. I mean, I love labor-intensive, esoteric food as much as the next girl, but really? If you offered me a guacamole cheddar burger from Bobbi's Dairy Dip, a craphole ice-cream stand over on Charlotte in Nashville, I'd be on it so fast you'd think it was made of fuck-me shoes. Even the most committed gourmands among us still get all woody over the occasional junk food indulgence. It's not like that stuff doesn't taste good, even when we've gone to the trouble of refining our palates.

No, the problem with Padma's ad is not that she's eating a fast food burger rather than braised pork cheek on a bed of salsify and Jerusalem artichokes. It's that, as the food blogger says, she has a classy image and yet, in lending her fair countenance to Hardee's/Carls Jr., she's joined the ranks of other sluterific pop-culture-friendly ho-bags like poor Paris. Now, I've defended Paris before. I actually love that carwash fetish-girl burger ad. I think her vampy camera mugging almost makes up for her role as an unenthusiastic cunnilingus receiver in the aforementioned titty flick. She's sexy, she's clearly having fun with her well-heeled harlot image and she owns that ad. So the idea that it would be an insult to Padma to compare her to Paris is, well, insulting to Padma.

In reality, the import behind the rhetoric in that little newspaper post is the underlying assumption is that "classiness" and overt sexuality are incompatible. And to that, I ask, why can't Padma lick sauce from her fingertips and let us marvel at her stellar pecan-colored tits in that push-up bra and not still be a perfectly respectable food snob and ex-wife of a literary supernova? To use the term "tramp" (and mean it derogatorily) to describe Padma just reeks of the kind of advocacy for the compartmentalization of female sexuality that does no sexually comfortable woman any good at all.

Now, this is not to say that other Carl's Jr./Hardee's ads don't play on some problematic traditionally gendered behavioral stereotypes in which dudes become dim-witted, narcissistic cavemen and women become nagging harpies (although hot ones). But no one of either gender fares very well in those ads, and undoubtedly, only dumbasses who send email forwards like this one would think they're funny anyway. See Sarah Haskins' video commentary to that effect below. Haskins makes a worthy point regarding advertisers thinking they're clever in targeting the basest of aspects of culturally prescribed "manliness" and even goes on to demonstrate how Paris has talents for multitasking that exceed the norm:



However, Padma's ad isn't crass or puerile at all. It is, in fact, dreamy and nostalgic. And I continue to feel that her conflating of her sexual charisma with her foodie street cred seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Doing so is, most certainly, in keeping with her career trajectory thus far. I mean, it's not like she got hired on as the host of Top Chef because of her food knowledge. She got hired on because she knows food and because she's startlingly beautiful. (Some among us might argue that Tom Colicchio's smirking blue eyes don't hurt the show much either.) Even long before Top Chef, she put out this book. And if that cover doesn't draw a visual analogy between her body and all the luscious, juicy fruits of the world, I don't know what does.

It's hardly new news that food is sexy. There's also nothing revelatory about the idea that Padma Lakshmi is incredibly genetically blessed. So, saying she can't have her burger and make you want to fuck her too doesn't do much besides advocate the annoying cultural directive that women should lock their libidos in the bedroom and pretend they aren't all fuck-happy in their waking lives. I can't speak for Padma, but I do know that kind of compartmentalization is exhausting for me. And it also smacks of the kind of retrogressive restrictions on the behavior of women that, well, get us nowhere in terms of claiming our sexual personae as our own.

...Which is all just to say, if anyone wants to make me a guacamole cheddar burger with a good, black, crusty layer of carcinogenic char, I'll do my best Padma for you, all sexy-like.

Dispatches from the Dating Trenches: the online dating profile I'd write if I had any balls at all (and wanted to attract, well, actually, no one)

Let's start here:

• Do not show interest in me if you've clicked the radio button next to the word "conservative." I will look at your political alliance before I look at your pictures. And I will dismiss you, no matter how cute you are, if you vote Republican. It's not that I think all such folks were necessarily birthed from the devil's own anus, per sé. It's just that the combativeness-as-erotic-charge model of relationship has long since lost its sparkle for me. And you shouldn't doubt that I will fight with you if your values don't align with my essential secular humanist ones.
• I'm an introverted, irascible bitch. I am not well-moderated. No one has ever called me "laid-back." I am obsessive and the hamster in my head runs his wheel expressly to keep me awake most nights. I'm intense and neurotic. I laugh easily, but I tend to think my own jokes are more hilarious than yours. I am actually fairly kind and if I like you enough, I can even be warm. But I'm what some might call "complicated." If you're looking for an easy, pleasant, cheerful girl, she ain't me.
  
• I do not like groups composed of more than 4 people. I do not like parties. If you promote your capacity as a flibbertigibbet, I'll probably go hide under my bed and not come out until I've stood you up for our first date.
  
• If your profile says,

  "I'm a laid-back guy looking for a girl who looks just as great in a cocktail dress and heels as she does in jeans and a baseball cap,"
  

  I'll consider it reason sufficient to blow you off immediately. Firstly, "cocktail dress?" You know you mean "slutwear"-- which I will wear on occasion, but I'd rather you'd just call a spade a spade. And you'll never, ever catch me in a baseball cap. Hat-hair with normal hair is one thing. Hat-hair with the crazy Jew mess I've got going on is something else entirely. But more importantly, dear catamarans from heaven! Do you have any idea how many dudes write the above sentence, verbatim, in online profiles? I can spot you a quarter. You are hereby instructed to buy an original thought with it.
• Other grounds for immediate dismissal include proclamations of affection for any of the following:
• Titanic
• The Da Vinci Code, book or movie
• Jesus Christ, your lord and savior
• Taco Bell
• taking me to sporting events
• Eat, Pray, Love (No joke. I've seen it. From a dude.)
• Hummers* (It's way worse if you actually include a photo of you and your natural-resource-wasting -small-cock-compensation-mobile. And worse still if it's just a picture of the car, with you nowhere in sight.)
• not reading
  
• Sideways
• sexual "fidelity" in your women
• If you can't put your prepositions in the right places in your sentences, I will laugh at you. I will not, however, go out with you.
  
• If you are actually looking for a mail-order bride, you're at the wrong site. I might be a little mouthy for you.
  

If, however, you comprehend the fact that no adult makes it past age 25 without acquiring a few emotional duffel bags; if you have the good sense not to grow hair into assorted configurations like mullets, comb-overs or pencil-thin mustaches (unless you're John Waters, but I don't know what you'd be doing, looking for the likes of me, if you are John Waters); if you won't crowd me; if you're patient with my oddness because you're odd too; if I think you're funny based on your command of written language; if you see through this pathetically translucent spate of attitude to the lonely girl beneath all the bravado -- well, then? Then, I might berate myself a little less for asking my computer to send me my own personal dreamboat(s).

*I mean the vulgar vehicular behemoths, obviously, not blowjobs. Professing a love of blowjobs is OK with me.

Was I loud?

I have a handful of nearly completed posts that've been filling the silences in my head, if not the ones on this blog. I just haven't gotten around to cleaning them up yet. I will, but not tonight. Tonight, I want to talk about this:

The single most astounding aspect of watching men with other working women is their degree of gullibility. My friend was not faking in an over-the-top, porn-style screaming way. But she was amping up to orgasms very quickly and then not doing much shaking or trembling to indicate coming. She’d simply say “wow, did you feel me come?” or let her “you’re going to make me come”s do the work for her. She also did a funny thing that I’ve only seen from blondes: swear to indicate her pleasure’s intensity. Are there women who do this naturally, genuinely? I don’t mean that she was dirty talking, simply that she was saying “oh fuck” or “fuck yeah” to encourage him in an affected, simpering voice. Not whimpering, which would be hot.

(via Nightmare Brunette's Tumblr)

Well, are there women who do this naturally, genuinely? I must confess, yes. But more on this in a moment.

The above Nightmare Brunette post reminded me of a night, few months ago. I was lying naked next to someone in a bed in an antiseptically designed (though pleasantly decorated) condo in an unpleasantly distant suburb of my city. We heard the mewlings of some poor woman directly upstairs from us and I began to smirk. She was all "Oh, Baby! Fuck me! Fuck me harder. Yeah. Fuck me. Fuck me harder!" in a painfully redundant loop that never crescendoed, never slinked down into murmurs, never released into gasping inarticulation. Her exclamations just flat-lined at a put-on frenzy that in no way mimicked the rising and falling action of orgasmic sex. I mentioned this to the person lying beside me in bed. He said he'd heard her "histrionics" (his word) a few times before, but it had never occurred to him that she might be putting on a big ol' porny show for the benefit of her gentleman caller. Astounding, indeed. It is baffling to me that some men really can't tell.

The truth is I'm largely unconscious of my own mid-coital sounds. Often, afterwards, I'll notice my throat feeling all scratchy and strained, like I've been working the heavy-duty ujayyi breath for a couple of hours. "Was I loud?" I'll squeak out over roughened vocal cords. Mostly, they tell me I vocalize at an average decibel level. Loud enough to seem appreciative, but not shriekingly expressive enough to draw a visit from the police. But the ones who're self-conscious about it? Who have roommates or thin walls? They whisper, "Shhh, shh..." to me and sometimes try to cover my mouth. That, of course, eggs me on. After all, the exhibitionist in me loves the layer of erotic charge a roommate's ear can cause to accrete atop our furious trysting. However, for the most part, mid-fuck, I'm not thinking about the sounds I make and can scarcely hear myself. As it should be, I think.

Still, yeah, I have heard myself say, "Oh, fuck!" now and again. In a manner nothing short of authentic, no less. I think I say it much in the same way I would if I stubbed my toe or if I crumpled into a chair at the end of a day. "Oh, fuck." Whispered, like punctuation to sensation. Off-handed and directed back to myself-- a decapitated sliver of inner monologue escaped into the outer conversation. Neither simpered nor whimpered, but breathed. Well, maybe occasionally it's whimpered. When whimpering is that for which it is called.